Live data from Hacker News

Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

bitwarden.com

181–190 of 242 posts

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#181
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We use Lastpass; I've never been a big fan of the sharing features. I use Bitwarden for personal use.

I moved to Bitwarden from Lastpass last year. Ironically I remember needing some premium feature, and having issues subscribing to premium. Support was 0/10, and made me move to Bitwarden, but I was really happy with Lastpass. Feature I miss today is security checkup.

Support USED to be great, ~2-3 years ago when I first signed up. I noticed around a year ago when I made a support request that it went way downhill. I get the impression that they outsourced it to India.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#182
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :-)

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. Bu…

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.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#183
post #37

> The most trusted open source password manager for business I expected a blog article with actual feedbacks from companies and data, but ended up on bitwarden.com main page. Baseless claims can be quite common when it comes to marketing, but I'm genuinely curious: which password manager is used in your workplace, if any? I've personally never seen in my (for now short) career anything else than Keepass.

We are using bitwarden currently. It seems to work well for our purposes.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#184
post #48
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 t…

  >Stateless UI is annoying at best...
Agreed. I've been using Bitwarden for ages now and this drives me insane.

If you open the popup menu and need to copy/paste/refer to more than one piece of info from it [because autofill doesn't always work or for example, you need more info to login than just username & password] you have to go back each time and re-open the menu, then the sub-menu [if you have more than one account info saved for a domain], to re-find the saved info and copy the next item.

It's made doubly annoying by the fact that there's a button to open the popup in its own mini-window, which allows you to go back and forward to that window, copy/pasting all the 'stuff' you need. However, when you click this button, the new window which opens doesn't retain whatever was in it in its popup version. So you still have to drill down through menus to find the appropriate info again.

I reported this as a bug several years ago on their Github and got a ridiculous reply from the developers, saying that behaviour was deliberate and wouldn't be changed. Apparently they couldn't envisage a situation whereby a user converting the popup menu into a separate mini window would actually want to retain the info therein, rather than having to search it out again.

When faced with total pig-headedness like that from developers, my natural support for their open source efforts evaporates pretty quickly.

The search function is also piss-poor. I've got several Gmail accounts and quite often a site will allow me to login using my Google account. Obviously that won't show up in Bitwarden's popup, as I'm not on a Google domain. So I type 'gmail' into the searchbox and it returns every single one of the 100s of websites where I've got an '...@gmail.com' username, rather than prioritising the Gmail logins which I've actually saved titled 'Gmail '.

So yes, it's great that it's open source and free [for private use]. But the usability is pretty poor and the developers unresponsive to feedback.

Oh. And incidentally, it barely ever works properly on Android --even with all the required settings and permissions allowed. I might as well keep all my passwords in a text document on my phone. It'd be quicker than waiting in vain for Bitwarden to offer to fill in a login, then opening the app itself to copy/paste the required info and waiting the several seconds while it creaks into action, decrypting my vault.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#185

Is there a good, real comparison of password managers for personal use out there somewhere? I've tried looking in the past and haven't found one that isn't just ads. I've been a long time LastPass user but I'm looking to switch away. Features I need: * Cross-platform (iOS, macOS, Windows) * Easy to use browser plugins (the LastPass safari plugin is awful and non-discoverable via Safari plugin search) * Autofill in br…

I believe 1PW has everything including nice to haves. Not sure about yubikey though.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#187
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$4 is $4 more than $0

I find the attitude of many folks on HN, arguably a forum full of logicians, baffling at times. I don't use 0 dollars to contextualize the cost of 1Password (or any productivity software). I value the time that I save with it. It saves me so much time, I don't mind paying $4, let alone $10. Not paying for something because it's not free is being penny wise, pound foolish.

Perhaps there are situations where people are budgetting for the pot that the $4 a month comes out of, or are concerned about the number of services they are paying for and not receiving anything.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#188
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really? Its less than the cost of a pint. Not exactly expensive considering the benefits. Sure it could be free, but its not expensive.

Depend on your platform. MacOS/iOS/iPadOS come with a more than decent integrated password manager for free. It almost never fail to identify password field and work both for web site and compatible applications. The paying part is when you want to sync key-chain between device and require an iCloud subscription which start at $0,99 and bundle other features. While I would never trust a "free service" (fremium backed…

It’s $5/mo for a family account of 5 accounts. $3/mo solo. With first year being 50% off.

1PW has so many more features on top of Apple’s native PW stuff it is only comparable If the basics are needed.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#189
post #162

I’ve been using Bitwarden, LastPass and 1Password for the past few years. Of the three, Bitwarden gave me the least problems. LastPass is by far the worst. While 1Password is generally good about keeping up with its features, it is on the pricy side and UI is not great. I liked Bitwarden so much I asked them if I can pay for it several years in advance. No dice there. My recommendation is to pair Bitwarden with Yubik…

Some one else said BW doesn’t always detect new logins. Is this not true? That comment doesn’t appear to have downvotes or people stating otherwise.

Another few comments have said BW sometimes loses track of a pw or login. Maybe when created?

Not sure. Is this stuff not true? I’m on a family plan for 1PW and it has been mostly flawless for me. However if that family plan ever breaks up, i would love to BW

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#190
post #37

> The most trusted open source password manager for business I expected a blog article with actual feedbacks from companies and data, but ended up on bitwarden.com main page. Baseless claims can be quite common when it comes to marketing, but I'm genuinely curious: which password manager is used in your workplace, if any? I've personally never seen in my (for now short) career anything else than Keepass.

PasswordState for us (and we're predominantly a Java/PHP/Linux shop).

PasswordState licensing and support was great. I administed it for a small robotics company. PasswordState devs added a requested feature in about 3 weeks from a forum post I made.
Post reply on HN