I have been using Bitwarden for around 7~ years. Subscription for this long too, at 10USD p/year. I will be switching due to lack of transparency, and would love to hear others thoughts on this.
The linked article goes into further detail, but here is a small summary that very much concern me / are sus:
- that 10USD per year has gone up quietly . I just checked and I have no email telling me it’s increased. It renews in like 2 months, so this is good timing for me
- Originally Bitwarden had values as apart of the acronym “GRIT”. Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency. They have changed the last two words to “Innovation, Trust”
- There is now a new CEO, this was not announced and the only reason people outside of Bitwarden know is that someone saw this change on LinkedIn
- The free tier momentarily disappeared from their product page for about a month (april14-may14). People were likely still able to make free accounts during this period. Bitwarden says it was a marketing mistake
The price hike is one thing, but for me the acronym change is most concerning, which is why I will be looking at another password manger (probably keepassxc)
Totally agree. I’ve been a multi-year paying customer of bitwarden for the family, always happy with their service, especially when compared with the 1pass I use at work. But that CEO avatar picture alone gives me enough bad vibes, let alone his credentials, the acronym change, so yea I too reckon I’ve been putting off the switch long enough now.
I came from keepass, can’t go back there, even if I now have syncthing set up everywhere. Also, how would that work for the family, you force everyone to set up their own file and hope they manage it well? Highly doubtful.
I saw aliasvault pop up too, this last week. Haven’t looked into it yet, and although a great contender, it’s probably too young to seriously consider.
These are the alternatives according to selfh.st/apps :
Anyone here had some bad experiences with any of these?
vaultwarden has an uncertain future with the new bitwarden management – we would need bitwarden apps that use vaultwarden apis rather than bitwarden. I suppose if bitwarden breaks api compatibility that might happen.
KeepPassXC is what I was using before – it’s like keepass. It has browser integration, but syncing is problematic, and it doesn’t have biometric unlock.
I should think so too. I’d expect a big race to start, like with the kbin/lemmy apps after the reddit api fiasco.
I’m using boost for lemmy btw. It was a great reddit client back in the day, and when the api change was announced they switched to lemmy pretty quickly.
vaultwarden allows you to keep using the bitwarden client i think, just with your own server. should be the most seamless for the family.
Good point, that is a big factor indeed, ease of migration. Vaultwarden should get bonus points for this, so I’ll be sure to add it to the list of alternatives to try out. Thanks!
If bitwarden went completely rotten could they cease and desist vault warden?
They could, but probably it’s more likely they would just introduce changes that break compatibility a little at a time.
I’d asked a similar question. Basically, the response I got was: if the something goes sideways, the community can hard fork all their clients and use vaultwarden as a server (their current licenses would allow that).
Another suggestion was that you can always use the web ui bundled with vaultwarden directly (heh, I’ve been using vaultwarden for years and I don’t think I ever used the web ui - just the applications, CLI, browser extension).
still in beta (stable) but im using aliasvault for a couple of months now and i don’t have any issues
any idea when they will release a major version?
That does inspire confidence, so I’ll add it to the list!
Switched from keepassxc to vaultwarden a while ago (mostly due to the horrible syncing experience, and to use the same password manager as my family so I could help out better).
It’s a selfhosted and open source version of the Bitwarden server, you’ll use the (open source) Bitwarden clients. So its all features of Bitwarden plus full transparency
oh so if Bitwarden eventually locks down their app, the folks over at vaultwarden could just spin up their own f-droid app?
Password Pusher is no password manager, only for securely sharing information.
Running on Vaultwarden, though that still depends on the official BitWarden Clients. Works great though, and can be selfhosted on pretty small machines. Very satisfied with it.
Passbolt was not on my radar when I was in the market for a new password manager, but would be a serious consideration today.
If considering a self hosted alternative, remember that backups are your responsibility then as well.
Good point about the backups. I snapshot the important VMs daily on Proxmox, I reckon that should suffice for this, right?
It’s not a backup if it’s stored in the same place as the original
It’s stored on the network, but yea, still same building.