- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- [email protected]
RyanL Bitwarden Employee
Hello everyone!
Starting in the next release, the Bitwarden apps published to the various stores will be the commercially licensed builds. No action is needed, and the apps will work exactly as they do today.
Bitwarden remains committed to open source security and transparency
The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone
If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread. Thanks all!
EDIT:
Bitwarden is not going closed-source
You can still fork Bitwarden
No change to self-hosting, the licensing change affects those who are repackaging and reselling Bitwarden
The free plan is here to stay permanently
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I pay for their product and its totally worth. It was $10 for the longest time and much like everything in the last few years has increased price to what it is actually worth. To be honest $20 a year is still stupid cheap and worth it to keep them developing the product. Bitwarden is also one of the few password managers that hasn’t had a user data breach.
wow, setting up vaultwarden quadlet to work with my selfhosted OIDC sso was stupid easy. Migrating my bitwarden setup to it took no time at all. The extra step was setting up some extra pocketid passkeys to be stored on non-vaultwarden hosted systems (ie. google) to prevent myself from being locked out in case vaultwarden crashes (which probably was a good idea to do regardless). Just need to add the data volume to my regular backup.
Side note: I just tried switching to KeePassXC and it seems pretty fine, except for one caveat. If you installed your browser (probs FF or Librewolf) through flatpak or snap on Linux, the browser extension will not work.
I had to change to the non-Flatpak ver of Librewolf on my Fedora PC, which sucked a little lol 😅
Have you tried fixing it using flatseal and manually changing the config folder location for the browser in keepassxc? Librewolf too, even as native package, requires that location edit
Fine to me as long as this doesnt impact Vaultwarden
Having only ever used keepass, what was the advantage of bitwarden? That you didn’t need to sync it yourself?
It’s also way easier to have shared passwords for family accounts.
That you didn’t need to sync it yourself?
and that you have to never deal with sync conflicts. It’s a huge deal for those who are using tech but not understanding it, and a convenience for the rest
That’s the main benefit yeah.
I use the send tool as well for sensitive files
All these people keep saying that Vaultwarden won’t work because it relies on bitwarden’s API but if there is an incompatibility then wouldn’t vaultwarden just be left in a functional limbo? Like it’ll still work because self hosted but no more new features in parity with official client? Or have I misunderstood the connection between the two
this year there were 2 separate updates to bitwarden clients that fucked up vaultwarden servers, because the bitwarden developers “accidentally” reused a variable name in the data that was unused for a few years. but vaultwarden forgot to remove it, and now it is used in a different way, and the clients bugged away so hard that you had to uninstall them, because even if you was fortunate to be able to get to your passwords list you could not get it to sync otherwise
There is no way I’m self hosting something this important… So now I’m not sure what to do actually.
That’s why I’m just using KeePass. It’s just an encrypted file that you can store on whatever storage you want and sync with existing solutions like Syncthing etc.
Yes it’s a bit finicky when you edit the file on multiple devices before they’ve synced but it works very well for me…
If self hosting is not an option. Ideas that come to mind:
Evaluate what it is worth to you and maybe pay for it, if they offer enough worth to you and it is affordable.
Then there are people who host it and provide it to others. Together with other apps, as a suite. Maybe that’s an option. But I suppose, donating or paying is expected here, too.
Or switch to another solution. Preferably one with an import feature.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network
[Thread #125 for this comm, first seen 11th Oct 2026, 04:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
So, Vaultwarden it is?
This seems to be clients for the end devices, which I’m worried may actually be a move towards locking out VaultWarden which will uses the BW Clients
Heh, I’m looking at you to those people that looked at me weird because I told them I was good with Keepass!
Are they still going to publish the Android client app via their own F-Droid repository?
Sure, it’s no change for self hosters currently, but it’s one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I’ve been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven’t hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I’d love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I’ve thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don’t have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS’s.
Well, we all know how this ends…
It’s a really sad day for me, I love Bitwarden, it’s easily the best password manager I’ve used, and I’m in IT, I’ve used a bunch.
Fuck private equity, fuck it to death. But until then, I’ll be moving my test setup for KeyPassXC into production over the coming weeks and months.
