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Goodbye LastPass, Hello Bitwarden


LastPass is a great tool, but I've found a solution I like more.

TL;DR

Try Bitwarden

Try Bitwarden


I noticed an event on my calendar called "Cancel LastPass". I had put it here months ago. Tomorrow my yearly registration fee gets deducted from my PayPal account. Today I canceled it. Let me explain why...

Our company has purchased a site-wide license to LastPass and has been encouraging employees to use it for better security. I've been using my personal LastPass account for over 10 years. I had thousands of passwords in there. Yeah, it could probably use some cleaning.

A discussion arose on slack about LastPass vs 1Password. I've never tried 1Password because I've been perfectly happy with LastPass. Plus, I've had my account for so long that my subscription was super cheap. Along the line, someone mentioned that because I have Synology I should just use a self-hosted version of Bitwarden.

I'd never heard of Bitwarden. I like the idea of self-hosting all my passwords, but I worried that Bitwarden would be a cheap, open-source knock-off of LastPass and I would hate it. But I decided to try it.

I was quite impressed with the whole process. I installed it using a docker container and set up a secure subdomain pointing to my Bitwarden server. I then did an export of all my LastPass passwords and imported them into Bitwarden. Bitwarden had instructions for everything.

I then installed the iOS app on my phone and the Chrome extension on my browser and gave it a try. I added a calendar item for when my LastPass renewal came due to see if I would be ready to cancel or not.

Well, that day has arrived. I've been completely impressed with Bitwarden. I haven't had any desire to go back to LastPass in all this time.

Update: The Bitwarden Server image I was using has been renamed to Vaultwarden. I'm adding this snippet to help me remember the quickest way to upgrade my docker image on Synology.

1sudo su -
2docker run -d --name vaultwarden -v /volume1/docker/bitwarden:/data -p 8085:80 vaultwarden/server:latest

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Dustin Davis

Dustin Davis is a software engineer, people manager, hacker, and entreprenuer. He loves to develop systems and automation. He lives with his wife and five kids in Utah.

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Dustin Davis