6 ms·

I very happily pay $10/year for Bitwarden. It is in my opinion superior to Lastpass, and I don't have the doubts of the corporate governance.

by blunte 6y ago

Maxburn 6y ago
Good to hear, I want to make the jump myself some day. At the moment I have a personal (paid) LastPass merged with my companies enterprise Lastpass and for sanity sake I get both in one UI with Youbikey support.
JumpCrisscross 6y ago
How does it compare with 1Password?
- neogodless 6y ago
  It's probably tough to find a thorough review where someone put basically all their passwords in different password management tools and lived with them for long enough to compare them. Then again, people have undertaken more arduous tasks before. For a while, I had the horrible practice of using the same username and very simple password everywhere. Eventually my "one true password" became slightly more complex, but I still had some bad habits. I eventually started letting Chrome save all my passwords except for, of course, my Google one. I switched to LastPass (free) for a while. (My memory of this is a bit fuzzy.) At some point I wanted to switch to something less, eh... corporate? So I got BitWarden. I really like the password generator, and use it exclusively now. (There was a web site I used to use for this, but of course this is much more convenient.) It was a bit rocky in the earlier days. Integration with the browser on Android could sometimes be a little shaky. It's still not perfect, but I don't have good comparisons there. I use Firefox on Android, Windows and Linux. It works really well on the desktop and mostly really well on Android, though with the browser it's unreliable if you rely on the Android app, so I install the Firefox Add-On for BitWarden, and that works reliably. My spouse set up her own account, and we share some of our important passwords via a free organization. This is a great feature and gives us both some peace of mind if we were ever required to get into each other's accounts. We also paid the $10/year so she could see reports on her passwords, and get rid of breached, insecure and duplicate passwords. She has adapted readily to using the password manager though she mostly just uses it on the computer, not on the phone. Overall we are very happy with it and I believe it's an excellent option. I cannot, however, compare it to 1Password.
- dsissitka 6y ago
  I think Bitwarden's UX is pretty poor. A few examples off the top of my head: - 1Password's TOTP support is much better. 1Password autofills the code and the password, Bitwarden only copies the code. 1Password will scan pages for QR codes. - They finally implemented encrypted backups but they half-assed it. From https://bitwarden.com/help/article/encrypted-export/ https://bitwarden.com/help/article/encrypted-export/: > Warning > Rotating your account’s encryption key will render an Encrypted Export impossible to decrypt. If you rotate your account encryption key, replace the old backup with one that uses the new encryption key. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868856 That said, I'm a Bitwarden user because I don't it's that bad and I don't think 1Password is worth 3.6 times as much.
- syntheticnature 6y ago
  I'm sure it's not a perfect comparison, but the Wirecutter does have a comparison on their password manager page: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-password-managers/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-password-man...
- digianarchist 6y ago
  All password managers have issues but as a user of 1Password I have a lot of gripes with the product: - Fails to fill out passwords around 2% of the time (Firefox account for example) - Sometimes I mash the "CMD+/" shortcut and nothing happens. It's very unstable. - Password generator is rigid. I have to edit the generated password about 90% of the time to add capital letters, numbers etc. I made a comment a while back on how we should be using HTML data attrs on the password field to hint how a password should look for password generators. Perfect password every time. - Can't remove a single item from the trash. It's empty all or nothing. - The shift to the web. Introduction of Keepass X extension whilst supporting the legacy. No feature parity between them. It's a bit of a mess to be honest.
  - kemayo 6y ago
    Re the generator, there's the passwordrules proposal: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3518 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3518 Some systems are already using it -- e.g. I know that Apple's generate-password helper reads it, and I believe that 1Password also does.
    - digianarchist 6y ago
      This is exactly what I was thinking. I knew the idea was too good to be mine.
  - tschwimmer 6y ago
    Man, that password attributes idea is very good. How does one go about proposing that to a standards committee or something?
- munchbunny 6y ago
  Unless you have strong opinions about either one's UX, the most significant difference that matters to most users between Bitwarden and 1Password is that Bitwarden has a free plan and 1Password doesn't. Sometimes the "free" price tag is the difference between being able to convince someone (or yourself) to use a password manager and not being able to convince them. About UX: between BitWarden and 1Password, I haven't seen any actually compelling discussion of the two password managers' UX that goes beyond just the typical way in which anonymous internet commenters enthusiastically assert preferences. They both do their jobs well enough the vast majority of the time. If you're genuinely in doubt about the UX, try Bitwarden for free and then try 1Password if you can't stand Bitwarden's UX.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  Bitwarden doesn't have a Safari extension anymore since Safari's extensions are their own format... Safari since said they'd allow Chrome's extension api but I haven't heard if Bitwarden will start developing the Safari extension again.
  - _coveredInBees 6y ago
