VILNIUS, Jan. 14 — Nord Security, the Lithuanian company best known for NordVPN, now owns two password managers. It said Wednesday that it has bought Passwarden from KeepSolid, the U.S.-based privacy-software maker, without disclosing what it paid.

The obvious question for anyone with a Passwarden vault is what happens next, and Nord’s answer is: not much, for now. The company said in a press release that Passwarden and its existing product, NordPass, will be run as separate products for at least 18 months. During that period Nord plans to carry Passwarden’s vault-sharing features across into NordPass.

What Passwarden customers should expect

  • The app stays. No forced migration was announced; the two products run side by side for a minimum of 18 months.
  • Current terms are honored. Nord said existing Passwarden customers will keep being supported on the terms they signed up under.
  • Data handling moves to Nord. KeepSolid said Nord Security will manage all Passwarden customer data and any account migration, under the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
  • The team stays. A Nord Security spokesperson said the deal involves no planned layoffs of Passwarden staff.

Why buy a second password manager

NordPass is not a small product. Nord launched it in 2019, and by the company’s October figures it has roughly 6 million paying users. What Passwarden brings is a different approach to sharing vaults among teams and families, and Nord’s chief product officer, Tomas Mickeviciute-Sawyer, said the company deliberately chose not to merge the two products immediately.

“Passwarden has built a meaningfully different product around team and family vault-sharing, and we did not want to lose those capabilities by collapsing the products on day one,” Mickeviciute-Sawyer said in an interview with Consumer Tech Wire. “Our intention is to take the best of Passwarden’s sharing model into NordPass over time, while continuing to support existing Passwarden customers under their current terms.”

The bundle behind the deal

Nord has been assembling a suite since 2022. Its consumer package, sold as NordVPN Complete, combines NordVPN, NordPass premium and NordLocker encrypted cloud storage under one subscription, priced at $7.99 a month on a two-year plan. More features in the bundle make the single price easier to defend, and a sharing-focused password product fits that logic.

Scale is the other part of the picture. Earlier this month Nord said it ended 2025 with more than 16 million paid subscribers across its products, compared with 14 million a year before. The company is privately held and does not publish financial results.

On the selling side, KeepSolid said the sale lets it concentrate on what it keeps: VPN Unlimited and SmartDNS.

A market still reshaping after LastPass

The password-manager category has not settled since the 2022 LastPass breach, in which encrypted vault data belonging to millions of users was exposed. That incident set off a long migration toward 1Password, Bitwarden, NordPass, Dashlane and Proton Pass, among others. The Federal Trade Commission opened an inquiry in 2024 into how password managers disclose their security practices; that inquiry is still active.

Yumiko Brennan-Kowalski, an analyst at the privacy-tools research firm Toolkit, sees the purchase as consistent with Nord’s history. “Nord has been the most aggressive consolidator in the consumer privacy market since the original Cyber Ghost rollups,” she said. “The Passwarden acquisition is consistent with that posture. The strategic question is whether bundle-driven distribution can continue to compensate for what is, on a per-product basis, a more crowded category than it was three years ago.”

For what consolidation tends to do to free tiers, see our analysis of how the password-manager market is consolidating. Readers comparing options today can start with our best password manager ranking, and VPN shoppers weighing a bundle should read what actually matters when choosing a VPN.

Reginald Rosenberg-Vance, Consumer Tech Wire’s editor in chief, wrote this report. More coverage is on the Privacy & Security desk.