Moving away from Bitwarden
It's been quite some time since I considered moving password managers. The last time I did a full move was in 2021, Bitwarden was being picked up by a lot of cost-conscious open source nerds like me at the time, back in the good old days where it was one of the few well designed, open source, and very affordable cross-platform options. Before this I was on 1Password and before that: Enpass, KeePass (though I found managing my own database file added a lot of friction), and Lastpass.
Now it seems like Bitwarden has lost their way, a doubling of price (which honestly is still very reasonable given the competition), confusing and messy UI overhauls, and now I've learned what looks like renewed ties to private equity. This doesn't really bode well for their future, and it's already disrupted my experience personally. This also isn't to say it's become a "bad" product, it's still "good" and does what it says on the tin, but I think it's at a point now where I can't really consider it good enough for my use.
A password manager is something that holds and protects the most important information in my life, access to products and services I use to live (banking, shopping, food, insurance, health, etc.). This means I'm using one every single day, many times per day, on every device I use, and must be completely friction-free. What's friction-free for a product that does this? Well for me that means a UI that gets out of the way, a UI that is consistent with industry-standard UI/UX patterns, and seamless integration into the tools I need it to work with. I don't believe Bitwarden provides this experience anymore, nor do I expect that to change if this is the direction they stick with.
My most important issues are:
- Removed Ctrl/Cmd+F shortcut to search my vault, I have to click search now. Truly maddening, let me use the keyboard!
- The click target for opening an item to view the details is now just the title instead of the row. I misclick all the time, I'm not aim training in my password manager
- Made folders less visible by moving them below the Bin ... why? Organising 100s of passwords is what this tool is for, how can I do that quickly when folders are collapsed by default and all the way at the bottom?
- Prioritised team and group sharing features so now there is an owner column that's just "Me" repeated hundreds of times for a single-user account, why not put it behind a menu somewhere? I'm not paying for a family or organisation account
- Browser auto-fill misfiring when logging in or submitting non-password forms, not saving passwords when they're updated, and incorrectly creating new entries. I can't figure this one out, it's inconsistently average.
I'm now fully back on 1Password, because honestly nothing else has really impressed me from what I've seen available. Despite it being a closed-source private company they were one of the first and they've continued making UI that is as close to friction-free as I've seen in the password manager space. After migrating away from it to Bitwarden many years ago it's been extremely pleasant to find that it's still snappy, the UI/UX makes complete sense, and everything works exactly the way I expect it to. Organisation is simple with drag and drop, I can add pretty icons to services to make glancing easier, their metadata on items is fantastic, and having more types of items than I'll need is wonderful.
1Password is ~$60AUD/year versus Bitwarden's ~$30AUD/year. 1Password is double the price of today's Bitwarden, but it's already worth it after a day of use. I truly hope Bitwarden can turn it around and become an industry standard in password management that's also open source, sadly they're not there yet.