Switching from LastPass to iCloud Keychain
Today, I received an unsettling email. LastPass, which I have so long enjoyed, would no longer allow me to manage my passwords for free on multiple device types. If I wanted to have access to my passwords on both my laptop and my iPhone, I would have to upgrade to Premium. I knew this day would come, but I was hoping I could put it off for as long as possible. Alas, I am no longer allowed to freeload on LastPass’ generosity.
As a loyal Apple customer, switching to iCloud Keychain seemed like the logical choice, given that all my devices (Macbook Pro, Apple Watch, iPhone) all would support it natively. However, getting all my passwords out of LastPass and into iCloud was no walk in the park. It seems that there are virtually no tutorials on how to make this happen, thus my writing.
To begin, I started by logging into lastpass.com, and exporting my entire database of passwords. To do this, from “Advanced Options” in the lower left corner, click Export. LastPass will take a minute to generate a comma separated list of all your passwords. Copy this entire list to your clipboard.
Open up Excel, and paste in your copied data. Then use the “Data” tab’s: “Text to Columns” feature to split your copied data into columns (using the comma ‘delimiter’).
Because I can’t directly import passwords into Keychain on my Mac, I use Firefox as an intermediary. Starting with Firefox version 80, you can import a comma separated list into FF’s own password manager. There is a special layout necessary, which is different that the layout LastPass provided. Make sure to take a look at this article to refine your Excel document and prep it for upload.
After I imported to Firefox, Safari has a nicely designed “import from Firefox” option in the File menu, which I used to take all my Firefox passwords and load them into iCloud Keychain. Warning: I had trouble getting this process to work on my older Macbook Pro that can’t run Big Sur. When I tried it on my work Macbook Pro, it worked within a few minutes.
All said and done, the process was actually much simpler than the current articles make it seem. I’m looking forward to using my new iCloud Keychain’ed passwords across all my devices.
The one, very unfortunate note here, is that iCloud Keychain does not support Google Chrome, at least on Mac. There is, however, a plugin for Windows 10 machines (as of earlier this year) that enables iCloud Keychain access in Chrome on Windows. Hopefully we’ll see the same functionality come to Chrome on Mac soon. For now, I’ll make the switch to Safari.
