When you can get a seriously full-featured, security-conscious password manager for free, what would entice you to pay? How about even more features, and no limits on existing features? LogMeOnce Password Management Suite Ultimate 5.2 pulls out all the stops, removing limits on the number of shares and beneficiaries, and adding advanced features that include anti-theft and an unusual selfie-based two-factor authentication system. A few quirks in its mobile editions are still being ironed out, but overall, it's a feature-packed password powerhouse.
At $39 per year, LogMeOnce Ultimate costs the same as Dashlane 4.0. Sticky Password goes for $29.99 per year, and LastPass for just $12. But this big, sprawling utility has a ton of features, including some I haven't seen in any competing product.
The free edition doesn't impose any limits on the number of saved passwords, or of synced devices. If you're interested in the product but not sure if you want to pay for it, go ahead and install the free edition, and familiarize yourself with its impressive capabilities. You can upgrade to Ultimate any time the free edition's limits begin to chafe.
Shared Features
The free LogMeOnce Password Management Suite Premium 5.2 is loaded with features, enough that it outperforms many competing products that aren't free. I'll summarize its capabilities here, or you can read my full review of the free edition for more details.
LogMeOnce runs strictly as a browser extension, so it's not limited to a specific platform. If your browser supports extensions, you can use it on Windows, macOS, or even Linux. There are also apps for Android and iOS.
Just about every password manager starts off by asking you to define a strong master password, something that you can remember but that nobody could guess. LogMeOnce now offers password-less authentication as its default. To set this up, you pair your smartphone or mobile device with your LogMeOnce account. Now when you log in on your desktop, you verify when prompted on the mobile device, using a PIN, a fingerprint, or what the company calls PhotoLogin.
Those who've upgraded to Ultimate get more information along with the request for PIN, fingerprint, or PhotoLogin. Swipe left to see the requester's email address, GPS location, IP address, and more, or swipe right to view the location on a map. If you get an unexpected login request, this data may help you figure out who's trolling you.
For PhotoLogin, LogMeOnce snaps a photo with the webcam and sends it to the device. You simply verify that the photo is what you expected. If the computer has no webcam, you can compare a visual one-time password that's sent along with the photo. It's also possible to use PhotoLogin on the mobile device itself, but this isn't quite as secure. It involves you verifying that you are seeing the photo you just snapped; it's a bit self-referential. When I mentioned this to the developers, they quickly modified on-device PhotoLogin to also require entering a PIN.
The free edition captures logins (which it calls applications) as you enter them, and offers to play back your saved credentials when you revisit the site. It also includes a catalog of almost 4,500 known websites. Choose one of these and you can be sure that LogMeOnce will handle it, even if it uses a non-standard login page. However, if you somehow manage to find an oddball login that's not in the catalog, you can't just capture all form fields the way you do with LastPass or Sticky Password Premium. Clicking the browser toolbar button displays all your saved websites. Clicking one of them navigates to the site and logs in.
The password generator defaults to creating 15-character passwords, using all character sets, which yields a very tough password. It also rates any password you type, estimating how long it would take to crack. By default, you must change your master password every three months, without re-using previous passwords. Those using Ultimate can change the password expiry time, in a range from one month to one year.
You can use Google Authenticator, or a workalike such as Duo Mobile or Twilio Authy, for two-factor authentication. Other options in the free edition include receiving a one-time passcode via email, SMS, or voice call. In an unusual move, LogMeOnce charges two credits for each SMS authentication and four credits for each voice call. Those using Ultimate get an allowance of 50 credits per month, with the option to purchase more, $10 for 1,000 credits. I'll cover the Ultimate edition's additional two-factor options below.
An interesting feature called Mugshot gives you a look at anyone who tries to log in on a lost or stolen phone. On any failed login attempt, it snaps photos with the front and rear cameras and sends them to your online dashboard, along with the device's GPS location and IP address. Using this information, you may be able to locate and recover the device. Upgrading to Ultimate gets you a more complete anti-theft system.
LogMeOnce stores personal, address, phone, and company data, for use in filling Web forms. You can save multiple instances of each data type. New since my last review, it also saves and fills credit card data. Like Dashlane, it helpfully displays the saved cards as images, using the color and bank name you specified. It doesn't have the flexibility of form-filling whiz RoboForm Everywhere 7, but it does the job.
Like LastPass and Dashlane, LogMeOnce can display a list of all your passwords, with a strength rating for each, and a flag for any duplicates. In addition, its report page offers several other views on your security, some of which aren't functional in the free edition. If you find you've got weak or duplicate passwords, just click the link next to each one to go change it. For many popular websites, LogMeOnce can even automate the password change process, something few competing products manage.
LogMeOnce includes the ability to securely share passwords with other users. You can choose whether the recipient gets to see the shared password, or just to use it for logging in. There's also an option to define a beneficiary who will receive either your whole account or a specific password in the event of your death. The free edition allows one whole-account beneficiary, five password beneficiaries, and five shared passwords. In the Ultimate edition, there are no such limits.
A productivity dock along the bottom of the screen displays a baker's dozen of live icons that expand when you mouse over them. You can use these icons to quickly reach important features like mugshot or security scorecard. That is, you can if you've paid for the product. Those using the free edition just get a reminder that the productivity dock is only for paid users.
Selfie Two-Factor Authentication
Upgrading to Ultimate unlocks several additional options for two-factor authentication, the most unusual of which is Selfie-2FA. It works like this. You log in to the browser extension, either with the default password-less authentication or a master password. LogMeOnce snaps a webcam photo and sends it to the mobile device you've specified for Selfie-2FA. If the received photo matches what you expected, you simply tap to authorize. MasterCard is exploring a similar type of selfie-based authentication.
