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!

  • Matt The Horwood
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    1 day ago

    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