LastPass vs. NordPass: A Side-by-Side Comparison for Business Owners

When evaluating LastPass and NordPass for your business, it helps to start with what makes each one distinct.

• LastPass is built around the operational realities of running a business. It offers scoped admin policies (120+ of them) that can be applied to specific users or groups, SaaS Monitoring that shows you which tools and AI services your team is signing into, SaaS Protect that lets you restrict access to specific sites, free Families accounts (5 licenses each) for every employee, and 24/7 phone support on business plans.

• NordPass is built around clean, modern simplicity. It uses XChaCha20 encryption with Argon2id key derivation, has a lightweight interface, and comes from Nord Security (the company behind NordVPN). It also includes Email Masking for generating disposable sign-up addresses and 3GB of file storage per user.

The further you scale, and the more secure access you want for your team, the wider the gap between the two products gets. This article covers what LastPass does for business security, what NordPass does, and where the differences matter most for business owners.

Note: While both products offer personal plans as well as business plans, this article focuses on the business plan options.

LastPass vs. NordPassat a glance

Here's a side-by-side summary of where they differ on the dimensions that matter for businesses.

Key LastPass features for businesses 

LastPass offers a safe and user-friendly password manager for businesses, with advanced secure access features normally found only in more complex enterprise tools. With LastPass, you can simplify how your team stores and shares credentials, discover which SaaS and AI tools your employees are using, and control how they access them, including whether to block, warn against, or approve specific applications.

Specifically, helps businesses maintain secure access across their organization with:

• A secure, encrypted vault for storing and sharing credentials across the team, with the ability to give individuals access to specific folders and revoke that access without resetting the password for the whole team.

• Visibility into which SaaS and AI tools your employees are signing into, and the controls to block unapproved applications or warn employees before they log in.

• Over 120 customizable admin policies you can apply to specific users, groups, or the entire organization (like requiring multi-factor authentication, blocking logins from TOR networks, or setting password complexity rules).

• Centralized offboarding that revokes a departing employee's access in one step, with automatic sync from your identity provider.

• Compliance certifications and integrations (SSO, SIEM, and native IdP integrations like Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace) that fit into your existing IT stack.

You can start your free trial, schedule a demo, or keep reading to learn more about key LastPass features.

See what AI tools and SaaS platforms your team is using

According to the Cloud Security Alliance's2025 State of SaaS Security Report, 59% of organizations say employees adopt SaaS tools without checking with IT first. Employees sign up for new tools with their work email. They start using AI tools with sensitive company data. They reuse personal passwords for work accounts. Each of these creates exposure you can't manage because you don't know it exists.

An unmanaged SaaS account tied to a work email shows up in that vendor's next breach with no one to tell you about it. Customer data pasted into an AI tool ends up in the vendor's logs (and in some cases, in their training set). A personal password reused for work means a breach of any consumer site (LinkedIn, Adobe, anywhere) becomes a breach of your work systems.

LastPass can give you visibility into the tools your team is using and the ability to restrict access where needed:

• SaaS Monitoring. Shows you which SaaS and AI tools your team is using, how they're logging in, and whether the credentials are managed in LastPass or floating around unmanaged.

• Security Dashboard. Surfaces weak, reused, and compromised passwords across the organization. You see which employees have which issues without ever seeing the actual passwords. You might find that three people on your team have weak credentials and need to update them — but the passwords themselves stay hidden.

• Dark web monitoring. Alerts you when employee credentials show up in known breaches, so you can rotate them before someone else does.

• SaaS Protect. Once you can see what your team is using, SaaS Protect helps you block specific sites or AI tools, warn employees before they log in to risky services, or set guardrails on the tools you've decided to allow.

 

Wout Zwiep, a Process Engineer at Axxor (a global manufacturer with sites in the Netherlands, Poland, and the US), used SaaS Monitoring to surface employee logins to AI tools like OpenAI and Canva, then decided which to bring under management. As he told us:

"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."

(Read the full Axxor case study)

Customize access permissions for individual users, whole teams, or the entire company

Different roles in a business have different access needs and different risk profiles. A finance lead needs the bank and payroll credentials. A contractor needs the shared project board and nothing else. A marketing team needs the social accounts but not the AWS console. Applying the same security rules to all of them means either being too lenient with high-risk roles or putting low-risk roles through more friction than they need.

LastPass gives you the tools to segment this, with:

• Granular sharing through folders. In your LastPass vault, you can customize shared folders with per-user permissions: view, edit, or manage. You can nest folders so a marketing team can share a "social accounts" folder while a subset of admins also see "ad accounts" inside it.

• 120+ admin policies that you can set to specific users or groups.  For example, you can apply MFA enforcement to a finance team while letting interns work without it. You can require longer master passwords for executives. You can restrict autofill on specific domains for specific roles. 

• Multiple MFA options. With LastPass, you can pick the authentication strategy that works for you, such as SMS, email, authenticator apps, and hardware tokens.

