Dashlane review (2026): strong scam alerts, no free plan

What Dashlane is in 2026

Dashlane is a password manager founded in 2009 by a team that met at Ecole Centrale Paris. It stores your logins, passkeys, payment cards, IDs and notes in an encrypted vault, fills them in for you, and tells you when something you use has leaked. Dashlane says more than 25,000 companies use it, including Air France and Forrester.

The product has changed a lot since 2021. In the last few years Dashlane has:

• retired its free plan, along with Essentials, Advanced, Premium Plus and Premium Plus Family
• stopped selling monthly subscriptions on every plan
• retired the Windows desktop app, and with it the old emergency contact feature
• ended the experimental Password Changer after its beta
• renamed its business plans under the Omnix name

For personal use you now choose between two plans, Premium for one person and Friends & Family for up to 10. For companies there are three: Omnix Password Management, Omnix Credential Protection and Omnix Enterprise. Older Starter, Team and Standard plans still renew for existing customers, but Dashlane no longer sells them.

Most of what Dashlane has added recently aims at stopping you from handing a password to the wrong site: AI scam alerts, phishing checks on saved logins and, for companies, monitoring of passwords that staff type in managed browsers.

Setting up your account

You install the browser extension (or the phone app), select the orange D, and create an account with your email address. Dashlane opens a separate tab to run a security check, which stops an attacker from faking the sign-up on a lookalike site, and then emails you a verification code that you have 15 minutes to enter.

Next you pick how to lock the account. You have three choices:

• a Master Password, the classic option
• a PIN tied to each device, which Dashlane calls passwordless login and currently offers to new accounts only
• a FIDO2 security key such as a YubiKey

Take the recovery step seriously. Dashlane cannot reset your Master Password because it never sees it, so you should turn on at least one recovery method before you need it. The account recovery key is a 28-character code you save somewhere safe, and in the Mac app you can also turn on recovery with Touch ID. Without any of these, a forgotten password means resetting the account and losing the data in it.

After that, the For you tab gives you a checklist and pushes you to import your passwords. You can import a CSV file from any browser or password manager, or a LastPass export. On a Mac or iPhone running macOS 26 or iOS 26 you can also move your data straight from 1Password or another app with Credential Exchange, which skips the risky step of leaving a plain CSV file in your Downloads folder.

Using Dashlane day to day

When you click a username field, the extension suggests the login it has saved for that site, and one more click fills the password. It fills addresses, payment cards and passport or ID details the same way, and you can right-click any field to pick something from your vault or create a new password. When you change a password on a website, Dashlane offers to update the saved login.

The password generator makes long random passwords or passphrases, and Password Health scores the whole vault so you can see which passwords are weak, reused or exposed. You then fix them one at a time on each site. Dashlane used to have a Password Changer that did this for you in bulk, but that feature is gone, so ignore older reviews that praise it.

On the phone, the Android app needs Android 10 or later and the iPhone and iPad app needs iOS or iPadOS 18 or later. Both apps autofill your saved logins. You can also use Dashlane on a Wear OS watch, and an Apple Watch can be used for two-factor authentication.

On a computer, the experience depends on your system. On Windows and Linux you use the extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox or another Chromium browser, plus the web app for managing the vault. On a Mac there is a proper macOS app from the App Store that opens with Touch ID, but Apple's rules mean you still need the Safari extension for autofill, and the Mac app does not autofill two-factor codes. Dashlane also works in AI browsers such as Comet, ChatGPT Atlas and Dia, but it deliberately blocks the browser's AI agent from using anything in your vault.

Dashlane ships updates every one or two weeks and switches off app versions more than 12 months old, so you need to keep the app and your browser current. Browser support covers the last two major versions only.

Scam alerts and phishing protection

This is where Dashlane earns its price. Two separate checks run in the desktop browser extension.

AI-Powered Scam Protection looks at sites you have not saved in your vault. Dashlane's model checks 79 signals on the page, such as links and images, and if the site looks like a phishing page you get a pop-up showing the address, with a choice to leave or to trust the site. The check runs on your device, so Dashlane does not see which sites you visit. It is on by default for Premium and Friends & Family, and it works in Chrome, Firefox, Edge and other Chromium browsers. Desktop Safari and phones do not get it yet.

