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I used to brag that I didn’t need an app to help me create a strong password and remember it.
This was when I was in school, and things changed rapidly after that, with new apps, services, and websites becoming part of daily life.
I put my ego aside and finally started using password managers on my phones and computer. Back in the day, LastPass was my favorite password manager, and I used it on all my devices.
The free tier of the app was powerful enough for casual users like me, with plenty of handy features to seamlessly manage passwords.
However, little did I know that those days were numbered, and I would soon start to look for alternatives.
Thankfully, my hunt for a better password manager didn’t last long. After a week of using Bitwarden, I moved all my passwords to this open source password manager.
After I started using the Bitwarden setup on all my devices, I couldn’t help but abandon LastPass for good. Here is why.
Is the world ready for passkeys, or should you wait a little longer?
All password managers can create and store passwords, and pretty much all of them do a good job at it.
While those are some of the core functionalities of a password manager, I also need it to work seamlessly across all my devices, because I have three smartphones, a laptop, and a Mac.
LastPass can run smoothly on all the devices I own, but it no longer offers the same value it once did for those who don’t want to buy a subscription.
In 2021, LastPass effectively killed my favorite feature in its free tier, restricting its syncing capability to a single device type.
I can use LastPass on an unlimited number of computers or mobile devices, but not on both device types.
While unlimited device syncing across platforms used to be available for free users when I started using LastPass, the company changed its policy in 2021 to make it exclusive to Premium customers.
I bought a LastPass Premium subscription, which is $36 a year, for that one feature, but I eventually canceled it after using Bitwarden, an open source password manager with pretty much everything that you need to manage your passwords.
Its biggest strength isn’t that it’s open source. I moved all my passwords to Bitwarden because it has what I loved about LastPass, without requiring me to pay a fee.
My Bitwarden setup is simple. I use the Bitwarden browser extension on my PC and Mac, a Bitwarden mobile app on my Android phones and iPhone 16e.
I use a free account, have autofill enabled on both desktop and mobile, and use biometric unlock for quick access on mobile.
Regardless of the device I use, Bitwarden has a single vault that stays synced across all of them.
So, if you create and store a password on your Mac, you can access and use that login information from a Bitwarden mobile app on an Android phone moments later.
Not only that, but if you change the password on one device, it’ll sync automatically. The new password is automatically available across all your devices that have Bitwarden installed.
Still, you’ll need to use the same account to log in to Bitwarden on all your devices.
This means I can use whichever device I want, without worrying about passwords to log in to use a specific platform.
The vault is secure and end-to-end encrypted (AES 256-bit encryption), which gives me the peace of mind that my information is safe.
Another huge advantage it has over LastPass is its open source nature. Unlike closed source software like LastPass, the Bitwarden source code is open for review.
While open source doesn’t guarantee that it won’t suffer a data breach like LastPass in 2022, it makes Bitwarden easier to trust. I don’t have to take the company’s claims at face value.
For most people, the only advantage LastPass has over Bitwarden is a more polished user experience.
However, for apps like password managers, a more polished interface matters less than it does for apps that you use throughout the day.
Nobody interacts with a password manager for hours. It only takes a few seconds to save a login, autofill credentials, and generate or update a password. It’s the kind of app that feels like it’s barely there.
So, the user experience in Bitwarden needed to be good enough, and nothing more than that. It is exactly that.
Even if LastPass makes the cross-device syncing feature free again, I have no solid reason to leave Bitwarden. That ship has sailed, thanks to LastPass.
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