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Love Bitwarden, I personally onboarded dozen … but they must heavily invest in UI/UX and fix their apps (+ extensions) It’s not easy and intuitive for non-techi

Love Bitwarden, I personally onboarded dozen … but they must heavily invest in UI/UX and fix their apps (+ extensions) It’s not easy and intuitive for non-techies.

skrebbel 5y ago
I just switched to it from LastPass which, well, has even worse UX in my opinion. It's an extremely low bar to clear and I agree Bitwarden is quirky too, but for me it's still firmly been an upgrade. The only thing I miss is an "add to bitwarden?" dialog when I sign up somewhere. Their docs say it exists but I've never managed to get it to appear :-)
- NoboruWataya 5y ago
  > The only thing I miss is an "add to bitwarden?" dialog when I sign up somewhere. Their docs say it exists but I've never managed to get it to appear :-) I have seen this occasionally but it is fairly random and unreliable. And then sometimes it pops up for stuff I clearly don't want to save, like OTP.
  - eitland 5y ago
    Works most of the time on my Firefox on Windows and Linux I think.
- test1235 5y ago
  I just switched as well, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to do so. Like you said, it definitely feels nicer to use than lastpass.
- jodator 5y ago
  Totally agree. LastPass has worse UX IMO. With bitwarden I never missed the "add to bitwarden" dialog. As a paying user. I love that they offer Android app. It has its moments like the integration with keyboard does not always work, but I can use it from the shot it's drawer. If you generate passwords (or passphrases!) they are stores 8n history, so there's always a backup :)
  - technothrasher 5y ago
    > It has its moments like the integration with keyboard does not always work I've found keyboard integration really hit or miss on Android. On iOS it does quite a bit better.
- jiveturkey 5y ago
  Detecting a new login is not one of BW's strengths. It's never detected one for me. But you can train yourself to "create new login" via the browser extension, _instead of_ expecting the extension to pick it up. This does work better for single-page creation flows. (Instead of using the web page to create a user/pass, enter it into the extension.) It's pretty business unfriendly IMO, as most users simply cannot pick up a new, rarely used flow. I switched away from 1P after they dropped the perpetual license option. They failed me by taking VC money and then chasing growth at users' expense. Not that the other PWM vendors aren't worse -- some of them much worse.
- j1elo 5y ago
  It has asked me lots of times, but just yesterday it didn't for a new account in none less than google.com. Its code to detect when to ask must be... weak, to say the least. So I went on to add a new entry manually. Oh my, the UX to do so is quite bad. There is such low hanging fruit here for improvement, like copying the "UI on a new tab" style that LastPass does... meanwhile Bitwarden insists on doing everything on a stateless pop-up window [0]. LastPass UI might be worse for some (that's debatable), but the UX of opening it on a new tab is simply superior, just for the fact of it being stateful. I don't get why Bitwarden doesn't adopt it. I'm happily paying for Bitwarden to support its development, but would never consider suggesting it to my grandpa or to serious business. The flow and experience is just far away from what is expected; a very good software, but with still too many rough edges. [0]: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/persist-bitwarden-ui-and-maintain-entered-data-previously-unsaved-changes-are-lost-when-move-to-another-item/5470 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/persist-bitwarden-ui-and-m...
  - mkdirp 5y ago
    Bitwarden has quite a few of these sad quirks. It doesn't work very well in Firefox's private browsing. Only thing you can do is autofill by right clicking a text field and autofill from there, or the keyboard shortcut. But you cannot unlock it in private browsing. Stateless UI is annoying at best. There's a few times where this has slipped my mind, so I paste a generated password in a new item, and then go to copy the email, and the new item is gone. If I didn't use a clipboard manager, this would have meant losing the generated password. The browser addon is completely separate from the desktop app. It's annoying as it means you have unlock them separately when you need them. I used to be a 1Password customer, and I absolutely adored the seamless experience of the browser extension utilising the desktop app when it's installed.
    - neppo 5y ago
      Firefox extension need permission to work in private browsing [1], after I gave permission it worked for me. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-browsing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-brow...
- lordnacho 5y ago
  Is there a simple way to make this transition from LastPass to BW?
  - wruza 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure my transition was simply googling how to export/import on both sides.
  - zalebz 5y ago
