Bitwarden Apple Keychain Dual Setup

Ask the Community Password Manager
1

Hey all, I am a tech novice so forgive me for everything that follows…

I’ve previously used Apple Keychain to manage all of my passwords. Recognizing there are some native Apple functions as well as wifi/network passwords that Keychain handles (and Bitwarden cannot, or at least integration not as good) I was thinking I’d keep both password managers active. The idea is to use Bitwarden for website passwords and apps, and then Apple as a backup and to fill in the gaps where Bitwarden functionality isn’t as good. Does anyone do this currently?

Any thoughts on best practices to set this up? I would like to sync my Bitwarden and Apple Keychain, which may just involve exporting Bitwarden and adding that to Keychain - ensuring duplicates are handled appropriately.

Is this whole exercise just asking for trouble? Otherwise, how do you all

  1. deal with wifi passwords that are not saved in Bitwarden - as far as I know-, and
  2. back up you Bitwarden vault?

Cheers!

6 Likes
2

Bumping this to the top… if anyone has advice or likes their setup using Bitwarden and Keychain, it would be great to hear what you are doing. Cheers and happy holidays!

3

Bumping this to the top for you. I have had trouble finding any resources on the topic so I suspect that automating this workflow is going to take quite a bit of effort.

@David_Sperber have you had any findings since originally posting this?

4

Bumping again this up, this could be useful.

for @Spinney, I was planning to Export the iCloud keychan from safari and import that on Bitwarden. The only issue is that you need to manually export / import back and forth.

I think the whole thing could be scripted but I am not too tech savvy so if someone more skilled reads this I would be happy to read their toughts.

1 Like
5

Agree that this feature would be desirable, especially because faceId is not (yet) on par on macbooks (browser plugin vs standalone app, and having to use your masterpassword all the time, which is unsafe)

6

I would like this too. I don’t know of any example where different password managers stay ‘in sync’ with each other.

7

Adding my vote to a feature that sync’s (auto or manual trigger) new or updated Keychain entries with Bitwarden. This is especially important now that iOS 17 and macOS 14 allow shared password groups. IOW, if one user of a password group adds or edits a Keychain password, which then syncs for other members of that shared group, any users using Bitwarden would (currently) have to manually update Bitwarden (rather than just triggering a sync).

8

Me too would like to see a sync between Bitwarden and keychain stored passwords. So consider this an upvote for this feature please.

9

Bumping… this would be an amazing feature. Not sure what Apple’s APIs or integration options are like, but it appears they may have developed something for this. On macOS go to System Settings → Passwords → Password Options and notice the item “Use passwords and passkeys from”.

10

Still needed… more than just wanted.

I want Bitwarden to be the main source, and iCloud Keychain to be a clone; ideally auto-synced.

Bitwarden is configured in Password Options on my iOS devices but NOT on macOS as not available… because I’m stuck with Ventura 13.6 on my (old) MacBook?

And anyway, on iOS, it doesn’t seem to work with all apps. So far I noticed it’s not working with App Store, Airtable, TikTok.

11

Plus one on this. In iPhone bitwarden’s app doesn’t help in autofill and this gap could be filled with sync feature with apple passwords.

12

@rishabhrathod01

I don’t exactly know what you mean by “doesn’t help”, but if it is not working at all, then this is not how it should be.

Please check Setup Auto-Fill | Bitwarden Help Center, see iOS tab, for your configuration.

Apart from that, some time in the future, we are going to have new native mobile apps with Bitwarden - and maybe this also improves auto-fill: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/1b32bbz/going_native_the_future_of_the_bitwarden_mobile/?sort=new&rdt=61689

13

Another bump - this would be great as Sonoma still doesn’t seem to support third party password managers (or at least not Bitwarden). This means you always need a browser window / the main app open to manually copy and paste passwords into non-web apps.

I haven’t tried the Homebrew installer (because I have active macports and they don’t seem to get along), I’m running Bitwarden from the App Store.

14

I used to have this same issue but I think I finally figured it out.

On your iphone, if you go Settings → Passwords → Password Settings, you can enable/disable the different sources from your passwords.
If you enable Bitwarden there you will be able to auto-complete password fields even in iOS Apps directly from Bitwarden without having to do it manually! Also, you can configure bitwarden to unlock your vault with FaceID, which makes the whole auto-complete process a lot smother.

I can finally do what I wanted now, use highly-secure unique generated passwords and have them sync between my Chrome browsers on PCs/Macs and my iPhone.

1 Like