So I currently have the premium plan, which renews in a few days. I also have one organization in which 1 other user is a part of, they are on free plan. I am thinking about upgrading to family plan to add more people. If I do this before my current plan renews, will this affect any of my current vaults or organizations? If I do this after my current plan renews, will I be billed for the premium and also the family plan?
After looking at my account on the web vault, I am getting a little confused. I already have one organization. I am able to click on new organization where it asks me what plan I want, free, families, teams or enterprise. So can I add another organization using the free plan? Basically what I am after currently is I want to add a total of 2 other users plus me, both other users are on the free plan. I can see possibly adding more users down the road but for now, just 2 other users.
You can have more than one organization, if that’s what you want. If I had to guess, though, what you really want is to upgrade your current organization — not set up a new, separate organization. You can upgrade your Free organization by logging in to the Admin Console (via the Web Vault), going to Billing > Subscription, and clicking Upgrade Plan.
If you pay for Premium and then pay for a Family plan, you should be able to contact Support to request a refund for the Premium subscription (if it has been less than 30 days since you paid the renewal).
Not really, but your current organization member will get upgraded to Premium.
How many organizations can I create on personal premium plan? Is it more complicated managing multiple organizations vs using the family plan? How does the family plan work compared to multiple organizations?
You only get to own or administer 1 free organization, but I don’t think there is a limit on the number of paid organizations you can set up.
However, it is possible for you to be a member of two or more free organizations, with the caveat that the second (and third, etc.) organization must be owned and administered by somebody else.
Assuming you are asking about having multiple free organizations, then the limitations of this are:
Each organization vault can contain items shared by only 2 users (i.e., you will not be able to do 3-way sharing, unless you created duplicate vault items).
Each organization vault can include only 2 collections.
The other users do not get Premium benefits, unless they upgrade their individual plans to Premium.
With a Family plan, you can share items among 2–6 users, and you can configure an unlimited number of collections. In addition, Premium benefits are included for all Family plan members at no extra cost.
So I upgraded to the family plan through the admin console. One thing I found odd about this is I never got an email acknowledging I upgraded. Not sure if this has to do with it starting a 7 day free trial before it charges my credit card, either way it seems odd to me.
So for the new user I am adding to the organization, all his passwords are stored in his personal vault. What is the easiest way to move these items to the organization? Also had a thought, would it be a bad idea to keep an entry of same login in both his personal vault and the organization? Would that be an issue when using the extension to autofill logins? Would that just make it more complicated to manage? I realize that would be more steps for whoever is adding a new entry. Probably overthinking this and being a bit over paranoid but only reason I thought of this is what if something happens to the organization whether it be on my end or on their end. I do have and make backups periodically and realize that support would be able to help, or at least I would hope so.
About the free organizations, for the moment forget I have the family plan only premium, you say I only get to own or admin 1 free organization. So would it give me some type of error when I try to create a 2nd free organization with me being owner?
The easiest way is to log in to the Web Vault (for his account), filter by “My Vault”, use the All checkbox select all items, then use the kebab menu (three vertical dots) at the top right to open the options menu, and select “Assign to Collections”:
In the pop-up, select the collection where the items should be stored, and then clcik Assign.
That being said, please beware that it is much more difficult to re-assign vault items from the organization vault back to a personal vault, so you should think very carefully about whether assigning all personal items to the organization is a good idea.
Yes, generally it is considered a bad idea to keep duplicate copies of any vault item, because it will invariable lead to errors when one of you updates any of the stored information (passwords, etc.) in the future, and forgets to update in both places (or makes a mistake when transcribing the information to the second item).
Yes, autofilling could become more confusing, as all duplicate items would show up as an autofill option.
Use exports (go to Admin Console > Settings > Export Vault) to back up the organization vault in a .json format (preferably encrypted — using password protection. not the “account restricted” encryption type). If you have uploaded file attachments to any organization item, please note that these are not included in the export.
That being said, please beware that it is much more difficult to re-assign vault items from the organization vault back to a personal vault, so you should think very carefully about whether assigning all personal items to the organization is a good idea.
From what I have read, my options are either use the clone feature or export and import. Is there another way to do this?
So now that I have a family plan, can I make a second free organization? I can possibly see wanting to add another user in the future but don’t want him to have access to anything else but his own accounts but I am still able to manage them. Idk, maybe I am going about this all wrong. Do I even really need organizations at all to manage other users and all their accounts? I could just switch to their accounts when needed. At the moment, I am the only one that makes any changes to their accounts. Just seems like it would be easier using organizations, that way once I get it setup, I just have to go into my account with access to everything.
Really I don’t mind paying $10 a year for premium or even $40 for the family plan. But I worry about them raising prices, I do expect it to happen, just a matter of when but not sure how much I want to justify spending. I read somewhere that the price of premium was going up at it was a decent amount, not sure if there is any truth to that. Didn’t see anything about premium.
How do you quote those messages like you are doing? I am familiar with multi quotes in other forums but don’t see an option like that here unless I am blind. When I click reply under your message, empty box comes up.
The only other option I can think of would be to write a CLI script. Also, please note that there is currently a bug that affects importing of organization vault exports (see work-around here).
Yes.
The better way to do this is to configure the Collections in your Family organization vault so that this additional user does not have any access permissions to view Collections that they should not be privy to (and vice versa, if appropriate, give them access only to Collections for which your other Family plan members have no access).