    That's not true. If you install it from the Mac App store, you do then get the extension and can activate it within Safari. I just switched from LastPass to Bitwarden and by all accounts it seems better than LastPass (for my basic usage) and the Safari extension is working fine for me.
    - tunesmith 6y ago
      Thanks for this, by the way. There was a time where the author had announced that he wouldn't be supporting the Safari extension for Catalina and beyond, and I never realized it came back. My work life is better now ;)
ttiurani 6y ago
I did the same switch too a while back, Bitwarden has been really solid. Interesting thing: I just now remembered to delete my LastPass account, but the delete account flow breaks totally. Just end up in a modal without any content in it, both Firefox and Chrome. I'm wondering if they are even deliberately blocking deleting accounts for damage mitigation?
- jrowley 6y ago
  Honesty, I’ve been using LastPass for years and lately the chrome and Firefox extensions have been really buggy for me. Especially the chrome one. So I’m not sure it’s nefarious.
- neogodless 6y ago
  Huh, you reminded me that I used LastPass for a while and still had that account. I went and deleted any passwords still in there, and then had to do a web search and found https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php which worked for me. I just had to confirm 2 or 3 times and then it claims it deleted my account. This is in Firefox on Windows.
  - ttiurani 6y ago
    Good to know, thanks. I'm on OSX. Maybe there's something funky with my account data then. I emailed their support, let's see what happens.
neltnerb 6y ago
Same here, I'm happy to pay Bitwarden because they have a highly functional firefox addon. LastPass was garbage for like two years before I dropped them and that was itself years ago. It's been bad for a while. I definitely don't trust LastPass with my information, definitely don't trust that it will actually work in my browser, and if you export your lastpass vault bitwarden imported it perfectly. Take my advice at your own risk of course, I had both for a few months before I was confident it was safe to close my lastpass account.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tonymet 6y ago
Anyone have a thorough guide to migrating to bitwarden. I’ve tried and failed . I have notes , multiple logins per site , about 1000 credentials .
- metalliqaz 6y ago
  I just did it. Exported to CSV in lastpass and simply imported it in bitwarden. No problems. search bitwarden's help for a guide.
- mminer237 6y ago
  https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/ https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/
- djfdat 6y ago
  Hey! I had this issue too twice before when trying to switch. I tried again today, and it seems to have gone off flawlessly this time.... I think the issue before was w/ multi-line nodes and special characters. For reference, I imported the data by pasting in the lastpass export rather than using the .csv import. Good Luck!
- toyg 6y ago
  Import features alone should work, but if you’re absolutely desperate you can roll your own import process with bitwarden-cli (it’s on github and various package managers).
joekrill 6y ago
I've tried really, _really_ hard to like Bitwarden. But I ran into 2 huge issues, that ended up being blockers for me: 1. Sharing is super-confusing. I was trying to organize things for my mom, as well for my wife and I. And you have to create these "organizations". And they makes things really confusing for a variety of reasons. They are a different pricing/SKU. And the UX around them is not good. It's not clear where things are being created a lot of the time, and who may or may not have access. It just was a really bad experience. 2. It was outrageously slow for me. I use Enpass otherwise, and it comes up right away, and searching is relatively fast. But Bitwarden always had this delay. And it was a huge pain point because it wasn't clear immediately if there were just no results, or if I just had to wait a few seconds. And sometimes things would pop up unexpectedly. So I've continued using Enpass. It has _by far_ been my favorite password manager. It's no open source, but it uses Sqlite and SqlCipher under-the-hood, and I have full control over where it syncs my data to. Sharing is still a problem (mainly because of the architecture decisions - there is no "central server"), but everything else is so great that I'm fine making that tradeoff.
- arsome 6y ago
  > and it comes up right away I'd be a bit afraid of this. Secure key derivation takes time. Remember, you want to be able to defend against people with a few GPUs or the ability to configure a cheap FPGA at least and the ability to build custom ASICs or employ a GPU botnet at worst. Taking ~5 seconds to derive your key securely on your phone is a near inevitability.
  - Macha 6y ago
    Searching happens after the vault is already unlocked.
  - BrightOne 6y ago
    That's about searching, not unlocking the vault.
- ska 6y ago
  re:2 - interesting. I've used bitwarden regularly over the last year or so across windows and mac laptops and iOS devices. I can't recall ever having a notable delay. I wonder what this implies about configuration.
mesid 6y ago
I'm a bit concerned that Bitwarden might also follow a similar path later on, if we keep using the free version. Any thoughts on that?
- input_sh 6y ago
  Honestly I pay for the premium even though I use absolutely none of their premium features. At €10/year, it's the cheapest subscription I've ever encountered, and I don't want to store OTP at the same place as my passwords to avoid single point of failure for my most important stuff.
- noja 6y ago
  I pay for it without using the premium features.
- Macha 6y ago
  It's open source (both client and server) and there's a third party reimplementation of the server
- driverdan 6y ago
  Hopefully they do. Services as important as a password manager should be paid unless you host it yourself. Bitwarden is only $10 a year.

