I Do Not Recommend Bitwarden
maxloh
51 points
45 comments
May 02, 2026
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Discussion Highlights (14 comments)
lambdadelirium
Full of skill issues
princevegeta89
Well, I know Bitwarden is pretty demanding and also not so straightforward to do self-hosting. But we have Vaultwarden which is ridiculously easy to deploy and also very lightweight while being immensely popular; has never had any major security incidents so far - and it has thousands of eyes on it for every single commit. I've been hosting this for three years now and I have never had a single problem with it. always worked with my Bitwarden clients on all of my devices. So if you would like to, try Vaultwarden.
kotaKat
Ahahahah, I am enjoying the little turn-off-your-Javascript warning that comes back when you click on a link in a new tab from the page to something linked in the article. My tab's title: "Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels?"
pretzellogician
I'm a free Bitwarden user, I don't plan to self-host stuff, and... honestly I have no idea what this person is going on about. And "Aside from the aforementioned technical details, Bitwarden is (and has always been) one of the subjectively worst applications on my phones and my desktop in terms of user interface. " Really!!? How many apps has this person used?
sph
Complaining about rent-seeking for $20/year? OK mate.
prism56
I don't self host Bitwarden so 90% of this doesn't really apply. I did however want to comment on the tab changing it's favicon and title everytime you change to another tab. Quite a cool "advertising" method for what javascript can do.
jrm4
Probably my biggest tech hill-i'll-die-on is: Password management involving a 3rd party is dumb and should never ever have been a thing. Before two parties had the secret (or something related to it) and now three parties have it and that's objectively worse -- even taking into account "the lazy user" or whatever. I know we're past that in a lot of places for a lot of people, but nope, my dad and his printed out sheet of password next to his desk is still beating every company out there.
cjs_ac
I use pass[0], and it works well for me. It's secured by PGP and passwords are shared between devices using git. [0] https://www.passwordstore.org/
username135
ive been rather fond of keepass for the last however many years or decades now. Its all a blur.
SamDc73
Bitwarden have in my opinion is one of the BEST business models a user can ask for. It's open-source, and I can self-host (100% free) and the free version is really, really good too, and then a premium version is $20/year which is very reasonably priced. Also for cloud hosted password manager, you're always going to have attacks no matter what, but at least they are transparent about it .. (unlike say LastPass, Norton LifeLock, Keeper and possibly others). For self-hosting it might be better security, solely because no one cares to attack it, but it's not going to be more secure form engineering best practices POV (but again I might be wrong .. I'm not a security engineer of any kind)
subhobroto
Vaultwarden is a very lean implementation of Bitwarden but if you want to look into an alternative to the Bitwarden ecosystem, I recommend - AliasVault https://github.com/aliasvault/aliasvault - check it out!
SV_BubbleTime
I agree that there are some goofy UX things. I don’t care about self-hosting. And the author goes to great care to write about every issue; then admits all software has issues and Bitwarden has fixed their issues as they come up. Overall their actionable advice that different types of credentials might need different software is good. The rest seems like ax grinding.
AntonyGarand
As a tangent, this site will overwrite its <title> and favicon if your browser changes tab to one of many random options, as well as showing an overlay highlighting the risk of keeping javascript enabled for once you're back. I dug around and found them listed within the `kill.js` file[0]. It uses the visibilitychange[1] API and swaps it to one of the following: Official Church of Scientology: Difficulties on the Job - Online Course Ask HN: How could I safely contact drug cartels? The internet used to be fun am I boring - Google Search what is punycode - Google Search arguments for HN comment - Google Search how to hack coworker's phone - Google Search censorship on hacker news - Google Search rust programming socks - Google Shopping Adult entertainment clubs - Google Maps Pick up lines suggestions - ChatGPT Online debate argument suggestions - ChatGPT The Flat Earth Society Amazon.com: taylor swift merch Amazon.com: waifu pillow /adv/ - topple government - Advice - 4chan r/wallstreetbets on Reddit Infowars: There's a War on For Your Mind! birds aren't real at DuckDuckGo Lincoln MT Cabins For Sale - Zillow The Anarchist Cookbook by William Powell | Goodreads Fifty Shades of Grey | Netflix jeff bezos nudes - Google Image Search zuckerberg nudes - Google Image Search bigfoot nudes - Google Image Search Rick Astley - Never Gonna Give You Up - YouTube Pennsylvania Bigfoot Conference - Channel 5 - YouTube Linus goes into a real girl's bedroom - Linus Tech Tips - YouTube MrBeast en Español - YouTube FTX Cryptocurrency Exchange [0] https://xn--gckvb8fzb.com/js/kill.js [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Document/vi...
sshine
I switched to self-hosted Vaultwarden a couple of years ago because of all the bad choices of Mozilla (I was using Firefox Sync and wanted something else badly). Sadly, Bitwarden's browser clients are antiquated (they don't auto-generate and save passwords as I sign up, I kind of have to create them manually ahead of time, and if anything botches in the signup, e.g. a server-side password validation rule), I now have a password that won't work, I have to find the entry in the database and update it to something else... geez, if it would just automatically overwrite the password every time I submit with a new one. Vaultwarden's great, but the inferior browser clients just don't make up for it. I'm back on Firefox Sync until I find something that's technically sufficient.