The software is open-source, which ticked one major box for me, and can be installed on a relatively small VPS. BitwardenĪfter doing my research I settled on Bitwarden’s self-hosted option which is completely free of licensing fees.

This post won’t go into all the features of Bitwarden as those can easily be found on the Bitwarden website. Since platforms like LastPass are not open source, usage of such services requires a certain level of trust that the claims made on their website are indeed true - but ultimately, there is simply no way to know. I no longer wanted to use a SaaS service where terms of service can change on short notice and I wanted something open source. I gave this a lot of thought and decided to start the search for an alternative. Limiting a free plan by device type, for me anyway, defeats the purpose of having a password manager. In an odd move by LastPass, only a single type of device would be free to use and for any other device type, you would need to pay a subscription fee to use at around $3 per user per month. However, in early 2021 LastPass announced that from Mait would no longer support a fully free tier. It was easy to use, I didn’t have to host anything, and hence I didn’t have to worry about monitoring a server, having to arrange backups, or setup SSL certificates. For the longest time, I used LastPass as my password manager of choice.

Bitwarden free account