Safely offboard employees without needing to reset passwords

When an employee leaves a company, every credential they had access to becomes a potential exposure point. Without a proper system in place, the only option is manually resetting every shared password and chasing down what the departing employee had access to (hoping nothing's missed along the way).

LastPass handles offboarding in two key ways.

• You can revoke departing employee's access in one step. The credentials stay in the vault, accessible to whoever inherits the role. The departing employee loses access immediately. You don't have to reset every password they touched.

• Native IdP integrations automatically sync. When you deactivate someone in your identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), LastPass picks it up. Offboarding becomes part of your existing offboarding flow, not a separate ritual.

The shared credentials don't have to be reset because the person who's leaving no longer has access to them. The institutional knowledge (which credentials map to which systems) stays in your vault.

Forsters LLP, a London law firm with over 500 employees specializing in private client and commercial real estate, ran into this problem during a period of high turnover in their IT team. Staff were leaving and taking critical access credentials with them. Different teams across the firm were managing passwords differently — some used KeePass, others wrote them on sticky notes — so when someone left, there was no centralized way to revoke access or recover the credentials they'd been using.

Neil Bell, their InfoSec Manager:

"We needed a corporate password management solution. It wasn't consistent, centralized, or secure. The risk of losing access to systems when people left the firm was high."

After centralizing in LastPass, they were able to effectively manage the risk. Credentials stay in the vault when staff depart, and access is revoked at the user level rather than by resetting every password.

(Read the full Forsters LLP case study)

Compliance and stack integrations

Cybersecurity insurance, industry regulations, and partner security reviews tend to ask for two things: provable security practices, and the ability to integrate with the rest of your IT stack. LastPass is built for both.

On the compliance side:

• 120+ admin policies that map directly to the controls auditors and insurance carriers ask about.

• A full compliance certification stack. ISO 27001, ISO 27701, SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3, BSI C5, and Global CBPR and PRP. LastPass was also the first password manager to achieve FIDO2 server certification.

On the integrations side:

• LastPass integrates natively with Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace, and more. 

• LastPass has SIEM integrations for advanced reporting and feeding admin activity into your security operations stack.

HOLT CAT, a Caterpillar equipment dealer with over 3,500 employees and 350+ applications, hit the SSO problem at scale. Tony Ledbetter, their Senior IT Security Manager:

"With over 350 applications for a team of 3500+ employees, our risk of exposure was high and in order to comfortably enable SSO, LastPass was a vital investment as it confirms every access point and login is protected."

HOLT used all 2,500 of their initial seats in year one, then expanded to 3,500 with 70% adoption by year two. Employees were requesting access on their own by then.

(Read the full HOLT case study)

Plus, LastPass is easy to deploy across your organization 

Most employees default to whatever's fastest when it comes to storing passwords and logging into tools. So you want a password manager that's both secure and easy to use. Steep learning curves slow down adoption and push employees back to bad habits (like reusing passwords or sharing credentials over Slack).

With LastPass, it’s both easy to get your team on board and also easy for them to use LastPass to access the tools they need to do their job, thanks to features like:

• Browser-based deployment. Because we run our tool out of the browser, you can set up LastPass in a matter of minutes. You create your account, invite your team, and your employees install the browser extension. No device agents. No compliance setup. 

• Easy log-ins with one-click autofill. The LastPass Browser Extension can autofill your passwords in one click. On desktop, LastPass can autofill MFA (TOTP) codes that you're using for extra security. When an employee signs up for a new account, the browser extension makes it easy for them to create and store strong passwords.

So it’s easy to get started with LastPass, and easy for your team to use it in their day-to-day.

For example, OTO Technology (a managed service provider that deploys LastPass for clients across France, the US, and Japan) runs onboarding sessions in under five minutes per user. That's the difference deployment speed makes: when the tool is easy to roll out and easy to use, your team is up and running before the conversation about whether they'll bother to use it even starts.

(Read the full OTO Technology case study)

When you use LastPass, you can track adoption from your team on an easy-to-read dashboard. 

On your Adoption Dashboard, you can see:

• License consumption rate

• Enrollment rate

• Active usage rate

You can use this to see how much of your team is using LastPass, as well as manage how many software licenses you’re currently paying for.

To see how LastPass can work for your business, you can:

• Sign up for a free trial

• Schedule a demo

Key NordPass features for businesses

NordPass is a password manager from Nord Security, the company behind NordVPN. It uses XChaCha20 encryption with Argon2id key derivation, which are different cryptographic standards than the AES-256 + PBKDF2 combination used by LastPass and most other password managers (more on this difference below and whether or not it matters). NordPass offers a clean, modern interface, an aggressive pricing model, and the option to bundle with Nord Security's other products, including NordVPN, NordLayer, and NordLocker.

NordPass helps businesses manage their team's credentials with:

• A secure vault using XChaCha20 encryption and Argon2id key derivation, with a zero-knowledge architecture that means Nord can't access your stored credentials.

