Key Takeaways

  • A strong password has two important characteristics: length and entropy. A longer password is harder to crack, and randomness adds to its strength.
  • Trust is an important factor when using online password generators. Ensure they don't keep logs and use secure connections to protect your information.
  • While offline generators are the most secure option, there are reputable online password generators available that provide strong and unique passwords for your security.

These days, a strong password is essential on the web. Whether it's your email accounts, social media accounts, Amazon accounts, or otherwise, using your birthday or cat's name as a password is a bad idea.

However, creating the perfect password is tricky. Thankfully, you can use online password generators to help create strong and unique passwords for your accounts. We've looked at the best online strong random password generators—but first, can you trust an online password generator to begin with?

What Is a Strong Random Password?

A strong password has two core characteristics: length and entropy.

The length of the password affects how long it will take to crack. A long password takes longer to break, as there are more individual bits to find. A short password is easier because there are fewer. A long password on its own is strong. That is why some services use a passphrase instead of a password. All the extra characters add additional difficulty.

The second consideration is the randomness of the password, also known as entropy. The entropy describes the randomness of the password generation process and the resulting password. For instance, an eight-character password like:

            01234567
    

Is significantly weaker than an eight-character password like:

            58z@L#?T
    

The difference is due to the difficulty in cracking the individual characters in the correct order. The higher the entropy, the more random the password, and the harder it is to break. The more entropy you introduce (the more characters and variations), the more difficult it becomes.

Can You Trust an Online Password Generator?

There is another factor to consider with online password generators: trust.

Can you trust the password generator service with your password? That means ensuring the password generator does not keep logs and the website uses the proper security certifications to create a secure connection between it and your browser.

It isn't easy to determine if an online password provider does all these things correctly. In all honesty, you should use an offline password-generation tool because it is the most secure method. Sending such sensitive information across the information opens you up to all kinds of issues.

However, you should check out the following list of the seven best online password-generation tools for a strong random password if you are going to use an online tool.

1. Bitwarden Password Generator

bitwarden password online generator tool

Bitwarden's Password Generator is a great free password generator featuring some handy options. It tells you how strong your password is, as you'd expect, but also has a handy display informing you how long it might take to crack your password.

Along with options to use capital letters, numbers, characters, and so on, you can switch to a passphrase, a longer phrase you can use in place of a password. Bitwarden's passphrase generator has other options, including capitalizing, numbers, and word separators.

2. LastPass Password Generator Tool

lastpass online password generator tool

The LastPass Password Generator Tool is a password generation tool from a well-trusted source. LastPass is a password management application. You can use it to store passwords for the hundreds of online sites that require a login. (How do password managers work, anyway?) The desktop and online LastPass applications are great. But if you need a new password in a bind, their online tool is a handy alternative.

You can change the password generation options to create a long, complex password that uses a mixture of upper and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. It also has interesting options that tweak your password to become "Easy to Say" or "Easy to Write"—we advise avoiding those options for maximum security.

3. Dashlane Password Generator Tool

dashlane online password generator tool

From the password generator of one password manager straight to another. Dashlane is another excellent password management tool. For the good of the internet and its users, Dashlane offers their password generation tool for free.

Like LastPass, you can tweak the letters, digits, symbols, and length before creating a complex password. The password generation animation is a nice touch, too, changing between colors to show how strong your password is.

4. Browser-Integrated Password Generator

Mozilla Firefox introduced an integrated password generator in Firefox 69. When you attempt to create a new account, you can right-click the password field and select Use Generated Password. Google Chrome has a similar feature that you can access using the same method.

5. Perfect Passwords

perfect passwords online generator tool

Steve Gibson is a world-renowned programmer and security expert, and his online password creator has been running for over ten years.

Perfect Passwords uses a powerful password generation algorithm to deliver a high level of entropy. The site generates a new set of passwords each time you refresh the site. You have three options: a 64-character hexadecimal password (that's 0-9 and A-F), a 63-character ASCII password (that's almost every character, including symbols), and 63-character alpha-numeric password (that's a-z, A-Z, and 0-9).

Of these, the ASCII character string password is the most secure. The randomness of the character mix makes it difficult for anyone to crack this type of combination, especially at 63 characters in length.

6. Secure Password Generator Plus

secure password generator plus online example

The Secure Password Generator Plus is another extremely easy-to-use online password generator. Secure Password Generator Plus gives you extensive control over the character combination in your password. For instance, you can include symbols, numbers, and upper and lowercase letters. But you can exclude similar letters, such as o, O, and 0, or similar characters, such as [, {, and (.

The Plus version also ensures that your password will begin with a letter (often a password entry rule problem), won't repeat characters or symbols, and won't duplicate them, either.

7. NordPass Password Generator

nordpass online password generator example

The NordPass Password Generator is the free online password generator tool NordVPN's password management app. Similar to the other apps on this list, it allows you to customize your character selections and generates the password immediately.

Use a Password Manager for Complex Passwords

Generating a password online is far from ideal for reasons covered previously. One of the most secure methods for generating a password is using a password manager.

A password manager works on your computer. Once installed, you use a single master password on each website rather than having to remember numerous difficult individual passwords. Having to remember a single complex password rather than 70 gives your brain a break, for one. But a password manager allows you to increase your overall online security as you only have to remember one string.

I would strongly suggest reading our guide to the best password managers for every occasion. Password management tools like KeePass, Bitwarden, and Dashlane all have integrated password generators. They're extremely secure and almost eliminate the security and privacy issues of generating a password using a website. You might also consider using a password vault.

Are Online Password Generators Safe?

Using a completely offline password generator is the best option, typically via specific software or a password manager. However, using a free online password generator isn't a terrible option. The online password generators on this list are all secure and provide a strong and unique password each time, which is great for your security.