I’ve been a paying Bitwarden family user for more than 5 years, and while it’s generally a solid solution, there are a few persistent quirks that make me genuinely wonder if the developers use it themselves on a daily basis.
Vault Item Sorting: The biggest issue for me is how the vault handles sorting. I manage around 20 Google Workspace accounts, and every time I try to log into one using the Chrome extension, the list of saved logins appears completely unsorted. Yes, I get that Bitwarden is trying to be helpful by showing the most recently used item at the top and that’s fine, but everything else should be alphabetically sorted. Instead, the rest of the list seems totally random.
This same chaotic sorting applies when searching inside the vault through the website. For example, a search for accounts.google.com returns results that feel arbitrarily ordered. Some entries appear sorted by name, others don’t, and it’s just unnecessarily confusing. Sorting by login name should be the default, not some obscure and inconsistent method.
There are requests for this since 2018, 7 years ago! And it is still not implemented!
UX Regressions in Recent Updates: Another frustrating change is the new behavior when clicking on a login: instead of filling in credentials, which is the most common use case, it now opens the full entry to view the details. To perform a fill, you have to hunt down a small button. Why would such a basic usability principle be flipped like this?
I genuinely want to continue using Bitwarden, but these repeated UX missteps and inconsistencies are wearing me down. I’m getting close to the point of considering a switch to another vault provider.
I know that I am not the only one upset by this. I wonder what the rest of the users think?
You can get back that old behaviour: Settings → Appearance → Check “Click items in autofill suggestion to fill”
Because it was an “obscure and inconsistent method” before and the fill button allows a more consistent behaviour of what happens when you click on an item (with the fill button → click the item = always open “View” – and not sometimes “fill” and sometimes open “View”) : ✅ Consistent behaviour on clicking a listed item in vault
Because I think it’s going to be quite different for individuals regarding how they use the product, you are going to see different answers. Here is my perspective as a user:
BW works really well for some users, making it a leading cloud-based password manager.
Sorting isn’t much of a problem for me, just because I don’t have more than 1-2 accounts on the same site.
I like the new consistent clicking-on-entry behavior. The Fill button isn’t a problem because it’s big enough on my screen; I don’t miss the button.
Changes are stressful. Some people are bound not to like them. Even 1Password makes changes that their own users end up heavily downvoting.
If I am fed up with a product and nothing in the product is a killer feature, I would try another product for a while to see how that works out.
: