Google Password Manager is built into Chrome and free for anyone with a Google account. It stores credentials in an encrypted vault tied to your Google login, autofills passwords across sites, syncs across devices, and flags weak or reused passwords through its Password Checkup feature. For many business owners and managers already using it personally, the natural next question is whether their whole team can use it the same way to securely access the tools they need.
The short answer is that while Google Password Manager can work fine as a personal tool to store saved passwords, a business needs more from a password manager than personal credential storage.
Your team is logging into dozens of SaaS and AI tools, sharing credentials for shared accounts (social media, vendor portals, software licenses), and signing up for new tools you may not even know about. As a business, you need visibility into which apps your team is using and how they're logging in.
Plus, you need:
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A way to enforce rules to specific users, like requiring MFA on sensitive accounts, or restricting access for contractors.
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A secure way to share credentials across a team and revoke them when someone leaves.
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To know where the security risks are across your organization, not just at the individual level.
Google Password Manager wasn't built for any of that. It was built as a consumer browser feature, and the design choices that make it work for personal use are what make it fall short when you're running a business.
Below, we'll walk through how Google Password Manager actually works, where it falls short for businesses, and what a business-grade alternative looks like instead.
How Google Password Manager works (and why it's not ideal for businesses)
Google Password Manager (GPM) works the same way for a business user as it does for a personal one. There's no separate business version, no admin console, and no central account that gives a business owner oversight across the team. Each employee uses their own Google Password Manager, tied to their own Google account.
When you log into a tool like Slack, HubSpot, or a vendor portal, Chrome prompts you to save the password to their personal GPM vault. The next time you visit the site, Chrome autofills the credentials. Your passwords sync across whichever devices you’re signed into Chrome on. If you need a new password, Chrome suggests one. Google's Password Checkup feature flags weak, reused, or compromised credentials and prompts you to update.
For an individual managing their own logins, that's a workable setup. But for a business, it leaves a few gaps that get bigger the more your team grows and the more SaaS and AI tools they use:
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No central view of which tools your team is using. Each employee's vault is their own. You can't see which SaaS or AI apps your team is logging into, whether they're using personal or work accounts, or which tools your IT lead doesn't know about. If a designer signs up for a new AI tool with their work email and reuses their company password, that exposure is invisible until something goes wrong. In 2022, Gartner estimated that 41% of employees acquired or modified technology outside IT's visibility. By 2027, they predict that number will reach 75%, driven in large part by AI tools that employees are adopting on their own.
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No way to share credentials between employees. Google Password Manager doesn’t work as a team password manager. If your social media manager and your marketing director both need access to your company's LinkedIn login, GPM has no way to give it to them. They end up sharing it over Slack or email, which creates its own security risk.
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No admin controls or policy enforcement. You can't require MFA for your finance team before they access banking portals. You can't enforce different password rules for your IT staff than for general employees. You can't restrict offline access for contractors or block logins from jailbroken phones. Every employee's GPM is configured the same way, with no role-based controls.
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No visibility into your team's credential health. Each employee can run Password Checkup on their own vault, but there's no organization-wide view of where the risks are. You can't see who's reusing passwords across work tools, or whose email addresses have appeared in a known breach.
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No zero-knowledge approach. Google Password Manager does encrypt passwords in transit (like when GPM runs Password Check Up) checks password security) and at rest, but in the default setup, the encryption key is stored in your Google account. This means Google can technically access the stored data, and the security of every saved credential still depends on the security of an individual employee's Google account login. Google does offer an optional on-device encryption setting where only the user holds the key, but it's opt-in rather than the default, can't be enforced or managed across a team by an admin, and comes with the tradeoff that if a user loses access to their Google account, they can lose their saved passwords too.
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No clean offboarding. When an employee leaves, there's no central way to revoke their access to shared accounts. Anything they had logins for stays with them unless you manually reset every password they had access to.
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Limited to the Chrome/Google ecosystem. GPM works best inside Google Chrome. Support is weaker across other browsers and native desktop apps, so any employee working outside that ecosystem either loses functionality or falls back to less secure habits.
In short, Google Password Manager was not meant to help businesses securely store, share, and use credentials. It also doesn’t have the advanced features needed to help with shadow IT and SaaS sprawl.
LastPass: a safe, business-grade alternative to Google Password Manager
LastPass is a secure access tool built for small to midsize businesses. It gives your team a simple way to log into the tools they use every day, while giving you visibility into what they're accessing and control over how they access it.
LastPass offers what you'd expect from a dedicated password manager, including an encrypted vault for storing and sharing credentials, a browser extension that autofills passwords, strong password generation, and shared folders organized by team or role.
Further, LastPass works on desktop, as well as on mobile devices with an iOS and Android app.
But LastPass also layers business security on top of those basics. With LastPass you can:
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Discover which SaaS and AI tools your team is using, how they're logging in (personal account, corporate account, SSO, passkey), and where credentials are at risk.
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Control access for your team with over 120 admin policies that can be applied to individuals or entire teams, like requiring MFA for sensitive accounts or enforcing complex passwords.
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Simplify secure access through the encrypted vault and browser extension, with sharing permissions you control at the folder level so credentials are only visible to the people who need them.
The combination is what makes it work for a business: the security and visibility a business owner needs, in a tool that's simple enough that your team will actually use it.
Because LastPass is a browser-based password manager, you can deploy it across your organization in an afternoon. There’s no device agents or compliance setup required. OTO Technology, a managed service provider that deploys LastPass for clients across France, the US, and Japan, reports onboarding sessions of under five minutes per user. (Read the OTO Technology case study.)
To learn more, you can sign up for a demo, start a free trial, or keep reading to see how LastPass handles each piece in more detail.
Monitor and manage the SaaS and AI tools your team is using
59% of organizations say employees adopt SaaS tools without checking with IT first. That number is climbing as employees discover new AI tools on their own. Most companies want their team to have the freedom to find helpful tools, but they still need to keep their organization secure and compliant.
For example, let's say one of your designers finds a new AI design tool, signs up with their work email, and reuses the same password they use for other company accounts. If that tool gets breached, those credentials are exposed, and you have no way to know it happened.
With SaaS Monitoring, which runs through the LastPass browser extension, you can see which apps your employees are using, how they're logging in (SSO, vaulted password, passkey, or unvaulted password), and whether they're using personal or corporate credentials.
You can also drill into a specific app. Say you're looking at ChatGPT usage across your team. In the image below, you can see that four employees are using ChatGPT. Two employees are logging into the AI tool with a corporate account, but two through personal emails.
This visibility gives you a few benefits:
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You can see which platforms are actually being used. If one of the platforms you're paying for isn't regularly being used, you can consider cancelling the subscription. If you have a tool that your team ought to be using, but they’re not, you can remind your team to use the tool that you’re providing.
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You can spot new tools your IT lead doesn't know about and vet them before they spread further.
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You can see how employees are logging in. If employees are using unvaulted credentials, you can remind them to use SSO or vaulted passwords instead.
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You can spot when personal credentials are being used for work tools.
With LastPass, you don’t just get visibility, you can also set up restrictions. You can allow or block specific apps, or add a customizable pop-up that appears when an employee visits a specific site. The pop-up can remind employees of approved alternatives or give context on how to use a tool without blocking access outright. For example, if your company uses a specific shipping vendor, you can add a pop-up on unapproved alternatives that points employees back to the approved one.
As Wout Zwiep, a Process Engineer at Axxor, a global manufacturer that rolled out LastPass across three countries, put it: "People are experimenting with AI tools like OpenAI and Canva. We don't want to block innovation, but we do want to guide it safely." With LastPass, companies can reduce their exposure risk while letting their team try new tools. (Read the Axxor case study.)
Securely store and share passwords, credentials, and more
Your LastPass vault is where your business stores and shares credentials and other sensitive information. Your vault is encrypted, organized in folders, and accessible to your team through the browser extension and mobile apps.
Every employee gets their own individual vault for their work credentials. You can also create shared folders that multiple people can access based on permissions you set. For example, you might create a shared folder for company social media accounts, one for software licenses, one for vendor logins, and one for your finance team's payment cards and API tokens. You can use your vault to store any other sensitive information your team needs to access but shouldn't be floating around in email or Slack.
When someone leaves your team, you can revoke their access to shared folders from the Sharing Center. This prevents unauthorized access without requiring you to change every shared password each time you offboard an employee.
This was the core reason Forsters LLP, a 500+ employee London law firm, adopted LastPass. As Neil Bell, their InfoSec Manager, put it: "The risk of losing access to systems when people left the firm was high." With shared credentials managed in LastPass, those passwords stay in the vault when an employee leaves, while the departing employee loses access. (Read the Forsters LLP case study.)
Plus, every employee gets a free Families plan for personal use. They can store their personal credentials in the same LastPass account they use for work, so they're not toggling between using LastPass and Google Password Manager or some other password manager. This also strengthens company security: if an employee's personal email gets compromised and contains anything work-related (a forwarded login, a shared document link), that's a path to company data. When personal credentials are stored securely in LastPass, that exposure shrinks. And when the employee is offboarded, their personal passwords stay with them.
