RyanL Bitwarden Employee

Hello everyone!

Starting in the next release, the Bitwarden apps published to the various stores will be the commercially licensed builds. No action is needed, and the apps will work exactly as they do today.

Bitwarden remains committed to open source security and transparency
The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone

If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread. Thanks all!

EDIT:

Bitwarden is not going closed-source
You can still fork Bitwarden
No change to self-hosting, the licensing change affects those who are repackaging and reselling Bitwarden
The free plan is here to stay permanently

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[–] 147 points 6 days ago (25 children)

Well, we all know how this ends...

It's a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it's easily the best password manager I've used, and I'm in IT, I've used a bunch.

Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I'll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.

I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto it's platform. We had a good run, time to move on.

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  • [–] 28 points 6 days ago (22 children)
  • [–] 40 points 6 days ago

    If I'm going to have to host my own infrastructure, I don't want it tied to Bitwarden, given the new direction of the company.

    I fully support Vaultwarden though, and I wish them well.

    I'll be going with KeyPassXC and Syncthing.

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  • [–] 24 points 6 days ago (8 children)

    Vaultwarden (and all the client apps) depend on Bitwarden for the API spec. If Bitwarden introduces closed features in the API that Vaultwarden can't/won't implement, but the client apps do, it will split the spec. They can also introduce API license keys, which would render Vaultwarden mostly irrelevant.

    The only way for Vaultwarden to remain relevant going forward is to own it and split ways from Bitwarden. This would in turn mean that the FOSS client apps have to decide which to support. But I think the ecosystem is going to fragment eventually anyway, so the sooner every app decides which way they want to go, the better.

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  • [–] 9 points 6 days ago (11 children)

    I'm. Using Vaultgarden but its not clear if the Android app will still be available.

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    [–] 27 points 6 days ago

    Sure, it's no change for self hosters currently, but it's one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I've been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven't hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I'd love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I've thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don't have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS's.

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  • [–] 8 points 5 days ago

    I pay for their product and its totally worth. It was $10 for the longest time and much like everything in the last few years has increased price to what it is actually worth. To be honest $20 a year is still stupid cheap and worth it to keep them developing the product. Bitwarden is also one of the few password managers that hasn't had a user data breach.

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  • [–] 18 points 6 days ago (1 child)
  • [–] 17 points 6 days ago

    Heh, I'm looking at you to those people that looked at me weird because I told them I was good with Keepass!

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  • [–] 15 points 6 days ago

    Are they still going to publish the Android client app via their own F-Droid repository?

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  • wow, setting up vaultwarden quadlet to work with my selfhosted OIDC sso was stupid easy. Migrating my bitwarden setup to it took no time at all. The extra step was setting up some extra pocketid passkeys to be stored on non-vaultwarden hosted systems (ie. google) to prevent myself from being locked out in case vaultwarden crashes (which probably was a good idea to do regardless). Just need to add the data volume to my regular backup.

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  • [–] 5 points 5 days ago (1 child)

    Side note: I just tried switching to KeePassXC and it seems pretty fine, except for one caveat. If you installed your browser (probs FF or Librewolf) through flatpak or snap on Linux, the browser extension will not work.

    I had to change to the non-Flatpak ver of Librewolf on my Fedora PC, which sucked a little lol 😅

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  • [–] 6 points 6 days ago (3 children)

    Having only ever used keepass, what was the advantage of bitwarden? That you didn't need to sync it yourself?

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    [–] 7 points 6 days ago (2 children)

    There is no way I'm self hosting something this important... So now I'm not sure what to do actually.

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  • [–] 11 points 6 days ago

    That's why I'm just using KeePass. It's just an encrypted file that you can store on whatever storage you want and sync with existing solutions like Syncthing etc.

    Yes it's a bit finicky when you edit the file on multiple devices before they've synced but it works very well for me..

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