    I wouldn't say it was extremely simple but I managed to move our company from LastPass to Bitwarden a few months ago. There is definitely an export & import process available. I did have to do some minor CSV cleanup on what LP generated though. Additionally, I purged and repeated the import process a few times once I familiarized myself with how "Collections" and company-wide sharing works in BW. But in the end it was certainly worth it despite the effort.
  - goldcd 5y ago
    Yes - you can dump out your passwords from lastpass as a CSV and slurp them straight into Bitwarden. I switched from Lastpass when they started demanding more money - and whilst not perfect, am very happy with Bitwarden. Functionality is all there, just a bit clunky in places - but you get used to it.
  - hestefisk 5y ago
    There is an import tool in BW to ingest LP CSV extracts. It works quite well.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- jillesvangurp 5y ago
  That's because web developers are not great at sticking to conventions and standards for this stuff. Product owners and UX designers seem to ignore aligning their signup and signin UX with obvious requirements for enabling people to use a password manager. If they'd make this a hard requirement, it would happen. It's not that hard even; we did that for our login form. Works great with Bitwarden. And on mobile too. But you have to know how to name things so that password managers can do their magic. Frequent mistakes caused by essentially ignorance on this front: - Splitting the email and password form across two screens. That somehow became fashionable. There are ways to do this and not break password managers. But why do this at all? Having to click the fill button twice is ugly and should be flagged as a bug if you ever see that. There's no need for that regardless of the UX. - Having a login form but then not using field names like "email" and "password" that a password manager would recognize as such. There are a few more things you need to think about: https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2018-01-13-making-password-managers-play-ball-with-your-login-form https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2018-01-13-making-password-m.... Just do it right. - Not having password managers on the radar as a thing that the UX MUST support (not optional). Non technical people like designers and product owners tend to be a bit sloppy with their own security and they won't necessarily even be aware this is a thing that they need to worry about. So, they don't notice when it doesn't work. They probably don't even use a password manager themselves. And they certainly won't test it. - Developers not caring enough to do anything about this unprompted; by e.g. just raising the topic with their PMs or just implementing things correctly to begin with. I've actually brought up this topic and usually this is not controversial at all and simple to resolve.
  - skrebbel 5y ago
    FWIW I'm a developer, and I think password managers are awful to code against. They don't document their expectations (to the best of my knowledge), it's hard to test because you need multiple password managers installed, plus the browser's built-in ones. I mean, even the link you shared feels more like alchemy than engineering (through no fault of the author, I might add): "do it kinda sorta like this and then hopefully it'll work most of the time!" And it's hard to figure out why it doesn't work when it doesn't. The feedback cycle is nonexistent.
  - 5y ago
kharann 5y ago
I switched to 1Password simply because I liked the browser extension, and the Mobile app better. I had issues with autocomplete with bitwarden on phone
creshal 5y ago
+1; it's sad that Bitwarden still has worse UX than the internal tool we hacked together in a month 8 years ago.
wruza 5y ago
I'm a techie and it's not intuitive for me either. Honestly, their UI is just bad, despite being my choice of a password manager. It's not a matter of habit, I stumble upon it every damn time I have to open its extension window.
- fraudsyndrome 5y ago
  I've had this issue before. If you're on Firefox, open up the history sidebar with ctrl + h,then in the top left corner click on the word History to open the dropdown and select Bitwarden. You'll be able to have it "open" without clicking the extension popup.
  - wruza 5y ago
    No, I have no trouble opening it (sorry that I wasn't clear enough). I meant that my entire UX in that window is full of mistakes and confusion. To name a few, clicking on an item shows "unable to autofill" message as if I wanted to autofill my gmail password on other sites and not open a card. Lock button is hidden obscured in a settings menu. Password length slider is too sensitive in a generator tab. And the window is always not high enough to include most important options. It feels half-assed all over the place.
hestefisk 5y ago
Bitwarden is great, I use their paid subscription to manage access to everything. Syncs my passwords, notes and credit card information across my phone and Firefox on many devices. Only issue I have is the lack of native UI and lack of encrypted notes, which LastPass has.
- mynameismon 5y ago
  I think Bitwarden too has encrypted notes: https://bitwarden.com/help/article/managing-items/#notes https://bitwarden.com/help/article/managing-items/#notes
mynameismon 5y ago
They do have a visual refresh in the plans: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-roadmap/12865 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-roadmap/12865

