If the security question in your team is "are our passwords strong enough?", that's likely the wrong question. The account that gets messy is the one several people use: the billing login pasted into a chat thread, the analytics account everyone signs into, the domain registrar only one person can reach. This is for founders, ops leads, and the person who ended up owning half the company's accounts by accident.
The verdict
The moment two people need the same login, the answer is per-person access rather than a stronger password. Take them in order: invite each person on the service itself if it supports that, use SSO where it's available, and fall back to a shared vault for the credentials that fit neither.
Why the sharing is the problem, not the password
Password strength protects against guessing. It says nothing about who can use the password, and in a small team that's the part that goes wrong.
Once a credential is shared, copies spread in ways you can't inventory: chat history, a screenshot, someone's personal notes app, a browser on a laptop that isn't yours. When a person leaves, you can't rotate — change — only their access, because there's nothing person-shaped to remove. You have to change the credential itself, which signs out everyone who uses it. That's disruptive, so it's easy to postpone, and postponed rotation is how an ex-teammate keeps working access months after their last day.
There's a second cost that shows up during an incident. If five people use one login, the app's own activity log records the account, not the person. When you need to answer "who changed this?", the log can't tell you.
Two-factor authentication doesn't rescue a shared login on its own. If the second factor is a code from one person's phone, that person becomes a bottleneck; if it's a code everyone can generate, the seed for it has to be shared too — which puts you back in the same place unless it's stored somewhere with per-person access.
Before you pick a tool: check whether you need to share at all
Many services let you invite teammates as separate users on the account. Where that exists, prefer it over a vault: removing someone is one action, permissions can differ per person, and the service's own log names them. One common reason teams share instead is cost — per-seat pricing on a tool where only one person needs full control. That's a real tradeoff, and worth making deliberately rather than by default, because the cost of a shared login lands later, at the worst moment.
Share credentials for the accounts that give you no other option. That's a shorter list than it first appears.
The three approaches
Browser-saved credentials
Works while. one person uses the account, on devices they control
Where it stops working. a second person needs in, or the device is lost or leaves with its owner
What breaks first. sharing degrades into pasting the password into chat
One personal manager, shared master password
Works while. a small, stable group with identical trust levels
Where it stops working. someone joins or leaves, or you need per-person permissions
What breaks first. offboarding — the master password change touches everyone, so it's easy to postpone
Shared vault with per-person accounts
Works while. each person signs in as themselves and sees only the items they're granted
Where it stops working. it holds as the team changes; the tradeoff is per-seat cost and setup time
What breaks first. the weak point moves to admin and recovery: who can grant access, and who can get in if that person can't
1. Browser-saved credentials
Fine for a solo operator. The browser fills the login, the credential syncs across your own devices, and there's nothing to administer.
It has no concept of a second person. When a teammate needs the same account, the browser offers no way to hand it over, so the handover happens in chat or over a screen share — and now the credential exists in a place with search history and no expiry. It also gives you no answer to the succession question: if you're unavailable, can anyone else reach the registrar?
2. A personal manager, shared between several people
This is the common middle step: one password manager account, one master password, everybody uses it. It's a genuine improvement on chat — most password managers encrypt stored credentials, and they stop appearing in message history. Check the specifics on the product's own security page.
What it doesn't do is separate people. Everyone in the vault sees everything in the vault, so you can't give a contractor the ad account without also giving them the bank login. And because there's one account, offboarding means changing the master password and telling everyone the new one — the same disruptive rotation as before, moved up a level. If a shared setup is going to fail quietly, this is where it tends to happen: the group grows past the point where one trust level fits everyone, and nobody notices until someone leaves.
3. A shared vault with per-person accounts
Here each person has their own account and their own master password. Credentials live in shared collections, and access is granted per person, per collection. Removing someone is a single revocation; the credential stays put and everyone else keeps working.
That structure is what buys you the things the other two can't offer: per-person permissions, a record of who was granted what, a place to store two-factor seeds so codes aren't tied to one phone, and offboarding that doesn't interrupt the rest of the team. It costs money per seat and takes some setup, which may be why it gets put off.
Its own failure mode is administrative rather than structural. Decide early who can grant access, and make sure more than one person can recover the vault — otherwise you've rebuilt the single-point-of-failure you were trying to remove, just in a nicer interface.
Who should skip this
If you're the only person who touches these accounts, you don't have a sharing problem yet, and browser-saved credentials plus a personal manager is enough. What you do have is a recovery problem: write down where the critical accounts live and how someone else could reach them if you couldn't.
If your team already runs on an identity provider and signs into its tools through single sign-on — one company login that grants access to each app — most of this is handled. A shared vault is then for the leftovers: the registrar, the bank, the vendor portal that doesn't support SSO. That list is short, but it's the list with the highest consequences.
The next action
Open a document and list the accounts more than one person uses. Next to each, mark whether the service supports inviting people as separate users. The ones that do are a config change you can make this week. The ones that don't are the actual argument for a shared vault — and the list is usually short enough to make the decision easy.