Bitwarden

I’ve been using 1Password for years without too many issues. It’s a nicely designed and implemented app with a long history. I really had no reason to look elsewhere.

However, there’s been a lot of noise lately about them taking $200 million in VC money. I’m not that concerned. They’ve grown and want to grow faster, so fine. It did, however, make me take a quick look at the alternatives, just in case.

A number of people, especially those concerned with privacy, recommend Bitwarden as an alternative to 1Password. I’ve signed up and imported my data from 1Password. Let’s see how it goes.

Bitwarden’s Premium license is $10/year. There’s also a “Family” plan for $1.00/month for up to 5 people. That’s pretty cheap.

But how well does it work? Well, after only a couple of days of testing I’ve decided it’s worth a decent attempt to make the switch to Bitwarden. It’s reasonably polished, open source, audited by 3rd parties, and inexpensive. It feels just a tiny bit nerdy, which, in my experience, means that when features are added they’re more likely to address actual user needs.

There’s an iOS app that can be configured as a password store, just like 1Password.

If I choose, I could run my own copy of the server. I may in fact do this once things have gotten burned in a bit and I haven’t found any deal-stoppers.

It’s been pretty seamless so far. I’ll report back if it works out…or doesn’t.

One thing I find interesting is that 1Password has nearly 200 employees, and as far as I can tell, Bitwarden is developed mostly by one guy. That’s a huge difference in resources for things that seem, at least on the surface, to be quite similar.