Passkeys Versus Passwords: What Is the Difference Between Them?

Ironically, although passwords exist to protect your accounts, they're notorious for being reused, phished, and easily guessed by hackers. They're vulnerable to many types of cyberattacks, which makes it easier for hackers to steal sensitive information, whether that's a personal login or a corporate VPN credential.

Password managers have made it easier to protect data, but passwords remain the weakest link in both personal and business security.

For enterprise security teams specifically, passwords are the root cause of the majority of data breaches. Stolen, phished, reused, or brute-forced credentials account for the vast majority of initial access events.

Passkeys change that equation entirely. They're faster, more secure, and remove the credential as an attack surface rather than just making it harder to steal.

Passwordless authentication methods allow users to log in quickly and securely without passwords. They're a shift away from knowledge-based logins and closer to possession-based logins. Most people already use this type of authentication when they unlock their mobile phone with face recognition or their fingerprint.

Passkeys are a passwordless login method. Half of the passkey is stored on your device or in your password manager, and the other half stays with the website or app, so there's nothing to remember. The two parts authenticate the login when you sign in using a passkey.

The technical mechanism relies on public-key cryptography. When you create a passkey for a site:

When you log in, the site sends a challenge. Your device signs it with the private key. The site verifies the signature with the public key. No password is transmitted, stored on the server side, or exposed at any point in the process.

The phishing-resistance property is the most significant security improvement for enterprise use. A traditional phishing attack works by directing a user to a convincing fake login page. The user enters their credentials. The attacker captures them. The attack succeeds because the password can be entered anywhere, by anyone.

A passkey can't be phished this way. The private key is cryptographically bound to the specific domain it was created for. If a user visits a fake site (even one that is pixel-perfect identical to the real thing), the passkey won't authenticate.

There's no credential to hand over because the passkey only responds to a challenge from the exact domain it was registered with. For enterprise teams, this matters enormously. For example, a workforce using passkeys eliminates the classic phishing attack path for every employee, regardless of whether they noticed the URL was wrong.

For individual users, passkeys are primarily a convenience improvement because there's no password to remember, logins are faster, and you have nothing to reset.

For enterprise security and IT teams, passkeys represent a structural change in the threat model.

The majority of enterprise breaches begin with a compromised credential. Phishing captures it directly. Credential stuffing uses credentials stolen from other breaches. Brute force exploits weak or reused passwords. In each case, the attack works because a valid credential exists and can be stolen or guessed.

Passkeys eliminate this attack class for every account that uses them. The private key never leaves the device, so server-side breaches at the application level don't expose authentication material.

For security teams managing credential risk at scale, this is a categorical improvement. Instead of continuously monitoring for weak passwords, enforcing rotation policies, and remediating compromised credentials, the threat model simplifies. If the private key stays on the device, the account can't be accessed without physical access to the device, plus the biometric or PIN that unlocks it.

Passkeys address authentication. The broader credential security picture for enterprise teams still includes:

Passkeys are the strongest available authentication layer for supported sites. A business password manager handles everything else, including the transition period when passwords and passkeys coexist across the employee's account portfolio.

Phishing is the attack that passkeys most directly neutralize, and it's the attack that enterprise security teams spend the most time and money defending against.

The conventional phishing defense stack (e.g. email filtering, URL analysis, employee training, real-time phishing detection) reduces the probability that a phishing attack succeeds. None of these layers eliminates the risk because they all depend on detection or human judgment.

Passkeys change the architecture of the defense. Even if every other layer fails (e.g. the email gets through, the employee clicks the link, the fake site loads), the passkey still doesn't authenticate. The private key won't respond to a challenge from a domain it wasn't registered with. The attack fails at the authentication layer regardless of how convincing the phishing attempt was.

This doesn't mean phishing defense infrastructure becomes unnecessary. Phishing attempts can still install malware or serve as the first stage of a more complex attack. But for credential theft specifically, passkeys provide a technical guarantee that no amount of training or detection tooling can match.

Dashlane's enterprise platform combines passkey management with real-time phishing detection. Dashlane analyzes pages at the moment of a credential request and alerts employees when a site looks suspicious, adding a detection layer on top of the structural protection passkeys provide.

One of the most persistent enterprise credential risks is credentials stored in browser password managers rather than a corporate vault. Browser-saved credentials are outside IT visibility, not subject to corporate password policies, and potentially synced across personal and work devices through the employee's personal browser account.

Passkeys address part of this structurally. A passkey-enabled account has no password to save in a browser. There's nothing to capture, sync, or expose through the browser's credential store.

