100% Local setup

Ask the Community Password Manager
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1

Hi,

I’m completely new to Bitwarden, and thought I had found a decent replacement for my actual Password Manager. But I must say, after having started Bitwarden Portable, the first screen already confuses me.

I thought I could use Bitwarden without ANY internet connectivity, syncing between desktop and mobile devices being done over LAN only (example : local Webdav).

I don’t want any data to go out of my local environment, but the first screen already asks for an Bitwarden-internet-account (probably resulting in an always mandatory internet-connection)

Could someone please enlighten me how a 100% local setup can been done (without having to setup a local Bitwarden Server)

Thank you

2

@Darwin4Ever Welcome to the forum!

Bitwarden certainly is a decent replacement. :wink:

But… it literally is an online-password manager. And besides the portable app that you already mentioned, the Bitwarden clients/apps indeed require a server to connect with (either with the BW cloud or self-hosted).

There is a feature request for “offline editing”, when the clients can’t connected to the server: Offline Editing (management of writeable vault items) – and there is a feature request for what you are requesting: Full local offline password manager (no self hosting or cloud hosting)

I think you mainly have two choices now:

  • looking for another password manager that can be used only locally as you want it
  • considering, if an online password manager – like Bitwarden – where the data that “goes out of your local environment” is encrypted all the time, might not be so bad after all
3

As already indicated by @Nail1684, Bitwarden is probably not for you, as it is designed to synchronize via a centralized database server. Bitwarden’s portable app can be used in read-only mode while off-line, but it must first be logged in (which requires authentication to the server, and downloading of a local copy of the encrypted vault database from the server to your device).

Since you don’t want to host your own server, you would be better off using a password manager that is designed to be used in a decentralized way. We typically would recommend some flavor of Keepass (e.g., KeepassXC).