I am looking into password managers, as number of my accounts are increasing. Currently I am weighing two options:
- Host Vaultwarden on a VPS, or
- Use the free bitwarden service.
I want to know how they are in practical aspects.
While I am fine self-hosting many services, password managers seem to be one of the most critical services that should not admit downtime. I surely cannot keep it up, as I need to update it time to time.
On the other hand, using bitwarden might require some level of trust. How much should I trust the company to use the free service? How do I know if my passwords would be safe, not being exposed to the wide net?
I want to gauge pros and cons, are there aspects I missed? How are your opinions on this? If you are self-hosting vaultwarden, how do you manage the downtime? Thanks in advance!
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I self host as well as use bitwardens service.
I pay $10 a year, and never have I had access issues with it.
My self hosted instance houses everything for my other self hosted services.
I can also have my Bitwarden duplicated to my self hosted instance.
However, the only way to access my Vailtwarden instance is via my network. And for my use case, this is perfect.
Neither of them have I had any downtime; like others have said it’s anecdotal.
I had a similar dilemma and just went with bitwarden because I don’t trust myself not to fuck up. Bitwarden can’t access the passwords without my master pw (afaik) so I feel safe knowing that. I use it on all my devices so it gets synced there and even if the service is down, I have my passwords.
I’ll self host it when I reach the next level of paranoia.
If I get hit by a bus, then the passwords for the things that my wife needs to settle things gets sent to her, and the infra isn’t something that I maintain and could be down.
Worth $10/yr, by far.
That is a service they offer? Man that’s amazing, I gues I am going to update!
There’s a dead man option.
I have my password stored as a QR in an envelope. With instructions for Bitwarden. Never heard about the dead man option.
I enjoy self hosting, but what tipped the scales for me in favor of using Bitwarden’s servers is that I’m 100% confident I’m not as good as hardening my system from being compromised as they are. The vault is going to be encrypted anyway, and I think there’s a lower chance of it falling into the wrong hands if it’s hosted with Bitwarden. Same reason I don’t self-host email.
Plus Bitwarden is a cool company and the product is open source, and the premium features are unreasonably low priced.
One little bonus for using Vaultwarden is that you get access to premium features for free. But still, I put availability much higher when it comes to password management, so I would go with paid Bitwarden. That is what I did before moving to Keepass.
The Bitwarden clients cache your data locally. So even if your Vaultwarden goes down, you’ll still be able to access your passwords. Just not sync new ones or make changes.
I’d throw in option 3: use a KeePass2 database, sync it using whatever sync tool you like (SyncThing, iCloud, NextCloud, WebDAV, …) and use compatible apps (KeepassXC, Strongbox, etc.)
I roll it this way, been like this for years and years, fine for my needs
I migrated from KeePass2 as the the DB would get out of sync and need to be merged back together. Thats why I moved to Vaultwarden, I like having my data on my own stuff
Maybe worth to mention that bitwarden also propose bitwarden.eu to host data in Europe. I’ve used bitwarden.com for years, and switch to bitwarden.eu a few month ago because of reasons, you know…
add keepassxc to the list. I’ve avoided it for the longest times because I remember the horror that was the OG keepass. this is modern software, minimal footprint (miniscule compared to bitwarden’s electron crap), easy to use, the db is one file that’s easily syncthing-ed around, browser extensions, etc.
Do you have a proper backup solution? If you have a catastrophic data error, can you still recover? If not, just choose the hosted infrastructure.
Self-hosting is great. I love it. But when it comes to critical things that you absolutely cannot fuck up, I would rather trust a consumer based solution. If you fuck up your passwords and they’re gone, it’s going to hinder you significantly more than losing sleep about some rando having all your passwords if they break scrypt encryption.
If you have a catastrophic data failure, then you can just use the vault stored on a client to restore it, even if you don’t have backups.
Nice! I was unaware that you could do this. Cheers.
Yeah, it says on their website you can export it from any Bitwarden app, and you can also do it from the CLI if you wanted to for some reason.
Probably be easier in case of emergency to do it from the browser extension though, since you’re gonna have to set up the Vaultwarden server anyway and import the data.
Bitwarden is dirt cheap. I can never host and be as reliable as they are for that price.
I self host vaultwarden and its great. Its an easy self host, and in my experience, it has never gone down on me.
That being said, my experience is anecdotal. If you do go the vaultwarden route, realize that your vault is still accessible on your devices (phone, whatever) even if your server goes down, or if you just lose network connectivity. They hold local (encrypted at rest) copies of your vault that are periodically updated.
Additionally, regardless of the route you take you should absolutely be practicing a good 3-2-1 backup strategy with your password vault, as with any other data you value.
This: backups might be a pain to handle. Bitwarden does that for you + redundancy.
Depends on the amount of work the person does. I know I’m a lazy self hoster that takes time to update software.
Vaultwarden allows a bit of downtime, the vault is cached by the clients
When the server is not reachable, no writes are allowed
There’s not a need to have vaultwarden up all of the time unless you use new devices often or create and modify entries really often. The data is cached on the device and kept encrypted by the app locally. So a little downtime shouldn’t be a big issue in the large majority of cases.
Bitwarden does my OTP as well. You don’t need the servers for that?
It you’re talking about TOTP exclusively, that only needs the secret and the correct time on the device. The secret is cached along with the passwords on the device.
Nope, just tested. There are hardware OTP devices that have no Internet connectivity. As far as I know, all OTP protocols are offline-friendly.
I have used the free Bitwarden now for untold years. It not only houses passwords for personal applications, I use it to keep track of my business account passwords as well. The only problem I’ve had with Bitwarden is their recent UI retool which ended up causing a huge ruckus among the user base to the point where they gave an option to switch back.
There is a certain level of trust for whatever option you choose. If you use Bitwarden free, then you have to trust that Bitwarden will keep your data is safe on their servers. If you self host, the onus of trust lies in you’re ability to secure your server, and to the extent that you trust your host as well. The latter option leaves me a bit queasy, so I do not selfhost my passwords in a selfhosted vault.
Others may have more trust in their security skills than I do. LOL There’s just a lot of sensitive data I have housed within Bitwarden free. Selfhosting it would keep me up at nights.
The only problem I’ve had with Bitwarden is their recent UI retool which ended up causing a huge ruckus among the user base to the point where they gave an option to switch back.
I think the new UI is pretty terrible. I didn’t know until you mentioned it, [email protected], that there was an option to revert. I can’t find it in the settings - how does one revert to the prior UI?
On the other hand, using bitwarden might require some level of trust. How much should I trust the company to use the free service?
How do I know if my passwords would be safe, not being exposed to the wide net?Wouldn’t these questions be as true of the VPS service that hosts Vaultwarden as of Bitwarden?
If my internet at home was better I would be selfhosting Vaultwarden and use a full vpn on my laptop/phone/tablet when leaving the house.
Now I’m using KeepassXC with my home pc as the true source and syncing copies of the database to my laptop and phone.No, you don’t need to trust the VPS provider. The VaultaWarden password storage is encrypted, and the master password is never transmitted to the server. The passwords are decrypted only locally on your device.
How does that differ from Bitwarden?
To my knowledge it’s not supposed to differ.
If you trust that the client (which is open source) is doing what it’s supposed to do, security-wise I don’t think there’s a difference between self-hosting and using Bitwarden’s service.