Note about vault security: All vaults are encrypted locally with 256-bit AES. LastPass uses a zero-knowledge approach, meaning we never see your master password and can't access your stored data.
Quickly and securely log in to your sites
When an employee goes to a site they have credentials for, the LastPass browser extension autofills those credentials, so they don't need to toggle between screens to pull a password and log in. For desktop users, you can set it up so Lastpass will fill in any MFA codes for them as well.
When employees log into a new site, LastPass prompts them to save the credentials to their vault. Next time they visit the site, they can use the browser extension to log in. When they create a new account, LastPass generates a strong, unique password right in the browser, which helps prevent employees from using weak passwords or reusing the same ones across accounts.
The LastPass browser extension works on Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Microsoft Edge, so unlike using Google Password Manager, your team isn't locked into one browser ecosystem.
Customize how your team accesses secure information with 120+ admin policies
Different people in your organization have different levels of access and different risk profiles. Someone on your finance team logging into a banking portal has different security needs than a contractor checking a shared project board.
With LastPass, you can set over 120 admin policies and scope them to individual users or groups. These policies are easy to enable and require no technical customization on your end.
For example, you can:
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Require MFA for your finance team before they access banking portals.
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Enforce 16-character password minimums for your IT group while keeping it at 12 for general staff.
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Prohibit offline access for employees working on shared computers.
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Block logins from jailbroken phones.
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Set different lockout periods. For example, you can have a lock out period of 10 minutes for a super admin account, and longer for everyone else.
To help you onboard your team securely, LastPass provides a set of recommended default policies when you sign up, so you're not configuring everything from scratch.
Get a detailed overview of your company's security health
A challenging part of maintaining secure access across a business is knowing where the risks are. This is a major reason why Google Password Manager doesn’t work for businesses. But with LastPass, you can use the Security Dashboard to see:
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Which employees have weak or reused passwords.
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Which employee email addresses have appeared in known data breaches (through Dark Web Monitoring).
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Which SaaS and AI apps your team is logging into, and where employees may be creating risk, such as using personal credentials or accessing unapproved tools.
The dashboard also gives you an overall security score across your entire team. From the LastPass app, you can flag employees who need to update their passwords and follow up with them directly.
Additional LastPass features
Track adoption across your team
A password manager only works if your team actually uses it. The Adoption Dashboard helps you track that and act on it.
You get three metrics at a glance:
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Your license consumption rate. You can see how many of your purchased seats are in use.
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Your enrollment rate. Your dashboard shows how many invited users have activated their account.
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Your active usage rate. You can see how many enrolled users have actually used LastPass in the last 30 days.
Each metric comes with actions you can take directly from the dashboard. If you have pending or expired invitations, you can resend them with one click. If you have inactive users who haven't logged in for 30 days, you can view who they are and send a reminder. You can also see how many licenses you have available, so you know when it's time to add more seats.
This is especially useful for businesses with employees spread across multiple locations or working remotely, where you can't just walk over and ask someone to set up their account. HOLT CAT — a Caterpillar equipment dealer with over 3,500 employees — rolled out LastPass and hit 70% adoption by year two. As their Senior IT Security Manager reported: "The results have been absolutely remarkable; we've reduced our risk significantly and have successfully prevented any password leaks from occurring this year." (Read the full Caterpillar case study.)
Use LastPass alongside (or instead of) SSO
If you already use an identity provider like Okta, Microsoft Entra, or Google Workspace for SSO, LastPass works alongside it. Your employees log into SSO-supported apps through your identity provider like they always have, and LastPass covers the rest.
Many vendors charge 2–4x more for SSO-enabled tiers, so using SSO for every app isn't practical for most small and scaling companies.
You can also configure SSO apps directly through LastPass if you don't already have a separate identity provider, or if you want to consolidate identity and password management under one tool.
24/7 support
LastPass offers 24/7 support through phone, email, and chat. So if an issue comes up during onboarding or an employee gets locked out of their vault on a Friday night, you're not waiting until Monday for a response.
You also get access to a self-service knowledge base and community forum for common questions your team can resolve on their own.
Try LastPass free for 14 days
Google Password Manager is fine for what it was built for: storing personal credentials for an individual using Chrome. But Google Password Manager doesn't offer central admin controls, SaaS visibility, secure password sharing, or a clean way to offboard employees, all of which are critical for a business to reduce its risk exposure.
LastPass covers the credential management basics your team needs to do their job, and actually encrypts passwords, and then layers on the visibility and control a business owner needs to manage risk across the organization.
Because LastPass deploys from the browser and works alongside whatever identity setup you already have, it's simple enough that your team will actually use it.
If you want to see how it works for your team, you can sign up for a demo or start a free 14-day trial.
