Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

Comment by joekrill | Hacker News Reader

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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.

Agreed on the sharing - I was trying to arrange a family plan for 5 people, and happy to pay $10*5 a year (coming from a shared lastpass instance), but have given up trying to figure out how sharing works. Ideally every person would have their own personal vault and there would be a shared vault for "family" accounts, that you don't explicitly have to switch to in order to use. We just share master passwords and manually sync things, but it seems like a missed opportunity to upsell individuals into family or small team plans with just a few new sharing features..

Having just set up a free organization the other day, I agree it was slightly confusing. Mostly because I was kind of hoping to combine costs for an organization with the per user $10/year plan. In the end, I set up a FREE organization for two people, and paid for the per-user upgrade for one of us, for now, to get the reports on bad passwords.

If you're trying to set it up for three users, you'd need to pay for a organization, which starts at $9/month. On the other hand, I believe you could set up two free organizations where you are a member in each, and you add your mom to one and your wife to the other.

https://bitwarden.com/help/article/getting-started-organizat...

https://bitwarden.com/pricing/business/

I don't think it was a particularly difficult process, but I did it on my computer, and once it was all figured out, helped my spouse with the rest. I don't find the sharing process confusing. You click Share on a saved password, choose the organization, and then you choose the collection you put it in (which can simply be Default.)

I haven't found BitWarden to be slow, but my laptop is a Ryzen 7 4800H and my old phone was a Pixel 3, so neither are slouches. Not sure how many records I have but I'd estimate about 500.

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.

> 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.

Searching happens after the vault is already unlocked.

That's about searching, not unlocking the vault.

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