Keeping work and family accounts separate but accesible

Ask the Community Password Manager
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I could need some help thinking through the best options for managing personal, family, and work-related vaults. I am on a familiy plan and have one organization, shared with family members. I now got a new work computer and want to use Bitwarden for managing passwords there too. I created a separate Bitwarden account with my work email but I need to figure out how to best link them.

Here’s what I’d like to achieve:
I want to be able to access passwords from my work computer through my personal Bitwarden account (from my personal computer and phone).
I do not want to have access to my personal passwords from my work computer (because my company has access to everything I do on my work computer).

If I understand everything correctly, I have four options (please correct me if I there’s anything I missed):

(a) Invite my work email account to my family organization and give it access to only a specific (work-related) collection. Save passwords for work in that collection. Exclude other family members from that collection. Benefit: would keep everything in one place. Disadvantage: I can only use one collection for work stuff (although that may be enough).

(b) Create a (free) organization through my work account, with its own vault, and invite my personal account to that organization. Benefit: I’d have a completely separate organization for work-related stuff without the need to keep collections organized. Limited to two collections. I can create another free organization with my personal account in the future if the need arises.

(c) I create a second organization/vault through my personal account, and invite my work account. That should give me a similar scenario like (b) but with the benefit that I can administer everything from my personal account. I can’t create another free organization in the future should the need arise.

(d) I add my work account as a separate account to my Bitwarden desktop and mobile apps and switch back and forth. That would keep everything completely separate. But would have an extra step switching accounts.

Any input on best practices/safest options (and whether I actually am understanding how things work correctly) would be much appreciated.

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Hi @jdh ! I’m excited to hear that you’re going to start using Bitwarden for work as well!

I would recommend Option D - keeping your work and business accounts completely separate as they are different threat surfaces. Now that account switching is available with the browser extension, it should be easier than ever to simply add the second account on those devices where you would like to have access to both.

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Thanks @sj-bitwarden, this is helpful. I’m tending towards that option too. But to understand better, if I do end up inviting my personal account to an organization vault that I create at the work side of things, shouldn’t that be as safe as if I only use account switching?

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Considering that you are completely self-managing at the moment, yes, that’s really up to you and your company’s comfort level with that cross-polination of logins. However, keeping them separate does help future-proof your work as well.

If your company does choose to use a password management solution at any point in the future (Bitwarden or otherwise), keeping them completely separate means that you will not have to do any additional work to separate the two and can easily export from Bitwarden, or, if they choose to create an organization with us, you can tie that work account to your company with very little effort.

Just some food for thought!