Organizations are primarily for the purpose of sharing credentials (and other vault items). If you have no need to personally use the passwords created be another organization member (or if the organization members have no plans to share passwords amongst each other), then an organization may not be the optimal approach. Two drawbacks of using a Family plan for the purpose of managing other users’ passwords are first, that by default, all of their accounts will be visible in your vault (and show up as autofill suggestions), and second, that when other users create a new vault item, by default, the item will be stored in their personal vault (where you will not be able to access it via the shared organization vault).
This would be an alternative approach. Technically, it might violate the account Terms, which specify that “a single login may not be shared by multiple people”, but I have never heard of this restriction being policed, and it could possibly be argued that occasionally configuring or maintaining somebody else’s account is outside what they consider to eb a “shared” login.
There was a Reddit discussion recently about a marketing survey in which Premium users were asked the following questions:
It is not clear that the price increase is a foregone conclusion, or that it would be in the amount suggested in the survey ($20/Premium; $48/Family). Per the Reddit discussion, some versions of the survey proposed $24/year for Premium.
The easiest way is to simply highlight the text that you wish to quote, which will automatically pop up a context menu, where you can click “Quote to insert a quotation that is linked to the source:
So while I have no need to share my passwords with them nor do they need to share passwords with me, they do occasionally need to share passwords with each other, not that often but on occasion. I just want to be able to manage them, make changes to entries or add new entries when time comes. Neither of them have the know how to make changes, they really don’t want to. I have all my passwords in my personal vault, none in the organization. The 3rd person that I can see adding in the future is even worse. Without going into too many details, not even sure I want to go down that road, it will be a nightmare just trying to get him to use this or any password manager. The one downside I see to having it setup like I have it now is if they do learn how to make changes with bitwarden, they could have a harder time dealing with collections and organizations vs just dealing with their personal vault.
Curious question about this, what is the difference between sharing multiple bitwarden logins or having all the entries as part of an organization where I still have access to all of them? They don’t have a need to use bitwarden constantly, there might be times they go a month or more without having to use bitwarden.
On the price increase part, I didn’t see the part about adding new features. It doesn’t seem that bad but at same time, a 50% price increase for premium seems like a lot at one time. One of the new features proposed, guidance to fix weak or exposed passwords, don’t they already have something like that now?
Not sure how I missed that, I did highlight something of yours to copy and paste it but didn’t notice that part come up about quoting it.
Also, is there a difference in exporting a vault from the admin console or from the password manager, whether it be an organization vault or personal vault?
Not sure if I should have or not but when I upgraded to family plan, did so on the 7th, I never got an email from bitwarden about that. That seems a little odd to me.
Something else, while on web vault password manager, in subscription under settings, it still shows next charge for individual premium will be on the 8th, which is today. In the admin console under settings for billing, it shows next charge is on Dec 14th for $40 for the family plan, currently on the 7 day trial. Is it still showing a charge for individual premium because I am on a trial plan for famly and not actually been charge for that yet?
In the web vault, I noticed I have a collection called unassigned collections. It does not show up any where else. What is the point of this collection? I have done some reading on this and seen several freak out because it put items in this collection by default and they had trouble finding them. I understand having a default place to put something, like the no folder under folders. But why have it where it only shows up in the web vault?
I don’t think this is possible. Maybe there was some issue in a previous version.
When you delete a Collection, it does not delete the contents of the Collection. Thus, any items in the deleted Collection that had not been previously assigned to a different (non-deleted) Collection will end up in the Unassigned pseudo-collection (it is not actually a real Collection, because you cannot configure its permissions or assign a vault item to “Unassigned”).
Thus the Unassigned pseudo-collection is only there as a catch-all, so that items don’t get lost when you delete the Collections that they belong to. Beyond that, it is possible to use the “Unassigned” status as a work-around for archiving vault items (storing items that you don’t want to see or use, but that you prefer not to delete); Bitwarden is currently in the process of implementing an “official” archive feature, though, so I expect this off-label usage to become obsolete…
One option is often overlooked: organizations and collections are not just for sharing. Bitwarden collections support single-user access, multi-collection assignment per item, and seamless mixing of personal and shared credentials without duplication—features that are under-documented in the Families plan.
With a Family plan, you can create unlimited collections. Each user (including yourself) can have a dedicated collection with tailored access, effectively replicating a personal vault within the organization. Credentials can be assigned to one or more collections for sharing, or kept in a solo collection for individual use, avoiding the need to clone items. Of course, organization admins retain technical access by design.
While you can’t set a global default organization or collection for new items, selecting the target org and collection before creating an item ensures it’s saved there directly. I also use a separate “archive” collection with no assigned access to keep inactive items from cluttering the active view.
I’m curious why you consider this beneficial — i.e., what is your use-case? Using a hidden collection for archiving is one application, but Bitwarden is about to roll-out a proper archiving feature. Potentially, I could see a way to use collections as a work-around for tags (a long-requested feature with an uncertain future). But other than that, why do you use multiple collections with single-user access (i.e., for non-sharing purposes)?
For me, the archive collection works now. There are more than a few feature requests like this that are long the tooth.
The Personal Vault vs. Organization divide is eliminated and uses the unique plan features to a greater extent.. One is centralized management, most notably backup. Also for members that struggle a bit with the tech, I can assign others to help out managing their accounts.
Or, when I need some help myself, then it is easy to add other members. Easier temporary sharing is another use case. I have emergency access set up, but account takeover is bit abrupt. Not every situation calls for that, so collections provide a more intentional structure for emergency access and estate planning
All checkbox select all items, then use the kebab menu (three vertical dots) at the top right to open the options menu, and select “Assign to Collections”:
