Context
I have around 200 entries in my personal Bitwarden vault, and access to another 500 or so entries from my company organization vault.
The Problem
The Android App, the Web App, the Chrome Extension, and the Windows App all have the same problem for me: it is impossible to distinguish between personal and organization vault items in all important views (like search, or the list of items available for auto-fill).
Additionally there are no sorting options available to ensure either personal or organization vault items appear first in these lists.
My workaround
I have resorted to prefixing all my Personal Vault items with __ as an ugly (but very functional) hack / workaround to fix this issue for me. So for the following realistic but made-up example, if I search my vault for “git” I might see these results in order:
__Digital Ocean login
__GitHub Open Source Account
__GitHub work Account
__GitLab SAAS account
Digital Ocean org admin account
GitHub invoices login
GitHub API tokens for project XYZ
GitLab self-hosted SA account
Project ABC git runner ssh key pair
Now imagine the __ prefixes weren’t there. Then everything would be jumbled together. I’ve witnessed people without such a workaround log in with a wrong account on multiple occasions.
I imagine this problem is multiplied for people that have multiple organizations they’re part of?
There might be other workarounds or setups I’m not aware of that are better fixes for my issue? I’m aware of the “Vaults” filter dropdown e.g. in the Chrome Extension but that requires an extra click every time I use my password manager, which is a ton of friction (I want to open a new google[.]com tab, click my extension, and immediately pick the right account - not have an extra step)
My feature request
Put differently as a user I would prefer to have it natively part of the UI, instantly visible without user interaction. Some things that would for example fix (most of) my issues:
- Differentiate between items through an icon that indicates the vault of origin, preferably one of my own choosing
- Differentiate between items through a (background) color, preferably one of my own choosing
- Sort and/or group (preferably in an order of my own choosing) so that items from my Personal Vault appear together, visually distinct from organization items
These are merely suggestions of course, I presume a UX expert could come up with a preferred design. I myself have not checked how other password managers solve this issue but that might also help.
Finally
My workaround is totally fine for myself, actually. It’s a tiny cost at UPSERT time to include the __ and gives me all the benefits (even though it’s ugly) when using Bitwarden. I still decided to write this extensive feature request as I think this could be a great improvement in general, and I love to see Bitwarden improve over time! Thanks for the overall great product 