Okay so yesterday, I changed my password as a precaution because of the hack, and just now I decided to clean my browser tabs and re login and almost forgot my password. I’m done dealing with passwords.
What password manager do you recommend?
Features I’m looking for
-Open Source
-Can be synced to cloud (I don’t want self host)
-Can be accessed via a browser
-Cross platform, the more platforms, the better
-End to End Encrypted, and Encrypted at rest on my device, also need some way to authenticate before releasing the password, like a pin or biometrics
-Autofill for browser and apps
-Free (can be a freemium model, but I need the base tier to be free, too broke to spend money on this lol)
-Can export the passwords to a file
I never used a password manager before so sorry if I seem like a noob.
I know I could google it, but I want the lastest info, not some outdated reddit post.
Edit: Woah, those replies are fast. I think I’ll use Bitwarden. Thanks for recommendations! Now I don’t need to worry about forgetting passwords anymore. 😄
Edit 2: It seems I’ve forgotten my email password as well as a few other accounts I haven’t logged into for a while. Damn, should’ve used a password manager earlier.
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Bitwarden is a no brainer. It offers ALL the features that an average user needs in its free plan (which imo all other password managers don’t.)
Its also a privacy friendly service which has passed multiple security audits from external entities
Non self-hosted: Bitwarden
Self-hosted: Keepass
Both are open-souce, multi-platform, and free. Bitwarden does have additional paid tiers to include support for things like OTPs. I used to use Keepass but got tired of manually syncing my database; If that’s not a problem for you then it’s a great choice.
Bitwarden supports self hosting doesn’t it? There’s an option in the UI to specify server
Yup, you can selfhost bitwarden and use your own private server to sync between devices.
the name is vaultwarden. a reimplementation of bitwarden i think in rust. you can use it with all bitwarden-clients.
One thing I was always wondering about the OTP feature: If OTPs are used for two-factor authentication but both your password and the OTP can be accessed through Bitwarden, aren’t you effectively sidestepping the two-factor part? I mean if I have the OTPs only on my phone then I need to know the Bitwarden master password and I need to have my phone in order to log in. On the other hand if both are in the Bitwarden vault, I only need to know the Bitwarden password. So effectively two-factor becomes one-factor authentication.
Maybe the relevant scenario here is your credentials for some website getting leaked. With OTPs inside Bitwarden any attacker would still not be able to log in as long as they don’t know your master password, giving you plenty of time to change your password. Although, if the attacker already found a way to access confidential website logins, they can probably access all kinds of other confidential data related to this account without even logging in as you.
You sound like me. I used KeePass for many years. AutoType rules. That said it wasn’t as slick as other password managers for browser credentials. I moved my home stuff to Bitwarden and use KeePass for work. I honestly could never give up AutoType for work. Typing credentials into other applications is so handy and one majority of other password managers lack, including Bitwarden.
It’s more to setup, but I have my keepass auto sync across several devices using OneDrive. Each device has a local copy of the database that is synced with the cloud version using triggers.
This is what I used to do. Although KeePass is better these days in that it will recognise when a database has changed and ask you if you want to synchronise the changes. KeePassXC will even reload the database when it detects changes.
Another vote for Bitwarden just in case anyone needed one more comment to get them to use it.
I use bitwarden but it can be quite annoying to use sometimes. Feel like I have to type my master password every 5 minutes and it won’t even prompt me to enter it for a site I have a login on, have to dig into the menu and find it
On my desktop browser I have it set to relock only when I close the browser. So I only have to enter my master password the first time.
I have an Android phone and an iPhone and have bitwarden enabled on both and set to auto lock after 15 minutes. Very rarely do I run into and instance where bitwarden won’t be able to auto populate everything on either device and I have biometrics set up to unlock my vault. When it doesn’t I have to go searching but imo it’s a minor inconvenience because it very rarely happens.
If you mean that when you are using the auto entry feature your account isn’t showing up to populate the field without searching then you need to save the URI to the password so that bitwarden knows what account goes with that site. Just hit the auto fill and save button and it will automatically add that URI for you so you don’t have to search next time.
I’ve got all that setup and biometrics work great. The problem is sometimes bitwarden just won’t prompt in the first place, sometimes it works sometimes it doesn’t, sometimes I have to wait a bit for it to realise
Ah yeah, I run into that sometimes but in my experience its pretty rare that it won’t pop up. Sometimes just closing the app, from recent apps, and reopening will get it to trigger. I always assumed it had something to do with the apps save state when I closed it since it generally happens on my banking apps that automatically log me out. It’s one thing I like about iOS is that when you are logging into something there is the little key button to open up iCloud keychain and Bitwarden so you don’t have to let it do it automatically.
I don’t want to self host
IMO Keepass is not for you then. Bitwarden all day
But you can sync your database across devices using Syncthing or a cloud storage like MEGA.
Keepass + Syncthing is great, works also on phones.
I’ll say maybe Bitwarden checks all of that.
I love Bitwarden! The $10/yr subscription is totally worth it too.
Can someone sell me on the subscription? I don’t mind paying for it because that’s really cheap but I don’t really understand what exactly it offers. I’ve been using the free version of Bitwarden for years now.
