I used it in conjunction with Vaultwarden for a year with the idea that I'd evaluate it as a family-wide replacement for 1P.
In the end I went back to 1P.
1P does some things amazingly well. Here's the shortlist:
- It loads quickly. This wasn't the reason I went back to 1P, but it loads an order of magnitude more quickly than any of Bitwarden's clients: Windows, Linux, iOS, Mac. Bitwarden is slow, slow, slow. I was willing to put up with it for freedom. I wanted Electron 1P to be awful. It's not. Electron Bitwarden kinda is...
- The (I can't believe I'm saying this) killer feature: being able to sort passwords by date (or well - being able to sort at all). If you use a password manager long enough, you'll have a lot of passwords. Sometimes you need to find one manually. Bitwarden made this far more difficult than it needs to be. There's no way to sort the passwords. You have to use the (lackluster) search.
- 1P can put your most recent passwords, secrets and make them easily accessible by default. Yep, more sorting issues. This is particularly helpful in my work related to software and infra development. There are often a lot of secrets, especially during spikes. It's nice to not have to hunt for them too much.
- Shared vaults are better with 1P. Easy to move secrets, easy to de-dupe. Etc. etc.
Everything about Bitwarden is fine for a single, technical user, but it's not for sharing secrets with non-technical family members at any scale. It's just too clumsy with too many sharp edges.
I really, really wanted to leave 1P behind. But I came back to it. And I don't regret it.