In our digital life, there’s a lot of information we need to keep track of, from login credentials to licensing information to important dates. It’s all stuff that you need to know, but can’t always stay on top of. You could write it down in your online notes or office apps, but if your accounts get hacked, your passwords and other private data will be right there for the hacker to see. You could try to remember everything, and keep up with the info you receive in email by archiving messages into special folders, but you’ll likely end up forgetting or losing something.
For individuals, there’s many password managers that can help out with this, from the free LastPass to paid options like 1Password. Between those apps, random bits of info you can find in your email account, and your own brain, you’ll likely be fine keeping up with the important info in your own life.
But what about passwords and info that your whole team or business needs access to? That’s where Safestacks comes in. It’s a web app designed for storing all your usernames, passwords, licenses and other important information in one central repository. By managing all this important information with one app, you’ll be able to easy save time, money and effort by staying on top of things. Let’s take a look.
Getting Started
Signing up to Safestacks involves you choosing a custom subdomain in which to access your Safestacks account, as well as setting a company name and your own login credentials for the service.
As a security measure, Safestacks won’t show any sensitive information on the screen without entering a secret second password, or an “Unlock Code”, even when you’re logged in. This way, someone would have to figure out both of your passwords to get your sensitive data. By default, this will be set to “Safestacks”, although you’ll naturally want to change it which can be done in the System Administration section of your account.
All the various types of information are held in collections, which separate information into their various groups like login information versus software licenses. There’s a few default ones setup for you, but you can add new collections at will to include data like office contracts and networking data all from the “Add Collections” link in the sidebar. You can create your own too, setting a custom name, icon and fields.
Adding a new collection is a relatively easy process.
Managing Your Collections
Obviously you want to fill your collections with items, entries consisting of a number of fields that differ depending on what type of collection you’re adding to. For example, the default collection for handling hardware includes fields for model and serial numbers, cost, warranty expiration, etc.
Adding a new item, in this case a piece of hardware alongside it’s model number, serial, cost and purchase date.
Of course, as previously said, the fields differ between collections. If you’re adding a computer, you can add it’s technical specifications to the entry while domain names will ask you for a registrar instead. If you’ve added your own, custom collections then it’ll obviously be the custom fields that you’ve specified instead.
Sensitive fields will hide behind the barrier of requiring an unlock code so, even if someone gains access to your Safestacks account, they won’t necessarily get access to your sensitive data, which is comforting knowledge.
Collections are pleasingly versatile, capable of being used for pretty much anything you want. You could include a database of contact details, or Twitter usernames. Essentially, Safestacks is a glorified database app with a simple enough interface for anyone to use it. It’s aimed at managing client or company data on a wide scale, but you can really use it for anything as long as you feel that the price is worth it.
Other Features
You can brand Safestacks somewhat, too, allowing it to have a little more unity if using it within a corporate setting. You can’t exactly do a lot, but at least Safestacks allows you to set a site name (swapping out references of Safestacks to your own chosen wording), a hex code for the header colour and a custom page for users to be redirected to when they sign out of the service.
Customising Safestacks is limited, but the features on offer are definitely welcome, including the ability to edit the site name, log out page and header colour.
Safestacks is really designed to be used on a large scale, and you can easily add new users through the System Administration panel to invite them into viewing and managing the database. Somewhat similarly, you can add new clients which further segregate your collections and entries so you can manage things easily.
Your Unlock Code, which safely protects sensitive data, is also customisable through the System Administration section.
Conclusion
Safestacks is a paid service, although you’ll be eligible for a 30-day free trial with your new account. They call their pricing strategy simple, and that it is. For unlimited storage and usage of Safestacks — pretty much everything the app has to offer — it’ll cost you $12/month on a cancel-anytime basis.
Like I said before, Safestacks is essentially a simplified database system and if you’re not familiar enough with managing a regular database, this is certainly an option. $12/month might seem a bit pricy but if you use it on the enterprise-level scale that it’s intended, it’s definitely of value. There’s no per-user pricing, as you’ll find in most apps, which can make it a very good value for teams that need to share account credentials and other sensitive info easily.