Love Bitwarden, I personally onboarded dozen … but they must heavily invest in UI/UX and fix their apps (+ extensions) It’s not easy and intuitive for non-techies.

skrebbel 5y ago

I just switched to it from LastPass which, well, has even worse UX in my opinion. It's an extremely low bar to clear and I agree Bitwarden is quirky too, but for me it's still firmly been an upgrade. The only thing I miss is an "add to bitwarden?" dialog when I sign up somewhere. Their docs say it exists but I've never managed to get it to appear :-)

NoboruWataya 5y ago
> The only thing I miss is an "add to bitwarden?" dialog when I sign up somewhere. Their docs say it exists but I've never managed to get it to appear :-) I have seen this occasionally but it is fairly random and unreliable. And then sometimes it pops up for stuff I clearly don't want to save, like OTP.
- eitland 5y ago
  Works most of the time on my Firefox on Windows and Linux I think.
test1235 5y ago
I just switched as well, and I was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to do so. Like you said, it definitely feels nicer to use than lastpass.
jodator 5y ago
Totally agree. LastPass has worse UX IMO. With bitwarden I never missed the "add to bitwarden" dialog. As a paying user. I love that they offer Android app. It has its moments like the integration with keyboard does not always work, but I can use it from the shot it's drawer. If you generate passwords (or passphrases!) they are stores 8n history, so there's always a backup :)
- technothrasher 5y ago
  > It has its moments like the integration with keyboard does not always work I've found keyboard integration really hit or miss on Android. On iOS it does quite a bit better.
jiveturkey 5y ago
Detecting a new login is not one of BW's strengths. It's never detected one for me. But you can train yourself to "create new login" via the browser extension, _instead of_ expecting the extension to pick it up. This does work better for single-page creation flows. (Instead of using the web page to create a user/pass, enter it into the extension.) It's pretty business unfriendly IMO, as most users simply cannot pick up a new, rarely used flow. I switched away from 1P after they dropped the perpetual license option. They failed me by taking VC money and then chasing growth at users' expense. Not that the other PWM vendors aren't worse -- some of them much worse.
j1elo 5y ago
It has asked me lots of times, but just yesterday it didn't for a new account in none less than google.com. Its code to detect when to ask must be... weak, to say the least. So I went on to add a new entry manually. Oh my, the UX to do so is quite bad. There is such low hanging fruit here for improvement, like copying the "UI on a new tab" style that LastPass does... meanwhile Bitwarden insists on doing everything on a stateless pop-up window [0]. LastPass UI might be worse for some (that's debatable), but the UX of opening it on a new tab is simply superior, just for the fact of it being stateful. I don't get why Bitwarden doesn't adopt it. I'm happily paying for Bitwarden to support its development, but would never consider suggesting it to my grandpa or to serious business. The flow and experience is just far away from what is expected; a very good software, but with still too many rough edges. [0]: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/persist-bitwarden-ui-and-maintain-entered-data-previously-unsaved-changes-are-lost-when-move-to-another-item/5470 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/persist-bitwarden-ui-and-m...
- mkdirp 5y ago
  Bitwarden has quite a few of these sad quirks. It doesn't work very well in Firefox's private browsing. Only thing you can do is autofill by right clicking a text field and autofill from there, or the keyboard shortcut. But you cannot unlock it in private browsing. Stateless UI is annoying at best. There's a few times where this has slipped my mind, so I paste a generated password in a new item, and then go to copy the email, and the new item is gone. If I didn't use a clipboard manager, this would have meant losing the generated password. The browser addon is completely separate from the desktop app. It's annoying as it means you have unlock them separately when you need them. I used to be a 1Password customer, and I absolutely adored the seamless experience of the browser extension utilising the desktop app when it's installed.
  - neppo 5y ago
    Firefox extension need permission to work in private browsing [1], after I gave permission it worked for me. [1] https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-browsing https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/extensions-private-brow...
lordnacho 5y ago
Is there a simple way to make this transition from LastPass to BW?
- wruza 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure my transition was simply googling how to export/import on both sides.
- zalebz 5y ago
  I wouldn't say it was extremely simple but I managed to move our company from LastPass to Bitwarden a few months ago. There is definitely an export & import process available. I did have to do some minor CSV cleanup on what LP generated though. Additionally, I purged and repeated the import process a few times once I familiarized myself with how "Collections" and company-wide sharing works in BW. But in the end it was certainly worth it despite the effort.
- goldcd 5y ago
  Yes - you can dump out your passwords from lastpass as a CSV and slurp them straight into Bitwarden. I switched from Lastpass when they started demanding more money - and whilst not perfect, am very happy with Bitwarden. Functionality is all there, just a bit clunky in places - but you get used to it.
- hestefisk 5y ago
  There is an import tool in BW to ingest LP CSV extracts. It works quite well.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
jillesvangurp 5y ago
That's because web developers are not great at sticking to conventions and standards for this stuff. Product owners and UX designers seem to ignore aligning their signup and signin UX with obvious requirements for enabling people to use a password manager. If they'd make this a hard requirement, it would happen. It's not that hard even; we did that for our login form. Works great with Bitwarden. And on mobile too. But you have to know how to name things so that password managers can do their magic. Frequent mistakes caused by essentially ignorance on this front: - Splitting the email and password form across two screens. That somehow became fashionable. There are ways to do this and not break password managers. But why do this at all? Having to click the fill button twice is ugly and should be flagged as a bug if you ever see that. There's no need for that regardless of the UX. - Having a login form but then not using field names like "email" and "password" that a password manager would recognize as such. There are a few more things you need to think about: https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2018-01-13-making-password-managers-play-ball-with-your-login-form https://hiddedevries.nl/en/blog/2018-01-13-making-password-m.... Just do it right. - Not having password managers on the radar as a thing that the UX MUST support (not optional). Non technical people like designers and product owners tend to be a bit sloppy with their own security and they won't necessarily even be aware this is a thing that they need to worry about. So, they don't notice when it doesn't work. They probably don't even use a password manager themselves. And they certainly won't test it. - Developers not caring enough to do anything about this unprompted; by e.g. just raising the topic with their PMs or just implementing things correctly to begin with. I've actually brought up this topic and usually this is not controversial at all and simple to resolve.
- skrebbel 5y ago
  FWIW I'm a developer, and I think password managers are awful to code against. They don't document their expectations (to the best of my knowledge), it's hard to test because you need multiple password managers installed, plus the browser's built-in ones. I mean, even the link you shared feels more like alchemy than engineering (through no fault of the author, I might add): "do it kinda sorta like this and then hopefully it'll work most of the time!" And it's hard to figure out why it doesn't work when it doesn't. The feedback cycle is nonexistent.
- 5y ago

