I have migrated from Lastpass in the last few days and have sorted out how to use it for myself and wife sharing one organisation. Everything works great including on apple mobile with face recognition.
I’m in the process of going through all my hundreds of accounts (gulp!) changing passwords set years ago when my security was lax. I want to get reports on weak/reused passwords but these are premium features. However I’m confused about what to change our free accounts to.
I could go to Family at a joint cost of $6.66 per month but this seems overkill as I don’t need the other premium features. But if we just convert our free accounts to Premium at $20 per year I can’t work out if this will give us the sharing we currently enjoy since this is what the pricing info on the BW site says
“Premium does not include secure data sharing. In order to access sharing features, you will need a subscription to an organization (free, families, teams, or enterprise)…” But we already have an organization we can jointly use in our free accounts (and seemingly no need to use a collection) so if we both upgrade to Premium will our organization be removed?
No, if you already have an organization setup to share items, it will not be removed if you purchase Premium subscriptions. The Premium subscription just unlocks premium features. Nothing else should change.
Ok thanks. I think I’ll probably purchase premium then although I’ll hold off for a while until I get used to BW in case I find a Family would be better.
So as a matter of interest why does it say that Premium does not include secure data sharing?
“Premium does not include secure data sharing. In order to access sharing features, you will need a subscription to an organization (free, families, teams, or enterprise). Paid organizations (families, teams, or enterprise) include premium features for all users enrolled in that organization.”
Ah - ok. Thanks. I think they are just saying that your individual plan alone is not enough to enable secure sharing. You will also need to setup a free or paid organization. No additional cost is needed, however, if it is just 2 people sharing.
A few things I want help with from your post - if you choose to go with the Families plan, the total cost is $40/year (billed annually), so per month it would only be $3.33/month or even less if you look at it per person since you can have up to 6.
As for secure data sharing, I want to echo what @dh024 said - the way Bitwarden allows sharing between users is through the Organization feature - and it sounds like you’re already taking advantage of our free two person organization. A free or premium individual account does not have to be a part of an Organization, so this is why we clarify!
The Families Organization functions similarly to the Free Organization, but allows for up to six users instead of just two as well as additional features. There’s a full listing of what features come with each plan here: https://bitwarden.com/help/about-bitwarden-plans/#compare-personal-plans
If you want to upgrade your existing Free Organization to a Families Organization (as opposed to creating a brand new one) or would like more information, please reach out to our Customer Success Team through our contact page!
The one tidbit I would like to note here as well, as I have seen some confusion between some users within the community here and in other spaces.
If you decide to both get an Individual Premium plan then that comes at a cost of $10/year for each person, only $20 for two people. This will give both of you premium benefits for your Individual Vault, and you can continue to share logins between the two of you with a Free Organization vault if that works for you, which comes with the limitation of 2 collections as noted in
The one stipulation I want to add here is that while both users will have premium benefits from their Individual Premium plan, this will not extend to items you wish to store in your Free Organization for shared items.
So if you have any items that contain attachments, which you then try to move into the Organization to share, this will not let you as the Organization does not have premium benefits.
Similarly any items stored in the shared Free Organization will not generate TOTP codes, and other premium benefits such as Vault health reports will not be available for those items in the Organization.
If that works for you with those limitations then perfectly fine, just a note of forewarning.
If you use a Family Organization though instead, then both the Organization (and any items shared within it) will have premium features, as well as having those premium benefits extended to you as a member of the Family Org.
So no need to purchase premium for your individual users, only one Family license.
These helpful posts were very useful thanks. So my conclusion, putting them together for our situation is as follows, please let me know if I’ve got anything wrong.
At present my wife and I have 2 separate free accounts with a shared Organization, the intention is to share all passwords not to have any separate ones.
Either of us can use the passwords in the shared Organization vault on our PC and mobile devices including face recognition on our mobiles. We can use our separate google authenticator apps for logging in to BW and for individual sites although it means temporarily switching into the authenticator and memorising the number when returning to the site login page. We don’t get any reports.
If we each upgrade to Premium at a joint cost of $20pa we get Premium benefits for items in our separate vaults (in our case there aren’t any) but not in our free shared Organization. These benefits thus boil down to priority support because we’ve got no items to report on or to attach files to.
If we upgrade to a Family plan at a joint cost of $40pa we get Premium benefits for our shared Organization. This adds the BW authenticator, encrypted attachments, vault reports and emergency access for a third person.