For accounts that still use passwords during the transition period, Dashlane's browser-based credential protection gives IT teams visibility into credentials employees are using outside the managed vault, enabling them to identify at-risk browser-saved credentials and bring them into managed storage.

Combined with passkey rollout for supported sites, this gives security teams a path to systematically eliminating unmanaged credentials from the employee's authentication footprint.

Dashlane supports passkey creation, storage, and authentication across supported sites. For enterprise deployments:

Most enterprise environments will run passwords and passkeys in parallel for a significant period. Not every vendor supports passkeys. Not every legacy system can be migrated.

Dashlane is designed for this coexistence. Employees manage passwords and passkeys in the same vault, under the same admin controls. As more sites adopt passkey support, employees can migrate account by account. The admin console surfaces which accounts still rely on passwords, which have migrated to passkeys, and which passwords are at risk in the interim.

For new hires in a Dashlane-enabled organization:

Dashlane can be deployed company-wide in a single day and requires no change to existing network infrastructure.

The traditional enterprise credential security workflow is reactive: A credential is stolen or phished, a breach occurs or is narrowly avoided, and the security team resets the affected credentials, then closes the incident. The cycle repeats.

Passkeys break this cycle at the prevention layer. There's no credential to steal, which means there is no reactive response required for the attack class they eliminate.

The Dark Web Monitoring, credential health dashboards, and admin console visibility that Dashlane provides remain valuable during the transition period and for accounts that have not yet migrated. But for every account that moves to passkey authentication, the reactive workload associated with that account effectively drops to zero.

Yes, Dashlane makes it simple for users to log in to a website account with passkeys and seamlessly works across devices and platforms, including iOS and Android, without the friction of traditional passwords.

Dashlane also makes the transition from logging in to websites and apps with passwords to going passwordless easy. Once a passkey is created for a website or app, whenever the user wants to log in to the website, Dashlane will identify the passkey created for that specific website and log in automatically.

You can create a passkey for any site or app that supports them:

The passkey is created and stored. On your next login, you'll be prompted to use the passkey instead of your password.

For enterprise rollout, Dashlane admins can enable passkey storage organization-wide through the admin console and configure SSO to ensure employees are enrolled before their first login.

Passkeys are significantly more secure. A password is a shared secret that exists on both the user's side and the server's side and can be stolen from either. A passkey uses public-key cryptography: the private key never leaves the user's device, the server only stores a public key, and authentication is phishing-resistant by design. For enterprises, this eliminates the credential theft and phishing attack classes that drive the majority of breach incidents.

Passkeys are cryptographically bound to the specific domain they were created for. When an employee is directed to a fake site, even one identical to the real thing, the passkey will not authenticate. It only responds to a challenge from the exact registered domain. This protection is structural and does not depend on the employee noticing anything suspicious.

Phishing, credential stuffing, and password reuse remain the leading threats. Each relies on a reusable credential that can be stolen or guessed. Passkey adoption directly addresses all three: there is no password to phish, no credential to stuff from other breaches, and no shared secret that can be reused across sites.

The most direct approach is eliminating credentials where possible through passkey adoption, combined with a business password manager that provides strong unique passwords and dark web monitoring for accounts that cannot yet migrate. Passkeys remove the attack surface for authentication-based breaches; the password manager handles the credential risk that remains during the transition period.

A business password manager with admin console controls lets security teams set and monitor password policy standards without requiring employees to manage complex credentials manually. As passkey support expands, the policy burden decreases further, as there is no password policy to enforce for accounts protected by passkeys. Dashlane supports both, with admin visibility into which accounts use passkeys, which use managed passwords, and which passwords are at risk.

With Dashlane, day-one credential access is handled through the admin console before the employee's first day. The employee logs in through SSO, receives access to provisioned shared team credentials, and can immediately begin creating passkeys for supported accounts. No onboarding email thread, no password on a sticky note.

Browser-based credential protection provides visibility into and control over credentials employees store or use in their browsers outside of a managed vault. Dashlane's browser-based protection detects credentials in use outside the vault and surfaces them in the admin console so IT teams can bring them into managed storage or migrate them to passkeys, closing the visibility gap for credentials stored in Chrome, Edge, or other browsers under personal accounts.

Passkey adoption is the highest-leverage reduction available: every account that migrates to passkeys removes the phishing monitoring, rotation management, and breach response workload associated with that credential. For remaining password-based accounts, Dashlane's automated dark web monitoring, credential health dashboards, and SIEM integrations reduce the manual overhead of detection and remediation.