I had been seeing a ton of talk about Bitwarden with all the Lastpass stuff going on. My wife and I used Dashlane for the past couple of years and were overall happy with it. We did have a few annoyances but had become accustomed to them:
DL did not always autofill logins correctly - they had a report feature, which I used many times, but never did I once see any of the sites I reported get fixed the entire time we used it.
Could not share payment, ID, or personal info.
Auto-fill on my android phone rarely if EVER worked.
Multiple accounts used the same auth platform but dashlane required individual entries which resulted in tons of logins stored.
In DL each user is an island. You can share with another person but its account by account and requires the recipient to confirm each account shared. It worked but it was aggravating to share an account and having to remind the other person to acknowledge the receipt to use it. The idea of sharing accounts as part of a family could be daunting, likely having required a lot of manual work.
With that stuff in mind I was ready to give another solution a try. After installing Bitwarden, a couple of positives stood out right away:
TOTP integration - This was a game changer for me and got me to buy a family license right away. I have so many of these keys that getting to them all can be really cumbersome. Being able to integrate them into my password solution saves me from having to fish out my phone every 10 mins. It also encourages me to set this up with every account I can since its not a PITA to manage any more.
Multiple URIs for logins - another game changer. I have many sites that shared the same auth database which resulted in a ton of entries in dashlane that i can now consolidate.
Ability to attach files to individual logins - very convenient! I prefer that to only being able to add plain text notes in DL
That said, there are some tradeoffs I am hoping Bitwarden addresses in future releases:
DL does a great job with personal information, their interface is really slick in the way it manages Drivers Licenses, Passports (indicates when they are expiring), Social Security #s, and addresses. I see BW does things a little differently and I will give it a try, but I liked the granularity of how DL did it.
Auto-fill of address info is something I am going to miss, a lot. Showed BW to a buddy of mine, also a DL user, and that was a deal-breaker for him.
On a similar vein, the same goes for credit card information. It was very handy being able to fill that out quickly.
DL was also very good with sites that had multiple accounts. You could easily click in the login field and be presented with a list of logins for a site. Some sites I access have 10+ unique accounts and I have missed how DL presents this. It works ok with bitwarden but DL just did a better job.
DL did a better job detecting new accounts and aiding in their creation, so far I have found that BW does not detect them all the time.
DL did a great job auto-filling generated passwords when changing them for sites. With BW I find that i have to take manual steps to interact with the plugin to get them rather than having them generated and filled in with a click as DL does.
Overall my migration was smooth, I exported a passwordless JSON file and imported it directly into my shiny new bitwarden account. Only downer I noticed is that my secure notes, contact info, and credit cards were all sorts of screwed up. I think its because the way DL does things does not translate to BW one to one, but I did see that a TON of my secure notes either did not export correctly or were not imported on bitwarden’s end. Regardless, I am glad i noticed as that would have really sucked to have lost that data.
There is a lot of cleanup I have had to do with accounts that did not have names or other little things. Its not a big deal but it will take some time before its all cleaned up.
Thanks for the reply! I probably should have been more specific: DL has trained me to expect to be able to click in the username box of a site that has multiple IDs and then be able to easily select which one I want. You are right though, I can get the list by interacting with the extension. I just feel the way DL did it was really elegant.
Thank you! Not sure why I did not try the clicking of the contact info or payment the way you would for a login. That should take some of the pain out. I still feel the way DL presented the info was a bit more elegant in that it popped a selector window at the time you interacted with the payment/personal info field. It made filling out forms very convenient.
Control Shift L will cycle through the logins for a specific site, until you reach the one you want. I think that is the most elegant method I have come across, but each to their own.
I like the keyboard shortcut idea, gonna check it out. I tried just now and I have an AMD utility on my system with the same shortcut so every time I use it I start advanced logging…Will have to turn that off if this works out
I disabled the AMD shortkey that overlapped with Bitwarden but when I use the Ctrl+Shift+L, nothing happens, is there something I need to enable for the shortcodes to work?
EDIT, NM Found it: The link with the AMD stuff above made reference to where the shortcuts are made. I had assumed it would be there by default but I had to manually put it in. Thanks for the help!
I have been working with the keyboard shortcut for a little while now and still find it lacking, maybe you guys have some insight…
What I am seeing now is that, on sites that have mulitple logins, when I use the keyboard shortcuts it starts at the top of the list and goes down, regardless of whether or not I have used bitwarden to log into the site previously, forcing me to cycle through logins in alphabetical order until I get to the one I want to use. Dashlane at least seemed to remember which login I used before and present them in order of the most recent first on down, which made logging in much simpler.
By extension I am seeing password filling with the keyboard shortcut buggy on logins that display only the username and then change view to present a password blank. I find that if I fill the login using the keyboard shortcut, if I have multiple logins, the incorrect password will be filled with the shortcut, causing a failed login.
So far, this is one thing I am really finding lacking in bitwarden. While the keyboard shortcut is nice, it is not helpful when you have 5+ IDs for a site, and more pronounced when the ID and password are not presented in the same view, which is common with Google, Microsoft, and others.
Thank you! I noticed the icon in the right click menu but had not given it a try. I’ll get myself in the habit of using it and see how that goes. Just for fun, here is what it looks like for MS logins, and that is not the whole list, I still have to scroll in the menu