I very happily pay $10/year for Bitwarden. It is in my opinion superior to Lastpass, and I don't have the doubts of the corporate governance.

by blunte 6y ago

I very happily pay $10/year for Bitwarden. It is in my opinion superior to Lastpass, and I don't have the doubts of the corporate governance.

Maxburn 6y ago

Good to hear, I want to make the jump myself some day. At the moment I have a personal (paid) LastPass merged with my companies enterprise Lastpass and for sanity sake I get both in one UI with Youbikey support.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago

How does it compare with 1Password?

neogodless 6y ago
It's probably tough to find a thorough review where someone put basically all their passwords in different password management tools and lived with them for long enough to compare them. Then again, people have undertaken more arduous tasks before. For a while, I had the horrible practice of using the same username and very simple password everywhere. Eventually my "one true password" became slightly more complex, but I still had some bad habits. I eventually started letting Chrome save all my passwords except for, of course, my Google one. I switched to LastPass (free) for a while. (My memory of this is a bit fuzzy.) At some point I wanted to switch to something less, eh... corporate? So I got BitWarden. I really like the password generator, and use it exclusively now. (There was a web site I used to use for this, but of course this is much more convenient.) It was a bit rocky in the earlier days. Integration with the browser on Android could sometimes be a little shaky. It's still not perfect, but I don't have good comparisons there. I use Firefox on Android, Windows and Linux. It works really well on the desktop and mostly really well on Android, though with the browser it's unreliable if you rely on the Android app, so I install the Firefox Add-On for BitWarden, and that works reliably. My spouse set up her own account, and we share some of our important passwords via a free organization. This is a great feature and gives us both some peace of mind if we were ever required to get into each other's accounts. We also paid the $10/year so she could see reports on her passwords, and get rid of breached, insecure and duplicate passwords. She has adapted readily to using the password manager though she mostly just uses it on the computer, not on the phone. Overall we are very happy with it and I believe it's an excellent option. I cannot, however, compare it to 1Password.
dsissitka 6y ago
I think Bitwarden's UX is pretty poor. A few examples off the top of my head: - 1Password's TOTP support is much better. 1Password autofills the code and the password, Bitwarden only copies the code. 1Password will scan pages for QR codes. - They finally implemented encrypted backups but they half-assed it. From https://bitwarden.com/help/article/encrypted-export/ https://bitwarden.com/help/article/encrypted-export/: > Warning > Rotating your account’s encryption key will render an Encrypted Export impossible to decrypt. If you rotate your account encryption key, replace the old backup with one that uses the new encryption key. - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868856 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25868856 That said, I'm a Bitwarden user because I don't it's that bad and I don't think 1Password is worth 3.6 times as much.
syntheticnature 6y ago
I'm sure it's not a perfect comparison, but the Wirecutter does have a comparison on their password manager page: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-password-managers/ https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-password-man...
digianarchist 6y ago
