RoboForm review

In our RoboForm review, we try a password management tool with features particularly useful to SMEs

RoboForm logo
(Image: © RoboForm)

IT Pro Verdict

RoboForm excels as a password manager for teams and businesses. With its centralized management console, you can gain better control over how passwords are used within your organization.

Pros

  • +

    Fine-grained user permission settings

  • +

    Limited free-forever version

Cons

  • -

    Expensive per-user licensing

  • -

    Interfaces lack polish

Keeping track of all your passwords is tricky, especially if you have to manage all the passwords of a team or even an entire organisation. RoboForm is a password manager that stores all your important credentials securely, so you only have to remember one master password.

In our RoboForm review, we put it through its paces to decide whether it's one of the best password managers for individuals, and one of the best password managers for business use.

RoboForm: Plans and pricing

RoboForm has plans for personal use, families, and businesses. All have a 30-day money-back guarantee, except for business plans, which are non-refundable.

There’s a free plan, too, which supports unlimited logins, bookmarks, and web form auto-filling, but it lacks key features like cross-device syncing, 2FA, and cloud backups. In fact - we ranked RoboForm as one of the best free password managers around.

The RoboForm Everywhere plan for individuals includes support for syncing your data across all your Windows, Mac, and mobile devices for £19.41 a year. You can also choose to pay for three years or five years in advance, netting you a modest discount of up to 16%.

The RoboForm Everywhere Family plan supports up to five users and costs £38.81 a year. Again, you can save up to 16% by paying multiple years in advance.

RoboForm For Business introduces centralised management of RoboForm data for an entire organisation. Licensing is on a per-user, per-year basis, with discounts for longer subscriptions and lower per-user pricing when you order more licenses.

For example, you’ll pay £32.47 per user a year for 10 users, but £24.34 per user a year for 101 users.

RoboForm: Features

RoboForm's policy and settings options

RoboForm offers you more control over how passwords are used in your organisation than most other password managers (Image credit: RoboForm)

All versions of RoboForm can fill in web forms automatically, generate secure passwords, and even automatically log in to Windows applications like Skype and iTunes. With an individual or family plan, you can sync your passwords across devices, back up passwords to the cloud, use 2FA, and securely share folders.

If you choose RoboForm for Business, you get an additional web interface for administering the passwords of all your employees. If you use Active Directory in your organisation, you can sync it with your RoboForm for Business account and RoboForm will continually update with any changes made to your company's Active Directory.

Once all your users are added, you have the option of assigning them to groups. Each group can have its own usage permissions, so, for example, you can set it so members can only view passwords but not change them.

One of RoboForm’s strong suits is how much control you have over the password policies of your business. There’s a long list of choices you can make, from how complex the master password must be to which IP addresses are whitelisted.

RoboForm: Interface and in use

RoboForm for Business has an onboarding wizard for setting up password policies for an organisation

RoboForm for Business has an onboarding wizard for setting up password policies for an organisation

The RoboForm installation program will install RoboForm extensions for all detected web browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, and Opera, though you can disable any you don’t want to install. The desktop app is perfunctory and business-like, making it a good fit for a corporate environment.

You’re offered a high degree of control over your passwords, such as enforcing periodic password changes, setting minimum password standards, and customising security protocols.

RoboForm: Support

RoboForm's help centre

RoboForm’s help centre is easy to navigate (Image credit: RoboForm)

RoboForm has a well-stocked help centre filled with hundreds of articles on the software. Finding answers is simple.

For a human touch, there’s live chat and phone support from Monday to Friday, 9AM to 5PM EST (Eastern Standard Time). We gave the live chat a few tests and received prompt, helpful replies each time.

RoboForm: Security

RoboForm's security centre

The Security Centre feature can find security vulnerabilities in your online password usage (Image credit: RoboForm)

RoboForm stores everything in an AES 256-bit encrypted format, making passwords virtually impossible to crack. You can set the software to only use your local storage instead of using a cloud service.

This removes any risk of your company’s passwords being leaked if the cloud service provider were to have a security breach, because none of your sensitive data is stored online.

Passwords can be shared between team members. They’re sent in an encrypted format and use sophisticated public-private key cryptography, so passwords can’t be seen when they are in transit.

The RoboForm application includes a Security Centre that highlights which of your passwords are weak. It can also show you where you’ve reused a password over multiple websites.

Alternatives to RoboForm

RoboForm’s most impressive features are for managing the passwords and credentials of a team or an entire organisation. If you just need a password manager for personal use, there are slicker options, such as NordPass and Dashlane.

These have more modern user interfaces than RoboForm, but lack some of its more advanced customisation options.

Another password manager with good support for teams and businesses is LastPass. It includes features like dark web monitoring and adaptive biometric authentication, but it’s significantly more expensive than RoboForm. Plans with a centralised admin console start at £3.40 per user a month and rise to £5.10 per user a month for the most comprehensive set of features.

RoboForm: Final verdict

RoboForm is an excellent password manager with features many businesses will love. It’s one of the few password managers that can autofill information into desktop applications, it’s reasonably priced, and it uses strong encryption throughout.

We recommend it more for businesses than for personal use, as many of the best features are reserved for RoboForm for Business. Here, you get a centralised web administration panel for managing your organisation's passwords that you can customise exactly as you see fit.

For IT managers who want better control over how employees handle passwords, RoboForm is a great choice.

Richard Sutherland

Richard brings more than 20 years of computer science, full-stack development and business operations experience to ITPro. A graduate in Computer Science and former IT support manager at Samsung, Richard has taught courses in Java, PHP and Perl, and developed software for both private businesses and state organisations. A prolific author in B2B and B2C tech, Richard has written material for Samsung, TechRadar Pro, and now ITPro.