It's time to leave Bitwarden (2023) | Hacker News Reader

It's time to leave Bitwarden (2023)

blog.notesnook.com

19 pointsthecodrr9 comments

If you're mooching the free tier of something with a Pricing tab on the website, you're always on borrowed time. It's worth finding a slightly less polished non-commercial FOSS program you're happy with for simple applications (notes, password managers, TOTP, etc.) so you don't have to worry about the impending VC heel turn.

I'll never understand people who act like they're entitled to free, perpetually maintained software, and then are surprised when the software owners try to make money.

I moved to Bitwarden years ago (as a paid subscriber) from LastPass after their breaches and everything went to hell there.

And Bitwarden HAS innovated, or at least evolved with the times. They support passkeys now. They've had security key support for a while. They allow you to save your OTPs (though the wisdom of having your OTPs for MFA and your password in the same entity is questionable). I use their secure file send every other day. Password managers don't have to stagnate any more than any other applications.

I'd say this guy should just install Keepass or Passwordsafe on his PC.

It sucks that Bitwarden is apparently moving away from open source, but I'll probably stick with them for now. LastPass and their competitors aren't even pretending to be friendly to the open source community.

I also keep a backup of my Bitwarden vault in KeePass on my PC, and a plaintext version on an encrypted drive, just in case.

FWIW, Bitwarden itself has been a less polished set of applications for a long time (Electron on desktop and MAUI on iOS, with the latter only changing recently to native). One advantage with Bitwarden was (and currently still is) that the yearly pricing starts low enough ($10 a year for premium). But this will likely not be around for much longer.

I knew I was on borrowed time when Bitwarden got the VC funding. I’ve also been using KeePassXC (on desktop), Proton Pass and the built-in password manager on iOS. So far, Proton Pass also seems to be slow on its development pace, just like Bitwarden. I’m looking at KeePass apps on iOS, but haven’t decided on them (the contenders seem to be MiniKeePass, KeePassium and Strongbox). I won’t miss Bitwarden though.

Related post: Bitwarden is no longer free software

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994

> Should you migrate to another password manager? Too soon to say anything. You're probably safe for a few years.

So it's not time then

> So it's not time then

A year ago.. I'm guessing this is surfacing now because of the recent thread about BW [0], so the question can be raised again if it's time now to migrate away.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41893994

Yeah, the hard part with Bitwarden is the maintenance of their client apps (which are quite good). Running the server is easy but dealing with Chrome Web Store bullshit, App Store bullshit, Google Play bullshit, Mac Store bullshit is a full time endeavor itself.

Too bad we can’t pay a little for decent for software. I’ve been considering moving to the new Passwords app that Apple has shipped to all my devices… is it any good?

I think Bitwarden is the best thing that happened in the space.

I like the UX a lot more tha keepass, it has been better at handling mfa across multiple devices than lastpass, i can self host or not, the pricing has been super reasonable.

It does the job perfectly in my opinion.

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