+1 for offline edits and saves. I have been using Roboform for many years. I never encountered an issue with conflicts when syncing so it can be done. The BW dev’s need to look at GoodSync and SyncBack Pro for ideas. I self-host BW and do not allow access from the Internet. It sucks that I cannot edit or save logins on my mobile devices when I’m not on the internal network. Before anyone suggests using a VPN… I do but I cannot use it on a couple of company devices nor in some secured facilities.
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Not being able to edit the vault offline is an absolute deal breaker. I’m overpaying for my main password manager solely because Bitwarden lacks this.
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Or simply just provide an offline mode in the app or option to disable sync…
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After reading through this painfully long thread, can you clarify what the current “official” position on this is? I think it is:
- Too complex to deal with
- Rare edge case, not worth the effort regardless of complexity
- Will not do unless someone else wants to do it
- Will do, but it’s behind 100 other things on the priority list
I assume this is not a “will never support this feature” situation or this would be closed.
Having the benefit of reading this massive 2 year old thread, I would like to now throw my accumulated cents in.
I will start with some obligatory but sincere respectfulness. Thank you for BitWarden. I really like the architecture and the soundness of the crypto; self-hosting is not at all painful; the mobile app works great; development efforts are transparent on GitHub and contributions are welcomed, unlike many other projects of this size. There is no personality cult and it’s not a toxic environment. These things are easy to take for granted. Kudos on all of these points.
Now, on with the discussion.
The complexity issue seems to be primarily (or at least partially) a concurrency issue that ought to be solved eventually, right? Editing an entry offline and having it “sync” to the server later is functionally equivalent to two authenticated sessions creating an entry at roughly the same time. The latter case is obviously a very rare edge case (perhaps it has never even happened) but the point stands. Applications dealing with critical and sensitive data should be resistant to known race conditions. Ideally, they should handle them simply and gracefully.
As far as use cases go, I find I am generally a walking edge case but a some of the examples used in this request affect me. I also want to give one that I think is underrepresented here, probably because less technical users don’t understand what the issue is and have just learned to live with the app being “broken” half of their day.
The case I am talking about is a major issue for me and probably many other people who work in medium-large corporations. BitWarden is obviously a password manager, and it is very well known at this point. Therefore, many commercial and open-source web categorization systems tag it as “Password Manager”. This means that policies can (and often are) applied at corporate egress proxies that prevent users from accessing BitWarden servers specifically, while still allowing access to the majority of the Internet. In my experience, the risk management department decides which categories are allowed and which are not, with some guidance from legal, technology, etc.
The “Password Manager” category is usually completely blocked with the exception of any specific services that the corporation has blessed as official, managed solutions. They obviously do not want to encourage employees to “steal” passwords or handle them “improperly” by putting them into their own personal password manager without having to think twice. The logic behind this is asinine; it’s a best effort control and everyone knows that. But it’s there. If the employee has a personal BitWarden subscription, they are shit out of luck, or have to switch over to cellular to update/create entries during work hours, which is painful. This isn’t about enabling employees to subvert policy, it’s about allowing users to use the application as they would normally use it when outside of a restrictive environment.
A very common case is also during travel in metro/subway systems that operate underground and through tunnels. This may be a matter of 30 seconds without coverage or 5-10 minutes. I can take a 45 minute subway ride and have service in aggregate for about 35 minutes, with it cutting out in a few specific areas. It all depends on what city you are in and how good they have implemented cell repeaters or city-wide WiFi networks. Some have neither, others have partial coverage of one or the other, etc. This may sound like a really unrealistic race window, but devices get finicky when losing and regaining coverage in these situations (especially cellular) and will tell the app they are offline for a few minutes after the connection is reestablished. At this point you’re fighting with your phone and throwing time away you’d like to be spending reading something (hopefully) useful on the Internet. Nobody creates accounts during their entire commute, but some people commute well over 2 hours per day. This is an actual issue, I think.
That’s all I have as far as use cases that I feel are worth considering solving this for. They potentially affect large user populations, and not just people writing diaries on vacation, or sysadmins trapped in cement walls, building servers and manually recording passwords in their phone
If the issue behind the lack of movement on this is simply the priority, maybe this can be reconsidered (maybe even moved up the list) some time soon. I think after two years it is fair to ask that it be reconsidered. If this has already happened, please forgive me as I do not follow the development process of BitWarden very closely
That’s really all I had to say- hopefully I’m not just adding more noise to this giant wall. I feel like little progress has been made and the points being made are not very good on either side as you get to the end of the thread.
Thanks again!
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I just ran into this problem on my iPhone. 2 scenarios:
I store my notes in bitwarden. I travel a lot on airplanes and I needed to edit some of my notes. Well bummer! Can’t save a note in airplane mode!
I decided to try the airplane wifi. I need to sign up for an account and make a password… oh can’t save the new login credentials because I’m offline!
That’s really weird!
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This is even more important with the outage yesterday. There needs to be some sort of asynchronous functionality so that people aren’t locked out if service experiences an outage. I was able to load stuff on my phone, but the browser plugin wasn’t working right and there wasn’t a clear indication that it wasn’t able to connect.