Vault phishing alerts cover the sites you have saved. If you try to autofill, or copy and paste, a saved login on a site or app that does not match the one stored with it, Dashlane stops you and warns you. This catches the classic trick of a lookalike bank address in an email, because the password manager knows the real address even when you do not look closely.

On top of that, Dark Web Monitoring watches for your email addresses in breach data, breach notifications tell you when a site you use has leaked logins, and Dashlane warns you if a password matching your Master Password turns up online. You still have to read emails with care, but you get a warning at the moment you are about to make a mistake.

Security and the 2025 incident

Dashlane uses a zero-knowledge design. Your vault is encrypted on your device with AES-256 (in CBC mode with an HMAC-SHA256 check) before it leaves for Dashlane's servers, and your Master Password goes through the Argon password-hashing function to make the key. Dashlane holds only encrypted data, which is why it cannot read your passwords or recover a forgotten Master Password for you. Its business SSO component runs inside AWS Nitro Enclaves, which keeps the keys it handles isolated from the rest of the server.

You can add two-factor authentication to the Dashlane account itself, with an authenticator app, and Dashlane can also store and fill the two-factor codes for sites you save.

Dashlane has published one security incident in recent years. In August 2025 attackers got into its Salesforce CRM through Drift, a third-party chat app connected to it, and saw basic business contact details (names, titles, company names, phone numbers and email addresses) for a small number of business customers. Dashlane's investigation, completed on September 1, 2025, found no access to personal or business vaults and no effect on its products. The realistic risk from that kind of leak is targeted phishing, and Dashlane's advice was to log in only through its official apps.

The built-in VPN

Premium includes Hotspot Shield's Premium VPN, and Hotspot Shield provides its own 24/7 tech support for it. You activate it from the VPN item in Dashlane's menu, Dashlane creates the Hotspot Shield account with a strong password, and you then install the Hotspot Shield app. You can use it on up to five devices.

The VPN has limits worth knowing before you count it as part of the value. The 14-day trial, the student year and referral months do not include it. On a Friends & Family plan only the manager gets it, so the other nine people do not. And on business plans it appears only if the admin turns it on. For protecting your connection on hotel or airport Wi-Fi it does the job; if you need a VPN for streaming or detailed privacy settings, compare it with a dedicated VPN such as Hotspot Shield on its own or NordVPN.

Sharing, families and emergencies

Any paid plan can share individual logins or Secure Notes with other Dashlane users, and you can group items into collections and share a whole collection. Secure Notes come with 1 GB of encrypted file storage for scans of documents or recovery codes.

Friends & Family covers you and nine other people. Each person gets their own private vault with Premium features, and you manage the group from a Friends & Family Dashboard where you invite and remove members. The plan suits a household or a small circle of relatives, because nobody can see anyone else's vault unless they choose to share.

Emergency access is weaker than it used to be. The old emergency contact feature lived in the retired desktop app. Now Dashlane's advice is to export your vault to an encrypted DASH file, keep it somewhere safe such as a USB drive, and give a trusted person the file's password separately, ideally in a shared Secure Note. It works, but the file does not update itself, so you have to export a new one whenever your vault changes. If planned emergency access matters to you, this is a reason to look at rivals.

Dashlane for businesses

Business plans run through the Admin Console, where you invite staff, buy seats, set vault and sharing policies and watch activity logs. Omnix Password Management costs $8 per user a month, billed annually, and you need at least 2 seats. It includes SSO and SCIM provisioning with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Ping, Duo and JumpCloud (Google Workspace and Keycloak for SSO), secure sharing and collections, Dark Web Monitoring, a place to keep API keys and other secrets, and activity log feeds to Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, Datadog, CrowdStrike and Panther. Each employee can also start a separate Friends & Family plan at no extra cost, which is a good perk when staff ask for help with their personal passwords.

Omnix Credential Protection, at $4 per user a month, is a different product. It has no vault. Instead it watches for weak or compromised passwords that staff enter in company-managed desktop browsers, shows AI phishing alerts even to people who are logged out of Dashlane or do not have an account, and can send risk notices through Slack. Omnix Enterprise combines both for organizations with 50 or more employees, at a custom price, and adds dedicated account management.

