I have been using Bitwarden for around 7~ years. Subscription for this long too, at 10USD p/year. I will be switching due to lack of transparency, and would love to hear others thoughts on this.
The linked article goes into further detail, but here is a small summary that very much concern me / are sus:
- that 10USD per year has gone up quietly . I just checked and I have no email telling me it’s increased. It renews in like 2 months, so this is good timing for me
- Originally Bitwarden had values as apart of the acronym “GRIT”. Gratitude, Responsibility, Inclusion, and Transparency. They have changed the last two words to “Innovation, Trust”
- There is now a new CEO, this was not announced and the only reason people outside of Bitwarden know is that someone saw this change on LinkedIn
- The free tier momentarily disappeared from their product page for about a month (april14-may14). People were likely still able to make free accounts during this period. Bitwarden says it was a marketing mistake
The price hike is one thing, but for me the acronym change is most concerning, which is why I will be looking at another password manger (probably keepassxc)
I’ve asked this before but does any of this enshittification affect vaultwarden?
you should get a notice no later than 2 weeks before the actual renewal
Sure, Go for it. I’ve been using KeePass for a long time now and I am very satisfied with it. Aside from the security and privacy (Which you know is BEST out there), It comes with many customizations too. I used to use BitWarden but now I use KeePass.
Can keepass store files?
Yes, you can add multiple files to an entry.
Great, then I will probably switch to that then.
Great to hear. One thing I liked about Bitwarden is that you change choose Aegon2id and its KDF iterations, etc. Is that standard? Can you do that in keepass?
Don’t be evil!!
I will conti UE to self-host Vaultwarden and use the BitWarden clients until I feel the clients are not trustworthy or they are forked.
This is the email I received at the begining of the year when there were multiple articles about the price increase.
I think it’s important to note that you may have missed or deleted the email, or it potentially could have gone to your junk folder, but they did send out emails letting people know.
I got the same email with 25% discount for this year. Can’t argue with lack of transparency on that and it’s a bit unreasonable to expect no price increases ever
Yeah. If you’re using the services that might required a paid subscription, it’s not out of the realm of possibilities for there to be a price increase eventually.
I’m not discounting that there’s the potential for a pivot to less transparency and auditability going forward, I just wanted to point out that this wasn’t done with no warning.
I don’t trust the company that bought them. Private equity is almost always a bad time for consumers/users.
The CEO apparently is a big private equity guy, and those bloodsucking ticks only know how to do one thing: Suck every last drop of money and goodwill from the company and its customers as quickly as possible.
Breaks my heart, I’ve been a massive Bitwarden advocate for years. Been happily paying for the individual paid plan. I’m now working on setting up KeyPassXC with syncthing.
Does KeyPassXC have passkey and TOTP support?
Both, yes
Yes. For passkey, you need to install the browser plugin and enable support in the preferences.
Do you know if I can get KeePass working on both PC and Android in sync with Syncthing?
I have been using it that way for years and it works well (for this scenario no problem). Only recently I switched from Syncthing to using mounted SMB share. I switched partly because of the Syncthing for Android maintainer switch (though I still think its safe) and because Syncthing sometimes didn’t sync on my Iodé custom rom and I got tired of having to open the app to sync.
I used to do that few years ago. It worked very well. Never had any issues. I’ve used KeePassDX on Android and KeePassXC on Linux.
If you or someone you trust happen to have a home server, just install Vaultwarden, which is the community fork of Bitwarden without any fees, shady stuff or reliance on Bitwarden infrastructure.
I know this options exists, but honestly I don’t think I have reliable enough infrastructure. It’s hardly ever offline, but my backup game is super weak, and I have had to rebuild from scratch once in the past three years.
What happens if I fuck up again and have to rebuild? Just feels like a massive potential failure point.
Your backup is all your clients. Every client has a blob. If you loose it export and then import. That is if everything else fails.
