After being fed up with AgileBits' (1P's owner) shenanigans (hiding critical threads on their user forum, ignoring customer voices wilfully, being generally dismissive of criticism), I decided to give Bitwarden a try.
I used it in conjunction with Vaultwarden for a year with the idea that I'd evaluate it as a family-wide replacement for 1P.
In the end I went back to 1P.
1P does some things amazingly well. Here's the shortlist:
- It loads quickly. This wasn't the reason I went back to 1P, but it loads an order of magnitude more quickly than any of Bitwarden's clients: Windows, Linux, iOS, Mac. Bitwarden is slow, slow, slow. I was willing to put up with it for freedom. I wanted Electron 1P to be awful. It's not. Electron Bitwarden kinda is...
- The (I can't believe I'm saying this) killer feature: being able to sort passwords by date (or well - being able to sort at all). If you use a password manager long enough, you'll have a lot of passwords. Sometimes you need to find one manually. Bitwarden made this far more difficult than it needs to be. There's no way to sort the passwords. You have to use the (lackluster) search.
- 1P can put your most recent passwords, secrets and make them easily accessible by default. Yep, more sorting issues. This is particularly helpful in my work related to software and infra development. There are often a lot of secrets, especially during spikes. It's nice to not have to hunt for them too much.
- Shared vaults are better with 1P. Easy to move secrets, easy to de-dupe. Etc. etc.
Everything about Bitwarden is fine for a single, technical user, but it's not for sharing secrets with non-technical family members at any scale. It's just too clumsy with too many sharp edges.
I really, really wanted to leave 1P behind. But I came back to it. And I don't regret it.
I never found the mobile apps to be slow (they're "semi-native", made in Xamarin, in the same way React Native is "semi-native"). The Android integration is not great (it misses password fields sometimes) but this is because of the platform itself, not the current app architecture.
The Electron app (for desktop) and browser extensions are indeed slower than they could be, and native mobile apps won't fix that.
I’ve switched from 1P to Strongbox which is using a Keepass2-compatible database in the background. But Strongbox integrates into the Apple AutoFill API so it works (and mostly feels) like the native Apple Keychain thing. Only for Chrome or Firefox you’ll need a plugin and then it works similar to Bitwarden. But I don’t use these.
> Everything about Bitwarden is fine for a single, technical user, but it's not for sharing secrets with non-technical family members at any scale. It's just too clumsy with too many sharp edges.
I don't know. I guess it depends on what you compare it to. I've used Bitwarden in some pretty non-technical surroundings and it worked fine. Compared to a "single file" PW manager (like KeePass), I'd say it's still pretty easy to use within a team or group of "non-technical" users.
Granted, not as good as 1PW, but still a lot better than KeePass et al.
I am also firmly a "tags versus folders" person, since an AWS credential is both "aws" and "qa"
Also, I get a lot of mileage out of the Fastmail "masked email" integration with 1P
I also still run KeePassXC just for its GPG agent support, which 1P hasn't (and I suspect won't) supported. I think 1P is all-in on using SSH keys to sign commits, which yes, is one GPG use case, but come on
And yet they can’t do folders or nested tags, which makes it unusable for me. All those other features are useless when it can’t handle basic organization.
I used it in conjunction with Vaultwarden for a year with the idea that I'd evaluate it as a family-wide replacement for 1P.
In the end I went back to 1P.
1P does some things amazingly well. Here's the shortlist:
- It loads quickly. This wasn't the reason I went back to 1P, but it loads an order of magnitude more quickly than any of Bitwarden's clients: Windows, Linux, iOS, Mac. Bitwarden is slow, slow, slow. I was willing to put up with it for freedom. I wanted Electron 1P to be awful. It's not. Electron Bitwarden kinda is...
- The (I can't believe I'm saying this) killer feature: being able to sort passwords by date (or well - being able to sort at all). If you use a password manager long enough, you'll have a lot of passwords. Sometimes you need to find one manually. Bitwarden made this far more difficult than it needs to be. There's no way to sort the passwords. You have to use the (lackluster) search.
- 1P can put your most recent passwords, secrets and make them easily accessible by default. Yep, more sorting issues. This is particularly helpful in my work related to software and infra development. There are often a lot of secrets, especially during spikes. It's nice to not have to hunt for them too much.
- Shared vaults are better with 1P. Easy to move secrets, easy to de-dupe. Etc. etc.
Everything about Bitwarden is fine for a single, technical user, but it's not for sharing secrets with non-technical family members at any scale. It's just too clumsy with too many sharp edges.
I really, really wanted to leave 1P behind. But I came back to it. And I don't regret it.