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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

Anybody use this along with a non-tech significant other? How does it compare to commercial password managers in terms of usability?

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I trained my parents to use KeePassX 2.0 and they do OK with it. They're very tech non-savy but do fine with it because they only have to remember one password. I also made sure they use Timemachine for OSX so they don't lose their database. Prior to this they had a physical notebook and sticky notes with passwords written on them.

I currently use KeePass (regular one, not XC) with a trigger to sync with dropbox. It works very well to share passwords with my wife but it requires a bit of effort to setup (I mean for non tech people).

I have not tried KeePassXC yet (I'm under Windows), but I wonder how it compares for this kind of setup.

Usability is too low, unapproachable for non techies. Even my somewhat technical spouse found it unusable after a few months.

It could be better with good browser plugins, but then you have the same security tradeoffs as more polished services like Bitwarden or LastPass.

> with good browser plugins

This latest version KeePassXC has a whole new browser plugin:

https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc-browser

So maybe it has reached that point now? Not that I've tried it, but it's at least promising that they've been working on it.

> but then you have the same security tradeoffs as more polished services like Bitwarden or LastPass.

Not exactly. The database is handled with an independent program. With the new model, AFAIK, the browser extensions have no idea what records exist and can only query - and record matching is actually authenticated before plugin sees anything.

Wasn't it shown recently that LastPass literally downloads JS from their servers to run on specified pages for compatibility? I suppose that's good for ease of use, but pretty scary from a security tradeoffs perspective and indeed KeePassHttp doesn't require you to make any sort of tradeoff like that.

I use KeeFox with it and really find it good (even better with the latest update, that made it compatible with Chrome as well)

It's not too bad at all. You need to walk through it with many users.

My wife, parents and in-laws all use it. The only thing that is a gotcha is sync. It's isn't obvious to folks that when you open a synced vault on an iOS device that it may not sync back.

Without syncing or shared folders, I haven't tried it.

You can sync it over Dropbox or a similar service. I actually prefer it that way, since it decouples the password manager from the syncing/sharing service.

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