Why You Should Have Been Using Bitwarden Since Yesterday

Keep all your passwords safe with this open-source, cross-platform manager.

We’ve been using accounts for decades and with the rise of malicious individuals, security measures have had to be developed to better shield accounts from attacks. Passwords are notoriously risky due to the need to make them easy enough to remember without using the same password for every account. Doing so would make the process of logging into all your services painless, but it would also mean all your accounts would be affected by a single security breach. This is where a password manager comes into play — a single login to manage thousands of accounts with randomly generated passwords.

There are numerous password managers available, but one I’ve relied upon for many years now is Bitwarden, an open-source and completely free service for managing all your online (and offline) accounts.

Randomize all your passwords to keep accounts safe

The best way to keep your accounts secure is to use two-factor authentication and randomly generated passwords. The longer the password the better and I always suggest throwing in some numbers and special characters, if supported by the service. Bitwarden can generate passwords instantly with full control over how many characters are desired and whether specific types should be included. This can be done using the web interface, a browser extension, or an app. This is the basic functionality of a password manager like Bitwarden.

Generated passwords are then stored within the Bitwarden vault and tied to the account it was created with. Each account login can have various data associated with it, including URLs, notes, and even custom fields, making it easy to search for specific accounts and have the Bitwarden apps and extensions automatically provide credentials when visiting the corresponding app or website. This makes it convenient to use a password manager and there are minimal additional steps to include Bitwarden into your tech world.

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Open-source and cross-platform

While many password managers will largely offer similar features, one thing to bear in mind is price. Not all password managers are free and some have a free tier with a premium account upgrade offering more functionality. Bitwarden is completely free to use. You can even host your own version of the password manager at home with no subscription fee or one-off purchase. There are optional premium upgrades available for families and businesses, but most people can make do with the free tier, myself included. If you’re interested, the premium upgrade for Bitwarden costs $1 per month.

Another benefit of Bitwarden is its availability across most platforms. There’s full support on iOS, Android, Windows, Linux, macOS, and just about every browser. Regardless of where you are or which device you have at hand, your Bitwarden password vault could be a single password or biometric login away. Everything is open-source and available for viewing, in case you wish to peek at the code to see what makes everything work. And to this day, Bitwarden has yet to have a data breach … touch wood.

Host Bitwarden from your home or office

Bitwarden uses managed servers to keep all your data safe. This should be enough for security as everything is encrypted but if you want to take data security to the next level, it’s possible to run an instance of Bitwarden from your home or office. All you need is a device to run a server-side instance of Bitwarden. I’d recommend a small device, such as a single-board computer (SBC), network-attached storage (NAS), or NIC. I’ve written a guide on launching Vaultwarden on a Synology NAS enclosure with access both within and outside the home.

Regardless of how you use Bitwarden, always enable two-factor authentication to keep your master account secured.