What each tool is built for
A password manager solves a personal problem: too many logins to remember. It stores each user’s own credentials in an encrypted vault, generates strong unique passwords and autofills them in the browser. Business editions add shared folders and basic reporting, but the model remains user-centric — the person owns the credential and sees it whenever they use it.
PAM solves an organizational problem: accounts whose power demands control rather than convenience. It vaults credentials for shared and administrative accounts, but crucially it also governs how they are used — brokering RDP, SSH and database sessions through a gateway, requiring approval before sensitive access, injecting credentials so users never see them, rotating passwords automatically and recording sessions for audit.
Where a password manager falls short for privileged access
Put a domain admin password in a shared password-manager folder and every subscriber can read it, copy it and keep it after they leave the team — the tool logs that the entry was viewed, but not what was done with it. There is no approval step before use, no session recording on the target server, no automatic rotation after exposure, and no way to grant a contractor access for one afternoon that verifiably expires.
Auditors notice the same gaps. Frameworks that demand individual accountability for shared accounts, evidence of privileged activity and credential rotation cannot be satisfied by view logs alone. None of this makes password managers bad tools — they are excellent at their job. The gap appears only when a convenience tool is stretched into a control function it was never designed for.
Choosing, and combining, the two
The practical rule of thumb: password managers for what individual employees log into with their own accounts; PAM for anything shared, administrative or infrastructure-facing — domain and local admins, root, database superusers, network devices, service accounts and vendor access. Most organizations genuinely need both, because the two tools protect different tiers of the same credential landscape.
The categories also increasingly meet in the middle. Monofor’s mobile app, for example, includes a personal vault for individual credentials alongside the enterprise controls, while Monopam provides the privileged tier — encrypted vault with rotation and history, JIT approvals and recorded browser-based RDP and SSH sessions. For privileged access itself, PAM is the answer: the risk lies not in remembering the password, but in what the password can do.