I Do Not Recommend Bitwarden
Key takeaways
- A review of my experience with Bitwarden after several years of self-hosting it, and why I decided to move away from the password manager.
- After having used a similar approach for myself for several years now, I came to the conclusion that I do not recommend the use of Bitwarden any longer.
- Wikipedia describes Bitwarden as _a freemium open-source password management service that is used to store sensitive information [ ] owned and developed by Bitwarden, Inc., and that is now almost ten years old.
A review of my experience with Bitwarden after several years of self-hosting it, and why I decided to move away from the password manager.
Almost four years ago I published a guide on how to run your own Last Pass on hardened Open BSD, in which I explained how to set up an Open BSD instance, either as a cloud instance or as a Raspberry Pi bare metal installation, that would host Vaultwarden as a backend for the Bitwarden client applications. After having used a similar approach for myself for several years now, I came to the conclusion that I do not recommend the use of Bitwarden any longer. Let me explain.
Wikipedia describes Bitwarden as _a freemium open-source password management service that is used to store sensitive information [ ] owned and developed by Bitwarden, Inc., and that is now almost ten years old. The company behind the software is not only developing the Bitwarden server, as well as client applications for most platforms, but it is also offering a SaaS product for users who don t want to put up with hosting this unwieldy beast on their own. More on this in just a moment.