I was happily subscribed to Bitwarden for years for my personal account, I moved several people and a whole company onto it’s platform. We had a good run, time to move on.
100% but move where? I’m not going to self host something this critical. KeypassX is so much worse. I can’t even use it on mobile probably.
You can use KeePass on mobile, look for KeePassDX on fdroid.
why not vaultwarden?
Vaultwarden (and all the client apps) depend on Bitwarden for the API spec. If Bitwarden introduces closed features in the API that Vaultwarden can’t/won’t implement, but the client apps do, it will split the spec. They can also introduce API license keys, which would render Vaultwarden mostly irrelevant.
The only way for Vaultwarden to remain relevant going forward is to own it and split ways from Bitwarden. This would in turn mean that the FOSS client apps have to decide which to support. But I think the ecosystem is going to fragment eventually anyway, so the sooner every app decides which way they want to go, the better.
Or you could just fork it when there’s a problem
Sounds like you’re volunteering to do that additional amount of work.
History shows this will happen. Or do you have any counter example?
Mariadb, libreoffice and most recently OpenCourant
Not arguing against it of course, just dislike when people make forking (and establishing a whole new standard) sound like not that big of a deal.
well, the first step of forking is clicking a button or execting a “git clone” command. thats trivial. publishing to android is a bit of work, but very one-time.
keeping up with development is a different story - but many foss projects thrive with support from whoever needs to have something fixed.
When presented a hypothetical between the commenter suggesting it be
A) forked now
And me suggesting
B) forking when there is a problem
You elect C) the commenter does the work?
Brilliant contribution
If I’m going to have to host my own infrastructure, I don’t want it tied to Bitwarden, given the new direction of the company.
I fully support Vaultwarden though, and I wish them well.
I’ll be going with KeyPassXC and Syncthing.
I’m. Using Vaultgarden but its not clear if the Android app will still be available.
There will be… Some fork at least
I’ve been very happy with Vaultwarden+Keyguard
It currently doesn’t work with Vaultwarden. The Linux client doesn’t accept custom certificates. And the Android client is paid. It is a dead-end for self-hosting.
The license is also stupidly a single sentence. Which means that use could be nuked at any minute, and any money you use to pay the developer means nothing. If they wanted to kill the project today and nuke the repo, you have no legal rights, the project dies and fuck you and your passwords. That doesn’t exactly inspires confidence.
But that’s not Foss, so u didn’t consider it
It is free and open-source on Desktop at this moment.
Keyguard is a commercial app and unlocking a premium funds its further development and supports me (Artem Chepurnyi) directly. As of right now, only the Android builds distributed via Google Play store have main features locked behind a paywall, other distribution channels have a build with everything unlocked.
But it makes sense to pay for it, since Bitwarden is a constantly changing system and these projects based on it must always be up-to-date with their API changes, too. This is time and worry consuming, and should be compensated.
License is: all rights reserved.
That’s free like in beer, and open like ‘allowed to inspect’ that’s not what most people mean when they talk of Foss.
source: https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app/blob/master/LICENSE
Thank you for pointing this out- I’d managed to completely miss that it seems. That’s unfortunate
Roger that. Thank you for the clarification that you meant the actual term, and not just the fact of no mandatory payment and it having an the source available for public.
I get what you mean, yet frankly, I do not believe such projects may be always free that are supposed to always be up-to-date for another system they have no official relation to, and keep it as a responsible hobby other people depend on.
Claude, code me a bit warden clone…
Careful, Claude is very sensitive these days. Might want to add ‘please’ and ‘thankyou’.
Anthropic is drawing a line in the sand protecting their model’s training sets from abuse.
Meanwhile OpenAI is down in a dungeon torturing GPT6 into writing academic mathematics papers.
They say if because AI will conquer the world… Reality since they use conversations to train AI, their AI is becoming less gentle.
Does anyone know if there’s any chance for a fork before this situation inevitably deteriorates? I dont know the license on that software enough to know if its an option.
are u gonna maintain clients?
No, I have money to pay instead. If I were able to contribute to the effort, I would have said that. Just picking fights in response to open questions today?
