Password manager or digital inheritance vault: what's the difference?
1 August 2026 · Inherit Vault
Password managers and digital inheritance vaults get lumped together because both involve "what happens to my accounts when I die", but they're built to do different jobs, and using one where you need the other creates real problems.
What a password manager actually does
Tools like 1Password or Bitwarden store your actual credentials, encrypted, and some offer an "emergency access" feature that can hand a trusted contact the literal keys: usernames, passwords, everything, after a waiting period the account holder controls. That's powerful, and it's also exactly what most banks' terms of service prohibit sharing at all, using someone else's login, even with good intentions, can breach the account terms and complicate a bank's own bereavement process rather than simplify it.
What a digital inheritance vault does
Inherit Vault deliberately holds no passwords. It holds the map instead: which institutions you bank with, which pension providers hold your money, where your will is kept, what your executor needs to know to contact each organisation directly and go through its proper bereavement process, the process built to verify a death and hand over control lawfully.
Why the difference matters
A bank doesn't want your executor logging in as you, it wants to be told you've died, see a death certificate, and deal with your executor as your executor. Handing over live credentials skips that process instead of helping it, and can leave an executor personally on the wrong side of computer misuse rules that were never designed with grief in mind.
Where they actually overlap
Some things genuinely do need direct access, family photos on a phone, a document only saved in one cloud folder, and for those, a password manager's emergency access has real value. The two aren't rivals, they're solving different halves of the same problem, one hands over specific keys you've chosen in advance, the other hands over the map that makes every other door easier to open the right way.
Most people need both, in different places, for different things. What nobody needs is to assume one covers what only the other actually does.
Leave your family a map, not a mystery.
Inherit Vault is the UK's digital inheritance vault: every account, policy, and instruction your family will need, encrypted so only you can read it, released to your executor when it genuinely matters.
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