1Password Teams Starter Pack vs Business: Which Plan to Buy
Short answer: Buy the Teams Starter Pack unless you need SSO, unless you are already over twenty people, or unless you will cross twenty within the year. It covers up to twenty members — not ten, as most write-ups say — and it is cheaper than Business at every size it can be bought at. The catch is that it stops dead at twenty-one, where your bill goes from $74.85 to $188.79 for a single hire.
Which one, for who
| If you're… | Pick | Because |
|---|---|---|
| A team of 1–20 with no SSO requirement | Teams Starter Pack — $24.95/month flat to 10 members, then $4.99 each | Cheaper than Business at every purchasable headcount, and by a wide margin: $24.95 against $89.90 at ten people. Nothing about Business is worth 3.6× at that size unless you need one of the four features it adds. |
| Anyone who has to connect Okta, Entra ID or another identity provider | Business — $8.99/user/month | Identity-provider integration is Business-only. If a client security questionnaire or your own IT policy requires SSO, the Starter Pack cannot do it at any price and the decision is made for you. |
| A team of 18–20 that expects to hire | Business — $8.99/user/month | Not because it is cheaper now (it is not — $179.80 against $74.85 at twenty), but because the Starter Pack cannot be bought at twenty-one. Migrating a filled password vault under time pressure is worse than paying the difference early. Decide at eighteen, not at twenty-one. |
| A solo owner or a pair | Neither yet — look at the free options first | At one or two people the Starter Pack's $24.95 buys team features you do not have a team for. Bitwarden's free two-person organisation shares credentials properly at no cost. Come back when you hire a third. |
Free option first: There is no free 1Password tier. Both plans include a 14-day trial, and every member of either plan also gets a free 1Password Families account for personal use — which is worth $59.88 a year retail and is the part of this comparison most people miss.
Side by side at 10 people
| 1Password | 1Password | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost at 10 people | $89.90/mo | $24.95/mo |
| At 1 / 10 / 25 | $8.99 / $89.90 / $224.75 | $24.95 / $24.95 / $99.80 |
| Monthly-billing penalty | annual only | annual only |
| Minimum seats | 1 | 1 |
| Free tier | None (14-day trial) | None (14-day trial) |
| MFA / passkeys | Yes / Yes | — |
| Audit logs on this plan | Yes | — |
| Data export | self serve | — |
| Removing a person | Suspend or delete a member from the admin console; shared vault items remain owned by the team. | — |
| Our evidence | Not yet tested | — |
Most comparisons of these two plans repeat the same thing: the Starter Pack is for teams of up to ten, Business is for everyone else. That is wrong, and because it is wrong the recommendation that follows from it is wrong too.
1Password’s pricing page says, verbatim:
The plan includes up to 10 members. You can add up to 10 additional seats, for 20 members total. Additional seats cost: USD: $4.99 per seat per month.
Twenty members, not ten. For a site about businesses of 1–25 people, that single sentence moves the answer for nearly everybody.
We published the ten-member version ourselves between 2 and 22 September. It is logged as a correction.
What each plan costs
| Team size | Teams Starter Pack | Business | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | $24.95 | $8.99 | Business cheaper |
| 3 | $24.95 | $26.97 | Level |
| 5 | $24.95 | $44.95 | Pack saves $20.00 |
| 10 | $24.95 | $89.90 | Pack saves $64.95 |
| 11 | $29.94 | $98.89 | Pack saves $68.95 |
| 15 | $49.90 | $134.85 | Pack saves $84.95 |
| 20 | $74.85 | $179.80 | Pack saves $104.95 |
| 21 | not sold | $188.79 | — |
Monthly figures at the annual-billing rate, read from 1Password’s pricing page on 2026-09-22. Neither plan offers month-to-month billing.
The Starter Pack is cheaper at every headcount where it can be bought, from three people to twenty. At ten people it is a fifth of the price. There is no size at which a team under twenty-one saves money by choosing Business — you choose Business for a capability, never for the bill.
The only reason to pay 3.6× more
Four things are Business-only. If none of them is a requirement, you are choosing between identical password management at $24.95 and at $89.90.
Identity-provider integration. Okta, Entra ID, OneLogin, Duo. This is the one that actually forces the decision, and it usually arrives from outside — a client’s security questionnaire asking whether access is centrally managed, or an insurer’s application. The Starter Pack cannot do this at any price.
Advanced vault controls. Finer-grained role-based sharing and permissions. Worth having at fifteen people with contractors; hard to justify at five.
Watchtower alerts at the business level. Breach and weak-credential monitoring reported across the organisation rather than per user.
Custom policies and advanced reporting. The administrative apparatus you need when somebody other than you is accountable for who has access to what.
There is also a quieter difference: guest accounts. The Starter Pack allows 5, Business allows 20. If you routinely share a vault with clients or contractors who are not staff, count them before you decide — five goes quickly.
The cliff, and why it is worse than a price rise
At twenty-one members the Starter Pack is not more expensive. It is not available. You move to Business at $8.99 per user, for everyone, and the bill goes from $74.85 to $188.79 — a 152% increase caused by one hire.
That distinction matters more than the number. A price rise is something you absorb or negotiate. A plan ceiling is a migration: new plan, re-provisioning, and a window in which your password manager is the thing you are changing while everyone still needs to log in.
So decide at eighteen. If your headcount plan for the next twelve months crosses twenty, move to Business while the move is cheap and unhurried. If it does not, the Starter Pack is straightforwardly the right purchase and will stay so.
The benefit nobody prices in
Both plans give every member a free 1Password Families account for personal use. 1Password Families retails at $4.99 a month, so that is roughly $59.88 per person per year of value that never appears in either column above.
For a five-person team on the Starter Pack, the company pays $299.40 a year and the staff receive about $299.40 a year of personal password management. That does not make the plan free, and we are not going to pretend it is a discount — you cannot spend it and it does not reduce the invoice. But if you were about to expense personal password managers separately, or if you are weighing this against a cheaper competitor that has no equivalent, it is a real line and it belongs in the comparison.
What this page cannot tell you
We have not run either plan in a lab. This compares published pricing and documented capability, and it will not tell you how quickly an admin can actually revoke a departing employee’s access, whether recovery works when somebody loses their phone, or how complete the export is if you decide to leave. Those are the things that determine whether a password manager was a good decision, and they are the things we intend to measure. When we do, it will be dated in the test log.
Until then: treat this as verified arithmetic and a careful reading of the vendor’s own feature table, which is exactly what it is.
The short version
Under twenty-one people and no SSO requirement, buy the Teams Starter Pack. It is cheaper at every size, by a factor of three or more in the middle of the range, and the extra-seat tier means growth barely moves the bill.
Buy Business if you need identity-provider integration, if you need more than five guest accounts, or if you will cross twenty members inside a year. In that last case, move early — the ceiling is a migration, not an invoice.
Prices read from 1password.com/business-pricing on 2026-09-22, US pricing, annual-billing rate. Both plans are annual-billing only. See the pricing tracker for check dates and the 1Password cost page for the full headcount table. This page contains no affiliate links; we have no affiliate relationship with 1Password, deliberately, until a lab verdict exists that predates one.