Can someone explain the difference between:

Hi there senioruserfriendly

I'll be happy to describe what these are all used for.

Identities

An Identity is a bit like a contact card. It should contain all the information about you that you would regularly autofill into websites, such as name, date of birth, address, email address, phone number, and so on.

You can have more than one Identity if you need to, but generally, you'll only need one.

Categories

Items in 1Password come in different types, called Categories. The main one you'll use is Login – a username and a password for a website. Other categories include Credit Cards, Medical Records, Passports, Documents, and many others (including Identities, as above).

There's a full list of all the categories and what they do here:

☞ 1Password item categories

Tags

Tags are a way to organize your items. You can assign multiple tags to the same item and find all items under a specific tag by clicking it in the sidebar. You can find out more about using Tags (and Favorites) here:

☞ Organize with favorites and tags

Vaults

A vault is where your items are stored, just like a physical vault. You can have more than one vault in your account. If you have an individual account, you'll have a Personal vault when you start using 1Password.

If you're part of a family account, you'll have a Private vault that no-one else can access, and a Shared vault that everyone can access and change. If you're part of a team, you might have access to multiple vaults from day one.

☞ Create and share vaults

Collections

A collection is a group of one or more vaults, which might span across accounts, but doesn't have to.

For example, I have a lot of vaults in 1Password across multiple accounts for various purposes. Most of the time, I only need to work with the items in my Private vault and those shared with my partner and family, so I've made an "Everyday" collection for that.

If you're using an individual account and only have one vault, this won't be something you'll need because everything is already in one place. But if your vault situation gets a bit busier (particularly if you use 1Password at work as well), collections can be a way to help focus only on the things you need at any time.

☞ Use collections to create custom groups of vaults

Accounts

A 1Password account is a membership to 1Password.com. That might be an individual account, a family account, or a team account. If you use 1Password at work, you'll probably have two – your account at work, and your own account. (And if you work at 1Password, you'll probably have even more than that! 😅)

I hope that explains all of those in a useful way, but please do ask if you'd like anything clarified or you have any other questions. :)

— Grey