I am looking into password managers, as number of my accounts are increasing. Currently I am weighing two options:
- Host Vaultwarden on a VPS, or
- Use the free bitwarden service.
I want to know how they are in practical aspects.
While I am fine self-hosting many services, password managers seem to be one of the most critical services that should not admit downtime. I surely cannot keep it up, as I need to update it time to time.
On the other hand, using bitwarden might require some level of trust. How much should I trust the company to use the free service? How do I know if my passwords would be safe, not being exposed to the wide net?
I want to gauge pros and cons, are there aspects I missed? How are your opinions on this? If you are self-hosting vaultwarden, how do you manage the downtime? Thanks in advance!
One little bonus for using Vaultwarden is that you get access to premium features for free. But still, I put availability much higher when it comes to password management, so I would go with paid Bitwarden. That is what I did before moving to Keepass.
The Bitwarden clients cache your data locally. So even if your Vaultwarden goes down, you’ll still be able to access your passwords. Just not sync new ones or make changes.
I second Vaultwarden, have been running it for a few years and even had a catastrophic host failure that I recovered from. was able to use the clients on both phone and laptop while building new host
There is a backup image you can run to take backups of the SQLite DB, used that a few times as the DB got tangled.
Also anything you host should have a good 3-2-1 backup strategy