1Password 7 vs 1Password 8

Hi Andrew42:

This is a great question. While it would make sense for me to be a bit biased, I used both 1Password 7 for Windows and 1Password 8 for Windows before working here, so hopefully you can trust that I'm sharing my thoughts here as just a user of 1Password, rather than an employee. 😀

• Quick Access. Out of everything we've released in 1Password 8, Quick Access is probably my single favorite feature. I rarely used 1Password mini in 1Password 7 for Windows, but I use Quick Access on a daily basis, at least multiple times a day. Whether it's quickly copying account and routing numbers into a webpage (because I have my bank account details stored as a bank account item), or copying a root password into my terminal to sudo, just pressing Ctrl+Shift+Space and starting to type has improved the way I use 1Password, and what I want to store in 1Password. Up until Quick Access, I would have never even thought of splitting out my bank account details into a second item, but the ability for Quick Access to change what you're copying based on the type of item immediately made me want to spend the few minutes it took to copy the details into a new item, add it as a related item to my bank Login item, and be able to access it when needed.
• Enhanced Windows Hello: I've always been jealous of 1Password on Mac being able to use Touch ID after a reboot or quitting, and with recent changes, and supported devices (devices with TPM 2.0 support), this is possible to do.
• Family: If a family member asks me for the Netflix password, or the admin code for our door locks, I can just point them at our Shared vault, rather than having to share it in an insecure format.
• Only a single account: It's a subtle difference, but I find it very nice to not have to sign into a third party syncing service, without having my passwords, but the only place I have my passwords is stored in that sync service. With a 1Password account, I only need to use my Emergency Kit details to add my 1Password account to a new device, then I can sign into everything from there. Similarly, with my Secret Key and sign-in details automatically stored in iCloud Keychain, adding my 1Password account to a new iPhone or iPad I've purchased just requires opening the 1Password app, tapping 1Password.com account, and then 1Password detects my existing accounts, and I just type in my account password.
• Travel Mode: Because we control the sync service, this enables features like Travel Mode. With Travel Mode, there's absolutely zero indication in the 1Password apps that Travel Mode is enabled. We simply don't send the vault to your devices when it's enabled. If we didn't control the syncing service, those vaults would make it to your device, then the 1Password apps would hide them.

Because we control the sync service, we get a bunch of benefits we wouldn't have if we used a third party service:

• Our API provides a single overview endpoint that the clients can use to check if there's any updates that they need to catch up to. Because it's a single endpoint, we can optimize it greatly on the server side.
• 1Password.com becomes the single source of truth. For example, what should 1Password do if your data folder disappears from Dropbox? Did you mean to do this, or was this a cleanup gone badly. Should 1Password rebuild the files on disk, or assume that it was intended and delete the vault inside the app? This question existed with single items too. Using our specialized protocol solves these problems with a robust and performant solution.
• We can offer item history. Because 1Password.com is the source of truth, it can keep track of all the encrypted blobs each item had, so you can always go back and view what it was and restore an item to a previous time.
• A more modern encryption design incorporating the Secret Key combined with the account password. In the event that data was ever captured from our server, it would be massively harder to attempt to bruteforce compared to a standalone vault.

Additionally, I'm not sure if you're aware, but we do have a trade-in offer for license customers like yourself, where you can get 50% off a 1Password membership for 3 years. If you'd like to get the ball rolling on that, you can email in to us directly at support+tradein@1password.com.

Jack