What if you're using a desktop device with no webcam? In this case, LogMeOnce sends a generic image with a visual one-time password at the bottom. If the OTP on your mobile device matches the one on your browser, you simply tap to authorize. It's less tech-sexy than using a selfie, but it totally works.
My LogMeOnce contact pointed out that you can make it even harder for an attacker to beat this system by being unpredictable. Just keep changing which of your devices is the one authorized to respond to Selfie-2FA.
Those who've paid for the program can prepare a USB flash drive for use as a physical second authentication factor. There's also an option to add an X.509 Certificate as an authentication factor, but this is more logical in a business setting.
You can enable as many of the two-factor options as you wish, and log in using whichever is logical at the time. For example, if you logging in on a mobile device with no socket for your USB authentication key, you could opt to receive a code via SMS or email, or get a code from Google Authenticator. True Key by Intel Security also offers multiple authentication options, but goes further by letting you require more than just two of them for authentication.
Device Management and Anti-Theft
The free edition receives the GPS location of any failed login attempt, but the paid edition lets you check device location whenever you like. The Device Map page in the Security section displays the location of all your registered devices. Clicking on a device gets you more information, along with a button that remotely logs out of any active LogMeOnce session on the device.
The separate Device Management page lists all the devices you've configured for use with LogMeOnce. If you've lost or replaced a device, you can remove it from the list, thereby disconnecting it from your account. You can flip a switch to define whether each mobile device can accept password-less login requests.
When you select a device from the list, other actions become available. You can send a request to locate a mobile device. A Details tab displays a huge amount of information for iOS devices, quite a bit less for Android devices. However, for Android devices only, you can view a list of installed apps.
The Commands tab appears for both Android and iOS devices, but the available commands differ. You can remotely cause an Android smartphone to ring at top volume, handy in case you've simply misplaced it, and you can lock it remotely using the system lockscreen. You can even change the lockscreen password remotely before locking it down.
On both Android and iOS, you can send a message, perhaps something like, "I've seen your mugshot, phone thief, and I'm coming for you!" But don't get too excited about this feature. Unless you've enabled viewing notifications on the device's lockscreen, the only way a phone thief could read the message would be by logging in to LogMeOnce, which shouldn't be possible.
That brings me to the final command, available on iOS and Android, the Kill-Pill. This dramatically named feature simply wipes all personal LogMeOnce data. I sent the Kill-Pill command to my Apple iPad Air and watched as LogMeOnce reverted to the initial setup screen, with no sign of my email address or any other configuration data. Oddly, sending the same command to my Nexus 9 never worked; it timed out repeatedly in my testing. My company contact confirmed that while the feature works on most Android devices, it doesn't yet work on a Nexus 9. Gotta love Android fragmentation!
Using a trusted mobile device as part of the authentication process is becoming more and more common. Like LogMeOnce in password-less mode, oneID skips the master password in favor of device-based authentication. You can configure True Key to use other forms of authentication, including a trusted device, in place of a master password. But LogMeOnce is the only product I've seen that adds anti-theft features to protect the security of that trusted device. It's a smart move.
Enhanced Reporting
Even the free edition of LogMeOnce lists all your passwords ordered by strength, rates your total security status, and displays what it calls a hybrid identity score. If you've paid, you also get an overall password strength rating, with a breakdown of statistics such as the number of passwords of at least 15 characters, and the number that contain at least one of each character type.
The Live PasswordTracker chart is another paid-only feature. It takes two weeks to get a baseline for reporting, so I didn't see its full capabilities. For starters, it charts a solid line that's your overall password strength each day. If you're using the product correctly, that line should only go up. It also charts what the company calls a heartbeat line. Solid line segments represent days that you used LogMeOnce, dotted segments days that you did not. The line's height above the axis is based on the strength of the passwords you used on that day. The purpose of the chart is to encourage you in proper password hygiene, replacing weak passwords with strong ones and always relying on the password manager to keep track.
A Few Oddities
In testing the free edition, I glossed over the few little quirks I ran into, given the fantastic features that you get for free. Running into those same quirks—and a few new ones—in the paid edition, I'm slightly less forgiving.
LogMeOnce is a work in progress, in a good way. While working on this review, I confused the PhotoLogin feature with what was then called Photo-2FA. Overnight, the developers renamed it to Selfie-2FA, to avoid confusion. Because I mused about the possibility of an unauthorized person picking up a phone that was left unlocked, they changed the local-only PhotoLogin to also require PIN entry. This is an agile team, indeed.
On the other hand, I also ran into some oddities that aren't yet fixed. I couldn't make the Kill-Pill personal data erasure work on my Android device. To use Selfie-2FA from my all-in-one desktop PC, I had to crank the webcam brightness to the max, so high that Skype images appeared washed out. On an iPad, the iOS edition runs in the dated 2x mode, just a blown-up version of the iPhone edition. And even though a paid account should be ad-free, the "Go ad-free" link still appears, and I saw ads on some mobile screens. Pending updates for the Android and iOS apps should fix at least some of these oddities. Overall, though, this utility's breadth of features and its inclusion of innovative, security-focused features overshadows these few quirks.
Passwords Plus
LogMeOnce Password Management Suite Ultimate takes the vast feature set of the free LogMeOnce password manager and kicks it up to the next level. I haven't seen another product offering selfie-based two-factor authentication, or a built in anti-theft system. It lacks the ability to manage password for applications, but it checks just about every other box. On the flip side, you get almost all of these features in the free edition, and for some the vast array of features may prove off-putting.
LastPass Premium comes the closest to matching LogMeOnce's breadth of functionality, though with the latest edition LogMeOnce has taken a significant lead. For those who are more into simplicity and ease than a prodigious number of features, Dashlane 4 does everything you could want, with flair. LogMeOnce joins these two as an Editors' Choice for commercial password managers.
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