For as long as most of us have used the internet, the password has been the front door to everything, and everyone has quietly known it is a bad door. We are told to make passwords long, unique and unguessable, and then to remember dozens of them, which is impossible, so people reuse them, and reuse is exactly what turns a single leaked database into a chain of broken accounts. Password managers emerged as the sane response to that impossible demand. Now a newer idea, the passkey, promises to remove the password itself. The obvious question is whether passkeys make password managers obsolete, and the honest answer in 2026 is no, not yet, and probably not in the way people expect.
This piece explains what passkeys actually are, why they are a genuine improvement rather than hype, why the transition away from passwords is slower and messier than the headlines suggest, and what all of that means you should practically do today. We cover the leading tools in depth in our Bitwarden review and 1Password review, both of which now sit at the centre of this shift rather than being made redundant by it.
What a passkey is, and why it is a real improvement
A password is something you know and type, which is the root of nearly all its weaknesses. Because it is a secret you enter, it can be guessed, reused across sites, tricked out of you by a convincing fake login page, or exposed when a service you use is breached. A passkey works on a fundamentally different model. Instead of a shared secret you type, it uses a cryptographic key pair tied to your device, and you unlock it locally with your fingerprint, face or a device PIN. The critical part of the secret never leaves your device and is never typed into a webpage.
That design closes two of the biggest holes in password security at once. Because there is nothing to type into a spoofed page, passkeys are strongly resistant to phishing, the technique behind an enormous share of account compromises. And because the sensitive half of the key never sits on the service’s servers in a form that can be reused, the kind of mass database leak that spills millions of passwords does not hand attackers your login. Even a long, unique password stored in a manager, which is already good security, remains vulnerable to phishing and to breaches in a way a passkey is designed not to be. So the improvement is real, not marketing: passkeys remove the password as a thing that can be stolen.
Why passwords are not going away yet
If passkeys are clearly better, it is tempting to conclude that passwords are finished and password managers with them. Reality is more stubborn. A login method is only useful where it is actually supported, and passkey adoption across the web is uneven. Many major services support them, a great many others do not yet, and the experience of using them can still vary between devices, browsers and platforms. Until support is close to universal, you will keep running into accounts that only offer a password, which means you cannot simply stop having passwords, however much you might want to.
There is also the practical matter of managing passkeys themselves. They need to be stored, synced across your devices and recoverable if you lose a device, and doing that well is not automatic. This is precisely where the supposedly obsolete tool re-enters the picture. Rather than being displaced by passkeys, password managers are becoming the place where passkeys live, storing and syncing them alongside traditional passwords in one vault. The transition, in other words, is not password managers versus passkeys at all. It is password managers absorbing passkeys and carrying you across a web that is only partway through changing.
How the two fit together right now
The useful way to picture the current moment is a long, overlapping handover rather than a clean switch. Passwords are the incumbent, present everywhere but flawed. Passkeys are the successor, clearly better but not yet everywhere. And the password manager is the bridge that lets you hold both without chaos. It generates and stores a unique, strong password for every account that still needs one, so your weakest links are as strong as passwords can be, and it stores your passkeys for the growing set of services that support them, so you gain the phishing resistance wherever it is available.
Framed that way, the tools stop competing and start reinforcing each other. You do not have to choose between adopting passkeys and keeping a manager, and choosing one over the other would actually leave you worse off. The manager makes your remaining passwords safe; the passkeys make your logins phishing-resistant where possible; and using them together means you get the best of what is available today without waiting for the entire web to finish its migration.
What it means for buyers
Do not wait for passkeys to take over before improving your login security, and do not treat this as an either-or decision. The concrete move in 2026 is simple and available now. First, use a reputable password manager and let it generate a unique, strong password for every single account, which alone eliminates password reuse, the biggest self-inflicted risk most people carry. Second, turn on passkeys everywhere a service offers them, and let your manager store them, so you pick up phishing resistance account by account as the web catches up. This combination gives you the strongest practical protection today while positioning you for a future where passwords fade. The direction of travel is clearly toward passkeys, but the smart posture for now is not to pick a side. It is to use both, together, and let the password manager do the work of holding the whole thing together.
