Comment by sondr3 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sondr3 | Hacker News Reader

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Throughout the years I've tried most of the more popular ones on the market, some times forced via work and other times because I was curious.

- KeePassXC: tried this when I was looking for a self-hosted, open-source alternative to LastPass years ago. Was surprised at how well it worked, but syncing was too much of a hassle so I gave up fairly quickly.

- 1Password: my favorite of the bunch so far, great UI and UX, works seamlessly across all my devices with all the stuff I want and need: credit card info, logins, 2FA, automatic hidden email generation via Fastmail, easy sharing and family accounts work really well, CLI for use in scripts and now builtin SSH-key management. Not a huge fan of the subscription model, but probably the service I am most happy to pay for.

- LastPass: was forced to use this at my previous job, absolutely hated it. The UI and UX feels ten years behind 1Pass and Bitwarden, it's slow and not nearly as featureful as the alternatives. I switched from them when they were bought out by LogMeIn, but it doesn't look like the product has meaningfully changed since then.

- BitWarden: played around with this for a while, but didn't switch from 1Pass mostly because I am not willing to host something like this myself and it costs the same as 1Pass with less features and polish.

Personally, I would recommend 1Pass for a "it just works" and Bitwarden hosted yourself if you want the same but on your own premises via https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden.

> 1Password: my favorite of the bunch so far, great UI and UX

Weird, I can't stand the 1Password UI/UX. I've used it at work for two years now, so I can get around ok at this point, but for a long time I struggled to find even basic functionality. Also the keyboard navigability is garbage.

> BitWarden: played around with this for a while, but didn't switch from 1Pass mostly because I am not willing to host something like this myself and it costs the same as 1Pass with less features and polish.

The SaaS Bitwarden offering is less expensive than 1Password at all tiers, plus there's a (functional) free tier.

I will say, 1Password does seem to be the most secure of the SaaS options. But this is just my vague impression -- I haven't looked into it closely, nor am I qualified to.

> syncing was too much of a hassle so I gave up fairly quickly.

Why can't you use Dropbox or Google Drive to sync? Seems fairly easy.

You can, and it's trivial. I've never had a problem after a decade of constant use. My KeePassXC DB is synced between my phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop, and they all stay perfectly in sync. I've been scratching my head for this whole decade about why people want some SaaS for this.

The only use case I found (though still quite possible) is if I have NO access at all to any of my devices, and I only have access to internet, and precisely - web only. I could go to 1Password website (for example, in an internet cafe or via someone’s tablet), get into my vaults with the master key and the password, and start recovering other passwords, details etc. Without SaaS, it would be barely possible.

Bitwarden has a free service that I've been using fine for a few years.

I really like 1password but the the only thing that keeps me away right now, and I would love to hear that it's changed, is that the only way to use 1Password outside of macOS/iOS requires the subscription service.

You used to have Dropbox/folder sync until 1Password 7 (I've used it that way on Windows since 1P4), but 1P8 dropped that. You can still use 1P7 and it'll receive security updates IIRC, but it's gone from app stores unless you already downloaded it (which is annoying in other ways too: 1P8 is missing some languages that 1P7 had).

Unless you mean subscription pricing which you could side-step before with one-time licenses, but those are gone now too.

I sync KeyPassXC with Google drive across all my devices no problem.

Same (well, different file sync but same idea). Love this approach. 4 devices and counting. Zero problems.

Maybe cause I don't use this service a lot. What's the easiest way to use google drive to sync across Linux, MacOS and iOS?

> - BitWarden: played around with this for a while, but didn't switch from 1Pass mostly because I am not willing to host something like this myself and it costs the same as 1Pass with less features and polish.

This alone makes me doubt the reliability of your assessment.

A quick google:

1password free: nope.

1password personal: 36 usd yearly

1password family: 60 usd yearly

Bitwarden free: almost every important feature available.

Bitwarden personal: 10 usd yearly

Bitwarden family: 40 usd yearly

Yeah, not even close

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