Despite the massive breach where we found out that notes (where lots of people stored previous passwords) were not stored encrypted by Lastpass, I have stuck with them for years because its hard to switch services.
Recently I realized that both my wife and I were paying for 2 separate password manager services and we need to consolidate down to one.
Staying with LastPass and moving to a family account would only cost $4/m which is still 1/2 what we were paying combined.
Is there another manager that offers Apple, Android, and Browser based applications/plugins? Ideally also with an authentication app, though I can swap to any authentication if I need to so its just a nice to have.
Check out BitWarden. You can use a Collection to share passwords with each other. Free, though I think the TOTP functionality is in the Premium subscription ($10/yr).
I like your suggestion, forwarded to partner. Also this way we both have to go through some pain to transfer and its not just them.
I think bitwarden checks all the boxes. It’s 3.33$ per month for a family plan ( 6 users). I’ve used it for a long time and I’m happy with it.
If you want more privacy you can always self host vault warden and use that. In which case you have full access to the premium features and you just pay the hosting costs.
Bitwarden can be set as the default password manager in browsers. Stores TOTP codes, has a browser plugin, has android app and iOS app.
Works flawlessly in my experience ( Linux/macbook/android).
No experience with iphones, but I assume it is fully supported.
Using LastPass now, after we learned so much about them from that breach, is inadvisable. Security is the whole point of a password manager, so no matter what the price, a password manager run by a company that can’t do security, and tries to hide their poor practices behind a wall of secrecy and deceit, is not a good option.
BitWarden is free, or $10 per year for premium, or $40 for the family version where you get 6 accounts. It’s open source and the developers are quick to respond to issues. It’s a refreshing contrast to the culture of secrecy and complacency that is LastPass.
1Password is also well thought of, but not open source.
Proton Pass or Bitwarden are both very good options. Here is my breakdown of their pros and cons:
Pros of Proton Pass over bitwarden
- Much better UI/UX (in terms of looks and ease to navigate)
- The app is feels much faster than Bitwarden’s, maybe its not objectively, but it feels lightyears ahead in terms of speed
- Possibility for separate email and username fields
- more seamless integration with simplelogin aliases than what Bitwarden has
- TOTP is available in the free version
Cons of proton pass compared with bitwarden:
- No “Identity” item type (vault item where you can store info about yourself like your SSN etc.)
- No payment card autofill
- Can only register the “generic” 6-digit type of TOTP (Steam guard TOTP didn’t work when I tried it)
- No custom fields that auto-fill on the web page
- less settings in general, for example, you can’t decide of the hashing algorithm of your account’s password, and you can’t tweak the hashing parameters
- more expensive
- less “Foss”: the server code is not published and there are no 3rd party servers like vaultwarden
Pros of Proton Pass over bitwarden
- Much better UI/UX (in terms of looks and ease to navigate)
- The app is feels much faster than Bitwarden’s, maybe its not objectively, but it feels lightyears ahead in terms of >speed
- Possibility for separate email and username fields
- more seamless integration with simplelogin aliases than what Bitwarden has
- TOTP is available in the free version
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Bitwarden is currently working on redesigning their apps, which will also include new native mobile apps that will fix the current speed issues. You can already test them if you are interested.
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Even if Bitwarden doesn’t have as straightforward implementation regarding the separate email and username fields, you can easily use custom fields to solve this issue. As you also noted, Bitwarden will also autofill these.
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Even though Proton’s SimpleLogin implementation is more simple and likely easier to use compared to Bitwarden, it also poses a serious lock-in issue with Proton Pass. If you ever decide to downgrade to a free plan, Proton will disable all your aliases that go beyond the max limit (10) in the free plan. This is a big contrast to even SimpleLogin that will keep all of your aliases operational even if you downgrade to the free plan. I would also take Bitwarden’s alias implementation over Proton Pass because they support multiple different aliasing providers compared to just SimpleLogin. In the past I have had issues registering a SimpleLogin alias for some sites, so all I needed to do was to change to DuckDuckGo that Bitwarden also supports and the site accepted that one. This is also a feature I doubt Proton would never implement because they own SimpleLogin.
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Proton’s free version only supports three TOTP logins, so not very usable, and Bitwarden’s Premium plan is only $10 per year, so not a big deal to upgrade to that if you need this feature.
To add to this point,
I was using ProtonMail when I finally got serious about generating new email aliases for everything. I went as far as upgrading my plan and started setting up SimpleLogin when I ran into the fact that I couldn’t just send from arbitrary addresses using a domain THAT I OWN. I couldn’t even reply to emails to a particular alias, FROM that alias. It looks mighty sketchy to the other party when you reply from some address they didn’t know about with the contents of someone else’s email (for all they know). Trying to explain this to others was a terrible experience.
I came across Fastmail, saw they integrated with Bitwarden via API so Bitwarden could create aliases (Fastmail calls them “masked emails”), and verified that I could both send from arbitrary addresses using my own domain and easily reply from masked addresses properly. I moved over and I’ve loved it ever since.
As I understand it, Proton is still working on the sending feature I wanted but it’s obviously not a priority for them.
IMO, Fastmail + Bitwarden is a much stronger feature set than Proton + SimpleLogin. Which is nuts considering Proton/SimpleLogin’s close relationship.
If I ever want to migrate from Fastmail, it’s a DNS change…
Passkeys have been available in Bitwardens mobile apps for some time: https://bitwarden.com/help/storing-passkeys/
It took me less than 30 minutes to transfer my LastPass vault to Proton Pass. The actual transfer took under a minute, then I just had to reorganize the folders. Definitely worth the switch.