You can try Omnix free for 14 days for up to 10,000 employees. If a paid business plan lapses, you get a 30-day grace period with full access. After that, admins can still see the data but members cannot log in at all until someone pays, so put the renewal on your calendar. Nonprofits can ask support for 10 percent off professional plans.

Pricing and value

Dashlane bills every plan once a year. For personal use there is a 14-day Premium trial without the VPN, and if you start it without a card it ends on its own at no charge. After that you pick Premium for one person or Friends & Family for up to 10. Dashlane raised personal prices from mid-February 2026 and shows the current figures on its personal pricing page, so check that page in your region before you buy. Personal plans bought on Dashlane's website come with a full refund if you cancel within 30 days.

The free plan is the change most readers will notice. When the trial ends without a purchase, you can still log in, but you can only export your passwords, not view, copy or edit them. So you are choosing between paying and moving to another manager, with no middle option.

For businesses, $8 per user a month is a fair price for a manager with SSO, SCIM, SIEM feeds and a family plan for every employee. A five-person company pays $480 a year for Omnix Password Management. The legacy Standard plan, which some smaller teams still renew, now costs $360 a year for 10 seats, and Starter costs $30 a month for 10 seats, but neither is available to new buyers.

Students with a university email address can get a year of Premium free, without the VPN. Referrals give you and the friend six months of Premium each, up to two years for you.

Support

Support starts with a large help center and a chatbot. If you are on a paid plan or a trial, the chatbot hands you to a person when it cannot solve the problem. Agents chat in English, French, German and Spanish, Monday to Friday from 6 AM to 6 PM Eastern time; outside those hours the bot logs your issue and an agent replies by email. Phone support is only for admins of some business plans, through the Admin Console. Business admins can also reach an agent directly from the console.

The help center is one of the better ones in this category. Articles show when they were last updated, cover each platform separately and say plainly when a feature has been removed.

Dashlane vs 1Password

1Password is the closest rival for people who are willing to pay. Its Individual plan costs $3.99 a month billed annually ($2.99 during its current first-year promotion), and Families costs $5.99 a month for the household ($4.49 in the promotion), with a 14-day trial that needs no card. Its biggest practical difference is apps: 1Password has desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux as well as iOS, Android, browser extensions and a CLI, while Dashlane relies on browser extensions everywhere except the Mac.

Pick 1Password if you work in desktop apps outside the browser or use Linux. Pick Dashlane if the scam alerts, vault phishing checks and included VPN matter more to you, or if your company wants staff to get a free family plan with their work seat.

Dashlane vs Bitwarden

Bitwarden wins on price and openness. It has a free plan that Bitwarden calls always free, with unlimited passwords on unlimited devices, and Premium costs $1.65 a month, billed at $19.80 a year. Its code is open source, so outside researchers can read it.

Dashlane does more to stop phishing without any setup from you, and it includes a VPN on Premium. Bitwarden, on the other hand, leaves you with a working free vault if you stop paying, which Dashlane no longer does. If you are on a tight budget or want open-source software, choose Bitwarden. If you want the extra warnings and are happy to pay every year, Dashlane is the better product to live with.

Pricing and value

Every Dashlane plan bills yearly. Personal plans are Premium (1 person) and Friends & Family (up to 10 people); check their current prices on Dashlane's personal pricing page, as they rose in mid-February 2026. A 14-day Premium trial comes first, without the VPN. Business plans: Omnix Password Management at $8 per user a month (at least 2 seats, 14-day trial), Omnix Credential Protection at $4 per user a month, and Omnix Enterprise at a custom price for 50 or more employees. Personal plans bought on Dashlane's website can be refunded within 30 days. Prices checked November 4, 2026.

Who should buy it

Buy Dashlane if you or the people you look after are the likely targets of phishing emails and fake login pages, and you want a password manager that warns you at the moment it matters. It also suits a household that wants one plan for up to 10 people with private vaults, someone who would use the included VPN on public Wi-Fi, and small and mid-sized companies that need SSO and SCIM and like the idea of giving every employee a free family plan.

Who should skip it

Skip Dashlane if you want a free plan to fall back on, prefer to pay monthly, or work on Windows or Linux and want a desktop app rather than a browser extension. Bitwarden is the better pick on a budget, and 1Password suits people who want apps on every desktop system. Skip it too if planned emergency access matters to you, since Dashlane now asks you to manage that with an exported file.