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Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

bitwarden.com

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Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#51

Post by polyrand »

I really like Bitwarden, but I found it buggy in terms of user experience, and I'm now considering switching. Some annoying bugs I've experienced:

* Desktop app not focusing correctly when opening it

* Browser extension asking to save password even if it's already there

* Log-In suggestions not showing

* Slow and laggy on iOS

* Biometrics log-in breaks half of the times I try to use it

I like the fact it's open-source, although that doesn't make it more secure, and I don't think I would like to self-host.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#52

Post by dboreham »

Try1275 wrote: post #35
tiffanyh wrote: post #13

FYI - Bitwarden took $100M in VC money last year. At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manag...

What are they doing with this kind money? Venture out into other topics like Proton with Protonpass and Protondrive?

New yachts?

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#53

Post by teekert »

notpushkin wrote: post #42
quaintdev wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it didn't pick up the database from the Docker volume I restored the first time This happened to me too. Moved to KepassXC with syncthing and I haven't looked back

KeePass is nice from my experience, but how well does it perform in a multi-user environment?

I went away from keepassxc after too many sync conflicts. Perhaps it was my own Nextcloud that was the cause, but now with passwords sharing between me and spouse and no more sync issues (on Vaultwarden) I’m very happy I switched.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#54

Post by 22289d »

FirmwareBurner wrote: post #26
tiffanyh wrote: post #13

FYI - Bitwarden took $100M in VC money last year. At some point, the pressure to aggressively monetize will unfortunately happen. https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manag...

My take in life: whenever VC or PE investors take over, start moving away from that product and pronto .

The new CEO concerns me. I didn't know who the founder was but I always had the impression it was a lone hacker. They passed the baton. Now it's some old Web 1.0 guy who was the CEO of eFax in the 90's.

That's not the type of service I thought I was using.

I looked up their headquarters in Santa Barbara and it's a co-working space. That doesn't sound very secure. Though that could be their corp address and they're hiding where they work.

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#56

Post by hollander »

autophagian wrote: post #12
Try1275 wrote: post #7

I am a happy user and find it very convenient but how safe is it really to have all your jewels centralized in the cloud, including 2FA. It seems such a worthwhile target. On the other hand keeping everything in sync manually seems a hassle and in the end you just encrypt on your machine and the syncing goes through the cloud anyway, so where's the difference? I'd be happy to hear thoughts on this.

For this I self-host vaultwarden ( https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden ), an implementation of the bitwarden server, on my raspberry pi at home (and back up the DB frequently). It works well enough for me, and doesn't have my stuff stored in a single company's cloud.

So what if the disk crashes? Do you keep backups? In the cloud?

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#57

Post by wmal »

The title is misleading. This is not fully "free and open-source". I'm actually puzzled by the licensing structure.

Bitwarden server is dual-licensed [1]

- part of it is licensed with AGPL (Open Source)

- some features are licensed with a source available Bitwarden license

Now, even the Open Source core requires you to register if you want to self host. This is to provide you with complementary services like security updates, push relay servers (?), and licensing checks. [2] Although not stated in the docs, I guess this also improves their telemetry data, as they suggest to never share the license keys between installations.

I completely understand the need to use source available licenses instead of open source. What I don't understand is why to even license parts of your app as Open Source? The resulting product is not free. Neither as in beer, nor as in speech. Does anyone know good reasons for doing that? I'm asking seriously. I'd like to better understand how companies benefit by marketing their products as Open Source, even if they are barely open source.

[1]: https://github.com/bitwarden/server/blob/master/LICENSE_FAQ....

[2]: https://bitwarden.com/help/hosting-faqs/#q-what-are-my-insta...

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#58

Post by mikae1 »

tjrgergw wrote: post #43

I wish our industry would adopt the custom that to pitch your product you need to compare yourself to the best competitor, or no one will even look at you. There's only one thing I wanna hear from Bitwarden: What do you do that KeePassXC doesn't, and what are the trade-offs?

> What do you do that KeePassXC doesn't, and what are the trade-offs?

Bitwarden offers free hosting for personal use. Also, consistently named apps (even for mobile).

Re: Bitwarden: Free, open-source password manager

#60

Post by blacklight »

I've been self-hosting it for years and I love it.

I mean, being a MSSQL + .NET app it's quite an exotic beast in my self-hosting garden, but it definitely does its job without skipping a beat.

I'm also happy to support them with a modest $10/month contribution - for that price you get a few extra perks on your instance, but most importantly for me you get to store OTP codes / support for MFA, so I don't have to use a separate app for that.

I feel like it's important to keep financially supporting projects like these, even if we host them ourselves, even if we only get one or two extra perks for the extra bucks.

External pressures towards enshittification are inversely proportional to profitability.

If a company can make money out of a business model where 80% is free to self-host and 20% is additional subscribe-only stuff, then things can remain like they are. If it doesn't, then we're all going to lose also the remaining 80%.

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