All password managers have issues but as a user of 1Password I have a lot of gripes with the product: - Fails to fill out passwords around 2% of the time (Firefox account for example) - Sometimes I mash the "CMD+/" shortcut and nothing happens. It's very unstable. - Password generator is rigid. I have to edit the generated password about 90% of the time to add capital letters, numbers etc. I made a comment a while back on how we should be using HTML data attrs on the password field to hint how a password should look for password generators. Perfect password every time. - Can't remove a single item from the trash. It's empty all or nothing. - The shift to the web. Introduction of Keepass X extension whilst supporting the legacy. No feature parity between them. It's a bit of a mess to be honest.
- kemayo 6y ago
  Re the generator, there's the passwordrules proposal: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3518 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/3518 Some systems are already using it -- e.g. I know that Apple's generate-password helper reads it, and I believe that 1Password also does.
  - digianarchist 6y ago
    This is exactly what I was thinking. I knew the idea was too good to be mine.
- tschwimmer 6y ago
  Man, that password attributes idea is very good. How does one go about proposing that to a standards committee or something?
munchbunny 6y ago
Unless you have strong opinions about either one's UX, the most significant difference that matters to most users between Bitwarden and 1Password is that Bitwarden has a free plan and 1Password doesn't. Sometimes the "free" price tag is the difference between being able to convince someone (or yourself) to use a password manager and not being able to convince them. About UX: between BitWarden and 1Password, I haven't seen any actually compelling discussion of the two password managers' UX that goes beyond just the typical way in which anonymous internet commenters enthusiastically assert preferences. They both do their jobs well enough the vast majority of the time. If you're genuinely in doubt about the UX, try Bitwarden for free and then try 1Password if you can't stand Bitwarden's UX.
tunesmith 6y ago
Bitwarden doesn't have a Safari extension anymore since Safari's extensions are their own format... Safari since said they'd allow Chrome's extension api but I haven't heard if Bitwarden will start developing the Safari extension again.
- _coveredInBees 6y ago
  That's not true. If you install it from the Mac App store, you do then get the extension and can activate it within Safari. I just switched from LastPass to Bitwarden and by all accounts it seems better than LastPass (for my basic usage) and the Safari extension is working fine for me.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    Thanks for this, by the way. There was a time where the author had announced that he wouldn't be supporting the Safari extension for Catalina and beyond, and I never realized it came back. My work life is better now ;)

ttiurani 6y ago

I did the same switch too a while back, Bitwarden has been really solid. Interesting thing: I just now remembered to delete my LastPass account, but the delete account flow breaks totally. Just end up in a modal without any content in it, both Firefox and Chrome. I'm wondering if they are even deliberately blocking deleting accounts for damage mitigation?

jrowley 6y ago
Honesty, I’ve been using LastPass for years and lately the chrome and Firefox extensions have been really buggy for me. Especially the chrome one. So I’m not sure it’s nefarious.
neogodless 6y ago
Huh, you reminded me that I used LastPass for a while and still had that account. I went and deleted any passwords still in there, and then had to do a web search and found https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php https://lastpass.com/delete_account.php which worked for me. I just had to confirm 2 or 3 times and then it claims it deleted my account. This is in Firefox on Windows.
- ttiurani 6y ago
  Good to know, thanks. I'm on OSX. Maybe there's something funky with my account data then. I emailed their support, let's see what happens.

