WHY I SWITCHED TO BITWARDEN FOR MY PASSWORD MANAGER

BITWARDEN IS A GREAT FREE OPTION FOR PASSWORD MANAGEMENT, ESPECIALLY WITH SOME SETTINGS TWEAKS.

- JARED NEWMAN

Like many former users of LastPass, I was miffed when the company delivered an ultimatum to nonpaying customers last year (fave.co/ 3eFXIGU). I’ve since switched to Bitwarden, and haven’t looked back.

Without a $36 per year subscription, LastPass (fave.co/3HwaMbf) now limits users to one device type—mobile or computer— per account. That means free users must choose between accessing their passwords on either a laptop or a phone, which isn’t much of a choice for a lot of people.

While I’m not fundamentally opposed to paying for useful services, I don’t like being forced to pay for something when a company can’t make its freemium business model work. With password managers in particular, there are plenty of other options, both free and paid, that work just as well as LastPass did.

And so I took my years of LastPass passwords and moved them over to Bitwarden (fave.co/3SgHaCQ), another password manager that’s free for basic personal use. The transition was mostly painless, though I ran into a few snags along the way.

While my colleagues Michael Ansaldo and Alaina Yee have written a full Bitwarden review (fave.co/3D904Hp), I thought I’d relate a bit more about my personal experience with the software, plus some ways to make it work even better.

PASSWORD MANAGERS: A RECAP

As a refresher, password managers are a great way to break the bad habit of using the same or similar passwords across multiple apps or websites, or even having to remember lots of passwords in the first place. Here’s how it works, using Bitwarden as an example: