The recent update broke everything (it automatically locks on app exit both on Android and iOS, even if the automatic lock is set to never)
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Bitwarden doesnt rely on the cloud either. You can host it yourself or use another backend like Vaultwarden.
If I’m hosting it myself then I might as well just use KeePass right? Bitwarden doesn’t add any value at that point besides keeping the passwords in sync - which is a non issue for me, because that’s already covered as part of the greater equation of keeping my files in general in sync.
I’ve considered this but it’s a hassle dealing with cross device sync. I’ve tried to store my DB file on Google drive. I’ve tried to store everything in a Git repo. But in the end, stuff always ends up in the cloud.
I’m not sure why it’s a hassle? I use syncthing-fork to sync with my Raspberry Pi. It’s pretty low maintenance and I haven’t really had any issues. Passwords are too important to trust to a third-party, and LassPass has show on several occasions how stupid it is to trust a third-party cloud provider with your passwords.
Also, BitWarden has a big drawback for me on desktop, and that is it can’t auto-type passwords - which is unacceptable for me, since I spend a lot of time working out of remote desktop windows and VMs as part of my job.
LOL
I’m not sure why it’s a hassle?
Continues to explain how it is a hassle (syncthing, fork, raspberry pi, …)
Btw. there’s pretty good autotype for Bitwarden/Valutwarden and I find it at least on par with the KeePass feature. You don’t even need to install the full blown client for it to work! https://github.com/anonymous1184/bitwarden-autotype
Google drive is the cloud.
really? that’s where i mostly use it, and to me it seems to work great! but on the other hand, i haven’t really experienced it anywhere else
For me it is slow to start.
It make chrome crash, unless Bitwarden is manual killed.
Same here
How so? It opens, and works reasonably for me, on a non top tier phone.
Its so slow and lagging. Even its opensource , i feels it is a very heavy app.
How many KDF iterations did you set your vault to? I have mine at 600,000 so it definitely takes a moment (~3 sec) to decrypt on older devices.
The decryption being compute heavy is by design. You only need to decrypt once to unlock your vault, but someone brute forcing it would need to decrypt a billion+ times. Increasing compute needed for decryption makes it more expensive to brute force your master password.
In fact, LastPass made the mistake of setting their default iteration count to 1000 before they got breached and got a ton of flak for it.
I stored probably a 20 passwords in bitwarden. Its not so much
It doesn’t matter how many passwords you are storing inside. It’s the number of cycles of decryption needed to be performed in order to unlock the vault. More cycles = more time.
You can have an empty vault and it will still be slow to decrypt with a high kdf iteration count/expensive algorithm.
You can think of it as an old fashioned safe with a hand crank. You put in the key and turn the crank. It doesn’t matter if the safe is empty or not, as long as you need to turn the crank 1000 times to open it it WILL be slower than a safe that only needs 10 turns. Especially so if you have a 10 year old (less powerful device) turning the crank.
As someone with quite a few passwords in Bitwarden, I think the amount of passwords very much matters. The search UI seems to try to stuff all entries into a flat list (even though I have folders) and that’s adding lag and slowdown after I’ve already waited for decryption to take place.
It’s not annoying enough for me to look for a fix, but if you add more than a couple hundred passwords, the amount of entries starts to matter.
Hmm… I need to test this out then. I have about 200+ entries across multiple folders, but I’m not seeing much of a slowdown. But then again most of my hardware is pretty good (except for one or two devices).
Seems like it’s a you/your specific phone problem. Everyone else says it runs well. I have like 130 saved entries on mine and no lag.
I haven’t used it outside of Windows Firefox and Android but it works great for me as well.
For mobile specifically: Rarely do I have any issues, and when I do, I have a quick panel button for Bitwarden (top drag down menu) that lets me manually trigger it. I can’t think of any apps that it doesn’t work with. My one nit is that autofill credit card info doesn’t work often, but obv that’s a secondary use, and the info is still with me if I ever need it on the go. And adding new login info can be a little tedious on mobile – much easier to create it first, then autofill. Highly appreciate the 2FA feature too. The auto copy feature feels really seamless regardless of if I’m on my phone or not.
I’d be curious what issues you seem to be running into with it.
I fit into about the same categories of use as you do, and I agree with most of your assessments. My one complaint is that, when I go to enter my master password the keyboard no longer pops up automatically, instead requiring that I tap the password field to bring it up. That stated happening sometime last year, and I’ve lived with it, but it’s just a quality of life thing that I miss.
I had so many issues with Bitwarden on Android that I couldn’t use it. I’m using KeepassDX. It works well on Android, is FOSS, and isn’t cloud based.
Nice
KeePass is fantastic and it has a shitload of options as to where the database is located. You can have it stored on the device or on a server using whatever protocol.
I’ve been using the official app on GrapheneOS on a Pixel a for over two years, havent had any issues and everything is very responsive.
What model phone do you have?
Redmi note 8
I also use this phone and doesn’t seem to have any issue, and I have over 700 entires in my bitwarden vault. My main browser is firefox though. If the issue is bitwarden is slow to unlock the vault, this is normal if your vault has high KDF iterations. Also, if you’re using the stock os, mi ui is very aggressive at killing background tasks, which means bitwarden will need to be relaunched over and over again and have to unlock the vault again every time, which further increase the perception of slowness.
It has problems on the stock MIUI ROM. I have the same phone, I have experienced it. The autofill feature used to turn off automatically.
I installed the official LineageOS, some time ago. Now, it works great, no problems at all.
I haven’t had any troubles, but on the phone I use it just to insert the passwords. For everything else I use it on pc.
It is. Also, I’d personally recommend using a password manager that doesn’t rely on the cloud, such as KeePassDX.
You can selfhost the Bitwarden server.
Not really. Never noticed a problem. I’m on Xperia 1 III running LineageOS 20 and everything’s pretty snappy.
Had it for a few years now on my samsung N20U and I’ve never had any sort of issues.
Really, bitwarden is poorly optimized everywhere. They cut corners at every expense using cross-platform frameworks, specifically web technologies on desktop and Xamarin on mobile. I’m hoping that someday someone writes a better client. But at least the main client has autofill down pretty well, it just becomes a pain when you want to actually do some advanced editing
Xamarin on mobile, at least on Android, isn’t necessarily slow by any margin. The command line interface being a Javascript program is almost comically bad (and slow as well), but the Android app would be about this speed whether it used Java or dotnet.
The Electron stuff is rather annoying, but it makes sense since the extension has to run from an addon popup anyway. They could do some weird WASM tricks to share code with a native implementation, but that sounds like a pain to do proper security analysis on.
I’m with you, waiting for better frontends. On the other hand, I’m also eagerly awaiting passkey support. If someone were to create the Vaultwarden of frontends, perhaps Bitwarden would put more effort into improving their client performance.
Having used LastPass for work, Bitwarden is optimized AF compared to it.
Please tell them to leave LastPass if they haven’t already.
They have way too many leaks all the time.
We tried using legal means, but the contract we signed doesn’t let us.
Someone else knows the pain!
I have a Pixel 7 Pro. It loads fast enough for me (~3s) considering I have 800+ entries and using argon2id with 20 KDF iterations, 256MB of memory and 8 parallelism.
I recently had to uninstall and reinstall both the browser extension and mobile app for bitwarden for me and it started to operate better. The main issue was whenever I tried to access either a password or card details it would freeze and crash and not insert or provide any details.
