How to Set Up & Use Proton Pass

Get Proton Pass from the App Store on iPhone and iPad, or Google Play on Android. It is free, and the listing you want is the one published by Proton AG.

Once it finishes installing, tap Open.

The app opens on a short welcome screen. Tap Sign in and enter the email or username and password for the Proton account from the section above — or tap Create an account if you skipped that part.

If that account already has two-factor turned on, you will be asked for a 6-digit code next. Enter it and tap Authenticate. If you have not set two-factor up yet, you will go straight through.

What you land on is your vault: the encrypted container everything gets saved into.

Autofill is the part that makes a password manager worth using day to day. It is what lets Proton Pass save a login as you create it, generate a strong password on the spot when you sign up somewhere new, and type the right details back in for you the next time — across your apps and in your browser.

Without it, Proton Pass still stores everything safely, but you would be opening the app and copying passwords across by hand every time. The app prompts you to switch it on, and the route differs depending on your phone.

Your vault now holds every password you own, and on a phone that is already unlocked and sitting in someone else’s hand, that is one tap away from all of it. An app lock closes that gap: Proton Pass stays sealed on its own, and asks for your face or fingerprint before it opens.

It costs you nothing in daily use — the check happens in the moment it takes the app to appear — and it is the single setting most worth turning on before you go any further.

With the lock on, the app finishes its setup with one last pitch — Control what lands in your inbox, about email aliases. That is a genuinely useful feature, covered further down, but it is not something you need to decide on now. Tap Start using Proton Pass.

You land in your vault: a search box across the top, a + along the bottom for adding an item by hand, and the list of everything you have saved. It is empty at the moment, which is exactly right — you have not saved anything yet. Logins appear here as you go, grouped by when you last used them.

Open proton.me/pass/download in the browser you actually use — that part matters. The page works out which browser you are on and offers you a matching Download for [your browser] button, so opening it in Chrome when you live in Firefox will hand you the wrong extension.

That button takes you to your browser’s own add-on store, where the listing is published by Proton AG. Click Add to Chrome — or Install, or Add, depending on the browser — and confirm the box that appears. It will tell you the extension can read and change your data on all websites, which is simply what any password manager needs in order to see a login form and fill it.

Once it finishes, Proton Pass opens a welcome tab of its own. That is where the next step picks up.

Once the extension is in, it walks you through two short steps. The first suggests pinning it to your toolbar — click Continue straight past it, since the next step covers that properly. The second is Connect your Proton Account, which opens Proton’s sign-in page.

Sign in the usual way: enter your email or username and click Continue, then your password. If the account has two-factor turned on you will be asked for a 6-digit code from your authenticator app before it lets you through.

You then land back on the extension with a page confirming it is ready to use, and your vault loads behind it — whatever is already saved to that account appears here without you copying anything across.

By default the extension is tucked away in a menu, which is enough friction that most people forget it is there. Pinning puts its icon permanently on the toolbar, so saving and finding a login is always one click.

Find the extensions button in your browser’s toolbar — almost always a jigsaw piece, sitting to the right of the address bar — and click it. Your installed extensions drop down in a list. Click the pin beside Proton Pass, and its icon appears next to the jigsaw, where it will stay.

Click the Proton Pass icon you just pinned. Your vault opens in a panel below it — a search box, a + for adding something by hand, and the list of everything you have saved.

Right now that list is empty, which is exactly as it should be. This panel is where you will spend most of your time with Proton Pass on a computer, so it is worth knowing it is one click away. The next step fills it.

Anyone who sits down at your unlocked computer can open that panel and read every password in it. A lock closes that gap: the vault seals itself when you have not touched it for a while, and asks for a PIN to reopen.

With the vault open, click the menu icon (three lines, top left) and choose Settings — it opens in its own tab. Go to Security, select PIN code, and enter a PIN you will remember but nobody would guess. You will be asked to type it a second time to confirm.

From then on the vault seals itself after 10 minutes of inactivity and asks for that PIN to open again. You can change the timeout on the same screen, and three wrong attempts signs you out entirely.

Sometimes you will want to put an account into Proton Pass yourself — one you already have, that you are not signing in to right this minute. This is the way to do that.

Open Proton Pass and tap the + button. It asks what you want to add; tap Login. Then just fill in the boxes: give it a name so you recognise it later (like “Netflix”), your email or username for that account, and its password. Tap Create to save. That account now lives safely in your vault.

You will not need this very often — the next two ways are how most of your accounts will get added — but it is handy to know. It is also where you would store things that are not really websites, like a wifi password or a door code.

This is the one that does most of the work for you, and you barely have to think about it.

The next time you log in to a website as normal — typing your email and password into the site itself — Proton Pass spots what you are doing and pops up a small prompt asking if you would like to save this login. Tap Save. It quickly checks whether you already have that account stored; if not, it offers to create a new entry, and hands you a form with the title, username, password and web address already filled in from what you just typed. Glance over it, adjust anything you like, and tap Create.

Do this each time a prompt appears and, over a week or two of normal use, all the accounts you actually use will quietly end up in Proton Pass. There is no need to sit down and add them all at once.

And here is the payoff. Once a login is saved, you never really type it again.

The next time you visit that same website, tap the email or password box and Proton Pass drops its matching logins right underneath — pick one and it fills both fields for you. If the site is not yet linked to your saved entry, tap Get from Proton Pass instead: confirm it is you with your fingerprint (or face, or PIN), and your vault opens with the right login ready to tap. Either way, you are signed in without remembering or entering anything.

This is why a password can be long and completely random: you never have to type it or recall it, so there is no reason to keep it short or reuse an old one. That is the whole point of a password manager, and from here it simply happens in the background.

Whenever you sign up for something new, or change the password on an account you already have, let Proton Pass make the password instead of thinking one up yourself.

Any time you are in a password box — adding a login by hand, or signing up on a website — Proton Pass offers a Generate password option. Tap it and it instantly produces a long, completely random password, then saves it with the login for you. You never see it, type it, or need to remember it; next time you visit, Proton Pass just fills it in.

Do this every single time, and before long every account you own has its own unique password. That is the single most valuable habit here: when one website suffers a data breach — and they regularly do — the leaked password unlocks nothing else you own.

You do not have to start fresh with new accounts to be secure. The accounts you already use every day can be locked down just as well — you simply replace each old, weak or reused password with a strong one that Proton Pass generates and stores for you.

Create a brand-new entry first, tap Generate password to give it a fresh random password, and save it. Then go to that site’s change password page — Google here as the example — and when it asks for a new password, autofill the one you just generated. Only once the site confirms the change has gone through do you delete the old entry. Doing it this way means your working password is never overwritten before the new one is confirmed — so if anything goes wrong partway, you are never locked out.