kharann 5y ago

I switched to 1Password simply because I liked the browser extension, and the Mobile app better. I had issues with autocomplete with bitwarden on phone

creshal 5y ago

+1; it's sad that Bitwarden still has worse UX than the internal tool we hacked together in a month 8 years ago.

wruza 5y ago

I'm a techie and it's not intuitive for me either. Honestly, their UI is just bad, despite being my choice of a password manager. It's not a matter of habit, I stumble upon it every damn time I have to open its extension window.

fraudsyndrome 5y ago
I've had this issue before. If you're on Firefox, open up the history sidebar with ctrl + h,then in the top left corner click on the word History to open the dropdown and select Bitwarden. You'll be able to have it "open" without clicking the extension popup.
- wruza 5y ago
  No, I have no trouble opening it (sorry that I wasn't clear enough). I meant that my entire UX in that window is full of mistakes and confusion. To name a few, clicking on an item shows "unable to autofill" message as if I wanted to autofill my gmail password on other sites and not open a card. Lock button is hidden obscured in a settings menu. Password length slider is too sensitive in a generator tab. And the window is always not high enough to include most important options. It feels half-assed all over the place.

hestefisk 5y ago

Bitwarden is great, I use their paid subscription to manage access to everything. Syncs my passwords, notes and credit card information across my phone and Firefox on many devices. Only issue I have is the lack of native UI and lack of encrypted notes, which LastPass has.

mynameismon 5y ago
I think Bitwarden too has encrypted notes: https://bitwarden.com/help/article/managing-items/#notes https://bitwarden.com/help/article/managing-items/#notes

mynameismon 5y ago

They do have a visual refresh in the plans: https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-roadmap/12865 https://community.bitwarden.com/t/bitwarden-roadmap/12865