How about beefing the extension up a bit so that if/when the BW server isn’t available (i.e. the server hosting it crashed) and you save new credentials, or make any changes to existing credentials, it’ll save those to the browser’s local storage, and then do the usual compare/sync to the server the next time it detects that the server is available again?
Currently, if you try to save credentials while the server is awol, you simply can’t save them, and you risk losing or forgetting the new credentials until the server comes back. You may end up having to store them in a note somewhere else just to have them for whenever the server comes back, which is pretty inconvenient.
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I sometimes have the problem that I am working on my internet connection or router or wifi or something and I then can’t save the changes because I’m not online. It would be much safer to be able to save now and sync when possible than to record those somewhere else and try and put them in and clean that up later. Especially if you have the popup open and editing when there’s no connection, those details can be easily lost.
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Would it be possible to implement apps to have ability to save any chages made to vault offline ?
Currently while being without internet connection and wanting to organize any of my passwords I’m getting “Unable to Fetch” error if trying to save anything on Linux desktop app. Maybe it would be possible for app to save it on hard disk and sync when connection is restored?
While I realise that may seem like unnescessary but there are actually people without constant connection these days.
Also I want thank you for this awesome manager, moved to Bitwarden from Keepassx and am very impressed.
Thanks.
I am no expert, but can this not be achieved using an update number (incrementing numeric value) and a time stamp.
Primary vector for determining which version should exist is the update number, with the second being the timestamp.
These values would need to be recorded against an individual field in a record as you could have an issue where [Device 1:Record 1: Field 1] is modified offline, and [Device 2: Record 1: Field 2] is also modified offline/online. In this case both changes should be kept.
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A conflict - which is unlikely, but might happen - could just create a duplicate of the entry and the user has to merge it by hand. Could be difficult in organisations, though.
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Come on, guys n gals, we need this feature. As several posters have mentioned, it’s the one thing stopping Bitwarden from being totally awesome… but unfortunately in many ways it’s also either actually or very nearly a dealbreaker. Ridiculous not to be able to save because my internet connection broke. Don’t leave us hangin’.
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Wow, I’m glad to see I’m not alone here.
There are hundreds of situations where you want to be able to store information without an internet connection, and configuring routers, private access points,configuring local equipment while you are away from any kind of connectivity… people seem to forget that there are things that require password but do not necessarily require an internet connection.
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Also looking for offline capability for at least adding new entries offline.
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@bobby_shaftoe how NOT so? 
Yes, you create passwords offline, and that’s not the main problem. It is data loss. That should NEVER happen in a password manager. I don’t care how complex that feature is, the least you should do is disable editing or adding if offline. Avoid loss of data at all cost. Nothing excuses data loss in an app handling passwords especially long, uggo ones that you don’t remember.
I recently setup bitwarden self-hosted (I am not interested in putting my passwords up on a 3rd party’s server). I also paid for the bitwarden subscription to get OTP going.
As a 1password user that used to sync via nextcloud (so all my data is fully under my control, self hosted), I was expecting that offline editing and viewing would be possible.
My setup is a split DNS one. i.e. abc.mydomain.com -> 172.16.1.40 internally, and abc.mydomain.com -> 111.222.111.222 externally.
So after setting up bitwarden in docker just last week, I neglected to forward the port to the internet (port 443 is forwarded to my nextcloud instance). This is fine for me, since I wasn’t planning on exposing BitWarden to the internet anyways. I opened up BitWarden on my laptop, and found that I couldn’t log on. I also found that my phone couldn’t unlock my vault either.
I believe the issue was related to the fact that bitwarden tried to access abc.mydomain.com and actually rather than it just flat out not working (i.e. non-existent DNS record, or no response from server), it actually found my nextcloud instance which caused it to totally bug out. As a result, I was left with no access to my passwords. Fortunately, I still had 1password installed on my laptop & my phone so I wasn’t totally dead in the water.
To those of you who are asking “why would you need access to a password manager without internet access” - well, because not all of us are using the password manager to store our website logins exclusively. For instance, I use my password manager for all sorts of things like details about my home lab, encryption keys for various things, config files for routers etc (the last one has saved my ass many times - and usually during a time when the internet is inaccessible because the router failed, and I need to restore the most recent config on a new device I bought).
I’m not sure if I’m an edge case here or what, but a password manager that can not only not CRUD while “offline” and allow me to sync it to the main db later but doesn’t even allow me to access it is a total deal breaker. Everything I can read seems to suggest that BW works when internet is inaccessible because a local copy is synced, perhaps this only applies to the hosted version? I have had the opposite experience with the self-hosted version.
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I agree with previous posters.
I’m just after “market research” regarding migration from KeePass to something new and lack of offline functionality is a deal-breaker for me at the moment.
Especially that Bitwarden have “notes”, which I’d like to store securely too.
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For anyone travels or who used to and will again some day, this is really needed. Is this on the roadmap?
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Hey ! I need this too, in case my home server shut down various days I need my password manager to allow local modification and prompt user if conflicting merge.
Thx !
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