Dashlane

Dashlane secures your online passwords with a single master password and stores your data locally with AES-256 encryption; plus it's one of the most secure and capable form-fillers available. You can sync data to a variety of devices, too, including (make that especially) smartphones. Dashlane works with most browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and IE). Recent updates include a password generator.

Dashlane's installation process involves three steps: Connect to your browsers, set up your account and profile, and secure and organize your data. A Custom installation option let us choose which browsers to use in case we didn't want to use them all (though your default browser should support it). To finish the installation, you must create and confirm a strong password: Do not forget this password since it's not stored anywhere but your system, and you'll need it to access encrypted data. After that, the Personal Data Assistant walked us through the steps of entering our address, contacts, IDs, payment information, and other data that we're constantly entering online; but if that's not easy enough, embedded video tutorials are a click away. Under Click to Pay, we could add credit card data, including issuing bank, security code, and color options. We could also click "Skip" to skip any step and come back to it later, if necessary. Dashlane's Security Dashboard organized all our Internet passwords and rated them for security (too many of ours showed very unsafe!), but color-coded ratings helped us sort out any issues. We clicked "Add Your First Purchase" under Internet Shopping to activate a feature that records an itemized receipt for everything we buy online when using Dashlane--how cool is that?

Activating Dashlane's extension in Chrome gave us instant access to our secure passwords, forms, and financial data from Chrome's toolbar or the Windows system tray. Though Dashlane does much more than most auto-complete tools, it proved surprisingly easy to use in everyday surfing. We've tried many similar tools, but none that does all that Dashlane does, let alone for free.