• 8 admin policies (compared to LastPass's 120+) covering things like password requirements, MFA enforcement, session timeouts, item exporting, and account recovery, applied at the organization, role, or individual user level.

• Password sharing with three permission levels: view, edit, or autofill.

• 3GB of file storage per user, though any password or note with a file saved inside it can't be shared with other users.

• Email Masking, a built-in feature that generates disposable email addresses for sign-ups, which LastPass doesn't currently offer.

• The option to bundle with the broader Nord Security suite if your team is already using NordVPN or other Nord products.

You can explore NordPass's pricing details on their website or keep reading to learn more about key NordPass features.

Modern encryption with XChaCha20 and Argon2id

NordPass uses XChaCha20 for vault encryption and Argon2id for key derivation. Both are newer cryptographic standards than the AES-256 + PBKDF2 combination used by most major password managers, including LastPass.

In practical terms:

• XChaCha20 is a stream cipher designed to be fast on modern processors, particularly mobile devices. It's the same encryption family Google uses in parts of Chrome.

• Argon2id is the function that converts your master password into the actual encryption key. It's specifically designed to be expensive for attackers using GPUs or specialized hardware to brute-force.

Both NordPass and LastPass use zero-knowledge architectures, meaning neither vendor can access your stored credentials. Our encryption choices are different, but both are considered secure.

NordPass markets XChaCha20 as a more modern alternative to AES-256, which is what LastPass and most other password managers use. AES-256 is used by top VPNs, secure databases, and the U.S. government. 

XChaCha20 is newer and well-regarded in modern cryptography, particularly for performance on mobile devices.

For most business buyers, the cipher choice isn't the differentiator. Both products encrypt your vault with strong, modern algorithms. The decision between password managers tends to come down to admin controls, integrations, and support, not the specific cipher used.

Admin policies and password sharing

NordPass gives admins controls for managing how their team uses the password manager:

• 8 admin policies that you can apply at the organization, role, or individual user level. These cover essentials like password requirements, MFA enforcement, session timeouts, item exporting, and account recovery. (LastPass offers 120+ admin policies with the same scoping options.)

• Three permission levels for password sharing: view, edit, and autofill. NordPass doesn't currently offer multi-level folder permissions.

• Same-data-center sharing. NordPass items can only be shared between members whose accounts are in the same data center, which can be a limitation for teams operating across multiple regions.

NordPass does not currently offer a SaaS visibility feature (like LastPass's SaaS Monitoring and SaaS Protect). Admins can see and manage credentials stored in NordPass but not the SaaS or AI tools team members are signing into outside the vault.

Email Masking and file storage

Beyond core password management, NordPass includes two features LastPass doesn't currently offer:

• Email Masking. A built-in feature that generates disposable email addresses you can use when signing up for new services. The masked address forwards to your real one, but if the service is breached or starts spamming, you can disable the alias without affecting your primary email. It's a proactive privacy feature most other password managers don't include.

• 3GB of file storage per user. NordPass lets users store files in their vault (documents, recovery codes, scans of ID, and so on) with 3GB per user. In contrast, LastPass offers 1GB per user, which is less than NordPass but in our experience users rarely use more than 1GB.

NordPass vs LastPass: Pricing 

LastPass offers three business plans, with pricing billed annually:

• Teams ($4.25 per user per month): For small teams of up to 50 users. Includes the admin console, shared folders, and 25 security policies.

• Business ($7 per user per month): Unlimited users, 100+ security policies, LastPass Families for employees (each employee gets a personal account plus 5 licenses to share with family), group user management, SIEM integrations, and directory integrations with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace, and more.

• Business Max ($9 per user per month): Everything in Business, plus SaaS Monitoring, SaaS Protect, unlimited SSO apps, and advanced MFA capabilities (workstation MFA, contextual authentication policies, and MFA for identity providers).

You cansee the full LastPass pricing page for current pricing.

NordPass Business starts at $3.99 per user per month for up to 250 users, with Enterprise plans available for larger teams. You cansee NordPass's pricing page for current pricing.

One thing to factor in when comparing the two: 

1. LastPass Business includes a free LastPass Families account for every employee, which extends password protection to employees' personal accounts and family members. Personal passwords often spill back into work (a home password reused for a work account, a shared family login that ends up on a work device), so the Families benefit is doing real security work alongside the headline business features.
2. LastPass offers SaaS/AI visibility, which is a major benefit for business owners who want to keep their organization secure.

Try LastPass for free or schedule a free demo

NordPass and LastPass both handle the basics of business password management — secure vaults, MFA, admin policies, and password sharing. The differences show up in the depth of what each one offers: how many admin policies you have to work with, whether you can see what SaaS and AI tools your team is using, what integrations and compliance certifications come with the product, and what kind of support you get when something goes wrong.

If you're a business owner choosing between the two, the right question is which set of features matches what your team needs, both now and as it grows.

You can try LastPass free for 14 days, no credit card required, or schedule a free demo to see it in action.