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by kileywm 2165 days ago
Having used both, Bitwarden has been a better overall experience for me and much better for my friends and family. I still like both of them.

KeePassXC

* [Pro] Excellent desktop app. Fast, easy, polished, powerful (TOTP available by default).

* [Pro] Great data ownership philosophy and data storage flexibility.

* [Con] Poor cross-platform app experience, especially on mobile (iOS in particular).

* [Con] Tinkering required to sync data. This isn't a big deal for many of us on here, but presented a large barrier to entry for my non-tech-savvy friends & family.

Bitwarden

* [Pro] Excellent cross-platform experience.

* [Pro] Low barrier to entry via SaaS, making it a good option for less-than-tech-savvy folks. This is ignoring the nice option to self-host.

* [Pro] Sharing features (haven't actually used them).

* [Pro] Web vault is accessible via web browser (accessibility).

* [Con] Web vault is accessible via web browser (increased attack surface).

* [Con] App is a tad slow (electron), but this is an acceptable price to pay for the good cross-platform experience.

4 comments

One of the other things I like about KeePass in regards to non-mobile devices is that you can autotype your credentials into things that are not web browsers and even make custom sequences per application.

I've got a sequence that gets me logged into to a mainframe and navigates all the way to the main menu and given how often I hit it I bet it has saved me from an RSI by now.

KeePass support on iOS has gotten better in recent years. I like KeePassium, but I’ve also heard good things about Strongbox.
I self-host Bitwarden and I haven't even bothered to install the desktop app. Since I have a browser open at all times, I just use the browser extension.

Also, I think the Android client is quite a bit better than Keepass2Android.

I tried bitwarden once and didn’t like it (can’t remember why, don’t care, no interest in switching ;) ), so I never tried their mobile client. But I’d be interested in what’s better than K2A, I think the modern Android experience with it is awesome.
A few things I remember: adding new entries was clunkier in k2a because I had to tap multiple times to select things like category/folders that I didn't care about. Bitwarden has better URI matching as I could choose the matching rule. BW has better search, or rather it displays search results in a more useful way. The autofill service also seemed to work more reliably, and I don't think k2a showed the matching logins right in the autofill drop-down menu, but I could be misremembering there.

Ultimately though it was the browser extensions, combined with the self-hosting option, that sold me on BW. None of the Keepass plugins I tried over the years worked that well. BW has extensions for both Firefox on Android and Vivaldi on desktop that are as solid as anything I've tried.

Can Electron really be called a good cross-platform experience? Consistent maybe, but good?