If you look real close side by side there is a subtle difference…
Suuuper easy to stand up, took me about 20 minutes to get it up and running
Well, when u say supereasy to set up, i don’t know. The need for reverse proxy was driving me nuts. For someone that doesn’t expose anything to the outside world, the need for a reverse proxy is overkill in my opinion. But i did hive up fairly easily, so i’ll have another go in the future when i have time. For now my Syncthing + Keepass setup will have to do but i do find its not 100% robust. If i have keepass open on both mobile and laptop, i’m at risk of loosing changes. If the change is made on one device and i close after change, i won’t see the change until i close keepass on the other device. But by then syncthing thinks that the latter is the most recent change and marks the file of first device as conflict file. So the chsnge is not lost but its not in the most “recent” version of the database.
It got bought by a company owned by Vista Equity partners, a private equity firm.
The loss of values happened at Citrix when it was Vought by Vista. They installed Tom Krauseasthe CEO to gut it from the inside out.
Everybody should have an exit plan ready to be able to leave bitwarden
Bitwarden got bought by private equity?
https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/06/open-source-password-manager-bitwarden-raises-100m/
No, they took $100 million in VC. Never a good sign imho.
Lol… From Transparency to “Just Trust Me Bro”.
I know right. Even in an Enterprise environment why would trust be a better word to represent your values over transparency
I guess it’s time to move on, I’ll check PrivacyGuides for a better alternative while I compare by myself too.
I’m not gonna allow a quiet price hike, this is scummy and anti-consumer.
Bit warden is undergoing enshittifcation in real time. It’s interesting to watch.
The price hike was announced months ago iirc and brings bitwarden in line (still cheaper) with all the other services after being the same price over years and years of inflation.
I got my eyes on em because of the vc money but the price hike isn’t out of line.
VC money is the end of the product. The enshittification has started and will never stop.
I am testing out Syncthing right now and will switch to an offline password manager
As a former subscriber since today, I didn’t get an email about it so it’s wasn’t announced enough imo.
Idk what to tell you, the price hike was announced months ago and I had to field a lot of questions from people I help with computers about it.
Another person posted the receipts for when emails got sent out and I remember warning people about this when it first “hit” the news cycle in January.
What would have been enough announcement?
Great resource. However, I remember one of them recommending straight up poor advice (and I think suspected sponsored recommendations), and the community shunned them for it. I just can’t remember if its https://www.privacyguides.org/en/ or https://www.privacytools.io/
The bad one is privacytools.
Thnx
Yeah, I switched to KeePass for the same reason. The only way I trust software is if they’ll show me the code, and the only reason to replace “transparency” with “trust” IMHO is because they want to go closed source. Innovation also tends to just mean 'we’re going to be charging you for features that used to be free ’
It much work to get all the names and passwords and stuff from BW moved over to keepass?
Not really, just had to install KeePass on my computer and export my bitwarden passwords BW makes that easy to do) and import them to KeePass. I haven’t set up the browser extension yet, as at a glance it says it doesn’t work with browsers installed with flatpak and that’s how I have LibreWolf installed. Setting up syncthing was also pretty straightforward.
Sweet. Thanks.
I never use browser extension for my pwm anyway. Just the pwm apk on my phone and thats about it. Seems less likely for any shenanigans to happen that way.
I tested this a few weeks ago, but one thing I struggled with was having custom fields imported. Don’t know if I somehow did something wrong, but while the export data had them as expected, KeePassXC just didn’t import it all? The standard Notes did get imported, but none of my custom fields.
Whoa no flatpak support is a problem. Thanks for the heads up.
Totally agree. I’ve been a multi-year paying customer of bitwarden for the family, always happy with their service, especially when compared with the 1pass I use at work. But that CEO avatar picture alone gives me enough bad vibes, let alone his credentials, the acronym change, so yea I too reckon I’ve been putting off the switch long enough now.
I came from keepass, can’t go back there, even if I now have syncthing set up everywhere. Also, how would that work for the family, you force everyone to set up their own file and hope they manage it well? Highly doubtful.
I saw aliasvault pop up too, this last week. Haven’t looked into it yet, and although a great contender, it’s probably too young to seriously consider.
These are the alternatives according to selfh.st/apps :
- Vaultwarden
- Password Pusher
- KeePassXC
- Passbolt
- Infisical
- OpenBao
- YeetFile
- AliasVault
- OrigamiVault
Anyone here had some bad experiences with any of these?
vaultwarden allows you to keep using the bitwarden client i think, just with your own server. should be the most seamless for the family.