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I personally got it for the reports of duplicated or leaked passwords to make it easier for me to find and update all of my old, bad passwords.
I specifically pay them because the money I’m giving them is put (mostly) directly into open source client/server components that benefit everyone at the end of the day, not just myself or the company but “humanity” in general.
If Bitwarden (the org) disappeared tomorrow, we would all still have access to really high quality software that someone could continue to push forward/develop and I appreciate that confidence and trust that they put forward.
Agreed, I’ve been using it for about 6 years after moving from iOS to Android and its great, fits all the points required by OP.
I’m using it since doing the opposite and it works great on iOS. Not sure if it was different a while ago but you can set it as your auto fill password manager.
I was just relying on keychain whilst on iOS and made me realise after migration I needed something that was platform agnostic.
KeePass all day. Completely open sourced and free.
I use
KeePassium on iOS
KeePassiumXC on desktop
Keepass2Android (no net) on Android.
All synced via Nextcloud but you can sync via sync thing as well if you don’t want to self cloud host.
Yet another vote for Bitwarden. I love that you can access your stuff through a browser without installing anything, I need that sometimes on my work pc where I cannot install anything.
Bitwarden, Psono, Proton Pass. 1Password is not open source but they’re amazing too and most secure because of a layer of protection
Ooh wow, Proton also made a passmanager? I’m going to have a look, I kinda like that company.
I’ve had a good experience with 1Password, but I would absolutely look at the others if I was starting from scratch now.
One I wouldn’t recommend is LessPass. It is kind of clever, but it relies on doing a hash of a set of values (master key + site + username + counter) and then producing a password from the hash based on some password specifications. Neat, but that’s a lot to remember.
because of a layer of protection
What does this mean? It’s very vague :D
1Password is secured with secret key on top of your master password, adds another level of security. many other password manager, Bitwarden etc are reliant on the strength of your master password
Keepass is
- open source and free
- just uses a file, so you can sync it wherever/however you want
- has a browser plugin with autofill if you’re into that
- is supported on all platforms
- database lives in an encrypted file that you put wherever you choose
For syncing I use Syncthing. It’s open-source as well and syncs two/multiple devices without the need for cloud-storage
+1 for Bitwarden
After 2 years of ignoring the fact that I use a duplicate password in over 100 places, and that password has officially been in breaches, I finally came to terms with the fact that it was time to find a password manager and generate unique passwords. I didn’t do a ton of research and ended up with bitwarden. If I opened this thread to see a bunch of people ragging on bitwarden I was prepared to be VERY upset.
I tried bitwarden and others and finally just settled on the firefox password manager. It does everything I need.
firefox
For me the firefox password manager is totally fine : I know where the encrypted file is and I can manually back it up and copy to an other computer ($HOME/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/key4.db + logins.json). You can decrypt yourself the file easily too.
I use Firefox as well. My uneducated concern. I once installed Chrome on my PC for something specific. During the install, it asked if I would like to import my saved logins from Firefox. I thought: “let’s see”. In fact, it unencrypted the file, and loaded all my passwords. So, my thought is, of someone was to gain access to that file, how hard would it really be to unencrypted it? If chrome can do it as part of their wizard.
Again, feel free to educate me, but that’s my concern
I assume it would only be (properly) encrypted if you set a master password in firefox?
If chrome could bypass the master password, that would be concerning.
Oh neat. Just
gpg -d HOME/.mozilla/firefox/[profile folder]/key4.db + logins.json?
My only gripe is having to insert my password every 15min (afaik it’s either that or having all your accessible by anyone using your computer). That and the fact that they discontinued the password manager they had on Android. This is what made me move to bitwarden.
they discontinued the password manager they had on Android
I use it on Android Firefox every day, it syncs my passwords to all my linked firefox instances.
Ah, I was using Firefox Lockwise, which was discontinued, but I see that Firefox itself can act as a password manager now?
By which I mean an auto-fill service
Yes, andiyou can sync between you installs.
It not perfect but it’s enough for me at least.
Bitwarden is ok
Bitwarden
This.
Bitwarden.
All day; everyday.
Guess I’m gonna have to give bitwarden a go, I’ve used LastPass for years but their quality of service and value for money has plummeted.
I used LastPass up until they re-started charging for multiple devices. I was happy to pay LastPass back in like 2013 when they used to charge for multiple devices, but when they decided to bring that charge back in 2022 (or whatever year it was) they were charging an obscenely high amount for it, and frankly the UX wasn’t good enough to justify that price. On Android, more often than not I was having to go into the app to copy/paste it, because the native integration just wasn’t working.
With Bitwarden I’m back to free, and it works so much better anyway. I never looked back.
is there a straightforward way to migrate? thanks in advance 🙏
They have a tool for directly doing the import for you.
Or if, for whatever reason, that doesn’t work for you/you don’t want to use that, they have detailed step-by-step instructions for how to manually export your LastPass vault and import it into Bitwarden.
Hope this helps!
Legend, thanks!
I switched from Lastpass to Bitwarden. Couldn’t be happier.