neltnerb 6y ago

Same here, I'm happy to pay Bitwarden because they have a highly functional firefox addon. LastPass was garbage for like two years before I dropped them and that was itself years ago. It's been bad for a while. I definitely don't trust LastPass with my information, definitely don't trust that it will actually work in my browser, and if you export your lastpass vault bitwarden imported it perfectly. Take my advice at your own risk of course, I had both for a few months before I was confident it was safe to close my lastpass account.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tonymet 6y ago

Anyone have a thorough guide to migrating to bitwarden. I’ve tried and failed . I have notes , multiple logins per site , about 1000 credentials .

metalliqaz 6y ago
I just did it. Exported to CSV in lastpass and simply imported it in bitwarden. No problems. search bitwarden's help for a guide.
mminer237 6y ago
https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/ https://bitwarden.com/help/article/import-from-lastpass/
djfdat 6y ago
Hey! I had this issue too twice before when trying to switch. I tried again today, and it seems to have gone off flawlessly this time.... I think the issue before was w/ multi-line nodes and special characters. For reference, I imported the data by pasting in the lastpass export rather than using the .csv import. Good Luck!
toyg 6y ago
Import features alone should work, but if you’re absolutely desperate you can roll your own import process with bitwarden-cli (it’s on github and various package managers).

joekrill 6y ago

I've tried really, _really_ hard to like Bitwarden. But I ran into 2 huge issues, that ended up being blockers for me: 1. Sharing is super-confusing. I was trying to organize things for my mom, as well for my wife and I. And you have to create these "organizations". And they makes things really confusing for a variety of reasons. They are a different pricing/SKU. And the UX around them is not good. It's not clear where things are being created a lot of the time, and who may or may not have access. It just was a really bad experience. 2. It was outrageously slow for me. I use Enpass otherwise, and it comes up right away, and searching is relatively fast. But Bitwarden always had this delay. And it was a huge pain point because it wasn't clear immediately if there were just no results, or if I just had to wait a few seconds. And sometimes things would pop up unexpectedly. So I've continued using Enpass. It has _by far_ been my favorite password manager. It's no open source, but it uses Sqlite and SqlCipher under-the-hood, and I have full control over where it syncs my data to. Sharing is still a problem (mainly because of the architecture decisions - there is no "central server"), but everything else is so great that I'm fine making that tradeoff.

arsome 6y ago
> and it comes up right away I'd be a bit afraid of this. Secure key derivation takes time. Remember, you want to be able to defend against people with a few GPUs or the ability to configure a cheap FPGA at least and the ability to build custom ASICs or employ a GPU botnet at worst. Taking ~5 seconds to derive your key securely on your phone is a near inevitability.
- Macha 6y ago
  Searching happens after the vault is already unlocked.
- BrightOne 6y ago
  That's about searching, not unlocking the vault.
ska 6y ago
re:2 - interesting. I've used bitwarden regularly over the last year or so across windows and mac laptops and iOS devices. I can't recall ever having a notable delay. I wonder what this implies about configuration.

mesid 6y ago

I'm a bit concerned that Bitwarden might also follow a similar path later on, if we keep using the free version. Any thoughts on that?

input_sh 6y ago
Honestly I pay for the premium even though I use absolutely none of their premium features. At €10/year, it's the cheapest subscription I've ever encountered, and I don't want to store OTP at the same place as my passwords to avoid single point of failure for my most important stuff.
noja 6y ago
I pay for it without using the premium features.
Macha 6y ago
It's open source (both client and server) and there's a third party reimplementation of the server
driverdan 6y ago
Hopefully they do. Services as important as a password manager should be paid unless you host it yourself. Bitwarden is only $10 a year.