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)
you should get a notice no later than 2 weeks before the actual renewal
Yea this is what has likely happened to me, just haven’t got the email about it. Then I was thinking: If I never heard any news about the price hike (which I didn’t) it would be good if I got an actual email from Bitwarden - perhaps when they decided the price would be higher, therefore I could actually choose to stay with them or have time to research other options
You’re quitting over some words? All this questionable shit and you’re quitting cause they changed an acronym? Sheesh…
They are quitting becuase they see another lastpass happening. The new CEO is a toxic private equity leech.
Last pass was not Foss though.
It’s true - apart from the price hike, Nothing really has happened. And yet I ask you, which are you more comfortable with:
- A company with closed communication, and still asks to be trusted at the end
- A company having open, transparent communication
In this case I don’t care. I selfhost. What Bitwarden does doesn’t affect me.
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.
Whoa no flatpak support is a problem. Thanks for the heads up.
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.
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
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.
Do you know if I can get KeePass working on both PC and Android in sync with Syncthing?
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.
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.
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.
I am looking at aliasvault.net or keepassxc. Vaultwarden I’m not super interested in either as one of its big developers works at Bitwarden, they could be pressured to stop working on it etc. Potential conflict of interest
That’s true, but as long as I have it hosted locally and it keeps working I’m fine with it. I have really gotten used to the bitwarden client simply working on all the devices/browsers.
Exactly. We can just fork it, if the need ever arrives.
There’s no reason for is to suffer through a more clunky solution when this is all open source.
Aliasvault seems cool. I wonder how mature it is. Its the clients though that matter too when the wholr family is using it.
Disappointing, but I’m still going to be running the free tier of Bitwarden for the time being. Thanks for the heads up.
although its advertised as self hosted & for companies, you can create a personal account on their server.
That’s cool I haven’t heard of that one. I personally will be avoiding Enterprise products from now on since Bitwarden
fair enough brother, Keepass + syncthing is a great alternative also
Just FYI there’s two KeepAssDX versions in FDroid: the square key and the round key logos. The round key is the Libre one you want, whereas the square one is aka the Google Play version. IzzyOnDroid mirrors the square one and it shouldn’t.
Are you sure it’s not the square key one you want? I just checked and that one is available from both Izzy and f-droid itself, whereas the round version is only available from Izzy (though that one has foss in the name and the other doesn’t)
The repo does mention “free” and “libre” apks and it would appear the only one available on Fdroid (as far as I can tell?) is the libre version.
Edit: I mention it because the official website has round logo, but this version doesn’t so not sure that’s a good indicator
Out of a desire not to switch, I’m going to ask what I know to be a naive/dumb question: what’s the worst that can happen? It’s a mature gpl codebase
They become another LastPass.
Was LastPass open source to the same degree that Bitwarden is? It’s super easy to run your own Vaultwarden server already, and it shouldn’t be a problem for the community to fork and maintain unofficial clients either. Doesn’t seem like there’s much Bitwarden as a company could do about that, even if they wanted to.
I’m surprised that nobody has (meaningfully) forked the clients yet, it seems like all the warning signs are there
When the clients start changing for the worse I’m sure there will be forks…
Yeah for sure, I’m just thinking that it can be a little rocky to get governance and contribution processes set up, sometimes those last minute forks flop because the person who decided to advertise their fork ends up being ill equipped to handle running the project. If we can get a libre warden client project working before hand then it’ll make the process a lot more seamless when issues with bitwarden arise.
Migrated to Keepass shortly before the price increase ( not because of it) just for the reason of wanting my vault fully offline. Seeing these changes at BW still makes me sad, was a long time paying user & truly enjoyed it
Keepass is fantastiic, my vault is pretty static so just manually copy to other device as needed. And of course, have your full backup plan in place as with all things
I ran away from Bitwarden a few weeks ago due to other controversies and started using GNOME Secrets and KeePassDX. I couldn’t be happier, it’s slightly less convenient but I’m glad I did that.
The price is still reasonable for me. I don’t want to switch services because they might enshitrify someday.
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.
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.
If you have several, it really is convenient to set up an internal reverse proxy for all your internal-only services. One place to set up let’s encrypt and set up subdomains or different paths for the different services. No need for URLs with different port numbers or IP addresses.
Yeah this is why I don’t want to bother self-hosting. There are just too many ways to fuck it up. I’d rather pay a small fee for professionals to handle it for me 🤷 If Bitwarden goes to shit, I can always move to something else - I never heard of a password manager that didn’t let us export passwords.
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.
Bitwarden app is fully compatible with Vaultwarden and stores copies of all your passwords for offline access, so as long as you have access to the app somewhere, you’ll have them.
Also, Bitwarden can export your passwords as a file in several formats, readable by Bitwarden, KeePassXC etc. You can have that stored somewhere safe.
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.
How do you use it on mobile? I didn’t find an app version
You use the normal Bitwarden app and point it to your server
Use the Bitwarden app, it is compatible. Under the email field, choose a custom server and set it up there.
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.
I’ve asked this before but does any of this enshittification affect vaultwarden?
Since we still need to use the official clients with Vaultwarden, I’d say time is running short, even if these changes don’t directly affect it yet. Definitely need some FOSS alternative clients for it.
None of the above effects vaultwarden (how could it?), but it does raise concerns about long term FLOSS-friendlyness. I got bit by the sudden price increase earlier this year and decided that is the 1 year warning to migrate to either self hosted vaultwarden or something else. I move slow, so need some time anyway.
Well since most if not all use the Bitwarden client they could lock that down. Which would suck.
Even if it doesn’t affect it directly Vaultwarden is strongly linked to Bitwarden, for example I think you’re using official clients on your devices, Vaultwarden is not self sustainable (for now)