If bitwarden went completely rotten could they cease and desist vault warden?
I’d asked a similar question. Basically, the response I got was: if the something goes sideways, the community can hard fork all their clients and use vaultwarden as a server (their current licenses would allow that).
Another suggestion was that you can always use the web ui bundled with vaultwarden directly (heh, I’ve been using vaultwarden for years and I don’t think I ever used the web ui - just the applications, CLI, browser extension).
They could, but probably it’s more likely they would just introduce changes that break compatibility a little at a time.
Good point, that is a big factor indeed, ease of migration. Vaultwarden should get bonus points for this, so I’ll be sure to add it to the list of alternatives to try out. Thanks!
vaultwarden has an uncertain future with the new bitwarden management – we would need bitwarden apps that use vaultwarden apis rather than bitwarden. I suppose if bitwarden breaks api compatibility that might happen.
KeepPassXC is what I was using before – it’s like keepass. It has browser integration, but syncing is problematic, and it doesn’t have biometric unlock.
I agree, syncthing syncing is problematic which is why i was looking ar vaultwarden.
if bitwarden breaks api compatibility that might happen
I should think so too. I’d expect a big race to start, like with the kbin/lemmy apps after the reddit api fiasco.
I’m using boost for lemmy btw. It was a great reddit client back in the day, and when the api change was announced they switched to lemmy pretty quickly.
Switched from keepassxc to vaultwarden a while ago (mostly due to the horrible syncing experience, and to use the same password manager as my family so I could help out better).
It’s a selfhosted and open source version of the Bitwarden server, you’ll use the (open source) Bitwarden clients. So its all features of Bitwarden plus full transparency
oh so if Bitwarden eventually locks down their app, the folks over at vaultwarden could just spin up their own f-droid app?
Yes, the clients (Desktop, Web, Browser, Mobile, CLI) are published by Bitwarden under GPL3 license, so you can always fork them.
Bitwarden could delete the repos, but the code is out there.
Password Pusher is no password manager, only for securely sharing information.
Running on Vaultwarden, though that still depends on the official BitWarden Clients. Works great though, and can be selfhosted on pretty small machines. Very satisfied with it.
Passbolt was not on my radar when I was in the market for a new password manager, but would be a serious consideration today.
If considering a self hosted alternative, remember that backups are your responsibility then as well.
Good point about the backups. I snapshot the important VMs daily on Proxmox, I reckon that should suffice for this, right?
Exactly what i do but have replication across machines and save the VM backup resository on external hard drive in different building. Outside garage.
It’s not a backup if it’s stored in the same place as the original
It’s stored on the network, but yea, still same building.
still in beta (stable) but im using aliasvault for a couple of months now and i don’t have any issues
still in beta
any idea when they will release a major version?
Is AliasVault here for the long term?
Yes. We build AliasVault with a long-term vision, not with a quick exit in mind. The product is never “done”; we keep developing, improving, and refining AliasVault continuously to give users the best possible experience over the long term.
Our spiritual predecessor, SpamOK.com, has been running since 2013. That is more than 13 years of uninterrupted service helping people fight spam and protect their privacy online. The same long-term mindset applies to AliasVault.
That does inspire confidence, so I’ll add it to the list!
Bitwarden was taken over by private equity just before these changes btw
price almost doubled; it’s $19.80 a year now. Still cheaper than 1pass or lastpass, which are $3/month. I don’t think they would increase to that much, because 1pass is objectively better.
didn’t KeepassXC go full into vibe coding?
https://lemmy.world/post/47036606/23815574
otherwise that would be the most appealing alternative to me too
I mean they recently posted a pretty reasonable explanation about their usage of AI (https://keepassxc.org/blog/2025-11-09-about-keepassxcs-code-quality-control/ ).
I’m not sure what the guy in your link is referring to since he didn’t provide any additional context.
thanks, I haven’t seen this before
Well that would make sense. I was actually going to switch to bitwarden back in May after keepassxc decided to corrupt my entire database along with the backup. I had to begin the lengthy process of resetting every single password I have, I was pretty furious and never wanted to touch keepassxc again. But when I went to bitwarden’s website I noticed only paid options, so I decided to continue researching alternatives.
So still has these issues. Glad I went to vsultwarden.
