By Nick Peers

How safe are you online? These days the biggest prize for any hacker or thief is access to your online accounts --financial or otherwise, and with many people choosing to protect all their online details with a single, easily crackable password, there's never been a better time to practice safe browsing.

The problem with staying safe is that ideally you should use complicated, unique passwords for every single account you have. That's brilliant in theory, but in practice it's almost impossible to remember that "fjdSkjAh43q2" is the password for your online bank while "rh13um93ba" protects your Paypal account. The answer lies in utilizing a password manager like one of the five we've plucked out from a lineup for this quick-fire comparison.

A decent password manager basically acts as an intermediary for all your online transactions. Use it to record all of your online details, which are subsequently protected by a master password, and it'll automatically fill in any login boxes for you, speeding up the logon process, too. The end result is that you can protect all your online accounts with separate passwords so if one is hacked the others remain closed off.

Better still, all good password managers, including every single application featured here, can generate random passwords for you, ensuring your accounts are protected to their maximum with a password you couldn't possibly make up, never mind remember.

Password managers can, depending on the application, also be used to securely store other information, too: contact details for filling in forms, or even your credit card details. Of course, with all of this sensitive information being kept in one place, you'll want to know that this data, along with the master password, is encrypted for greater security.

Other considerations include convenience: are you happy for your data to be stored in the cloud so you can access it anywhere, or would you prefer it was all kept on a secure file on your hard drive, with the downside being you can't easily sync it with other computers? And what platforms do you need to access your passwords on? Many password managers now include smartphone support, so your logon details are accessible from whatever device you use.

With all this in mind, we've taken five password managers and put them through their paces to see what they offer. The results are close, meaning different tools will suit different needs. This is what we discovered.

Efficient Password Manager

At the bottom end of the market is