I was first using 1Password and then I really tried to love Bitwarden for two entire years (paid user). But it was riddled with bugs and UX mishaps. I gave them detailed feedback by email, they acknowledged it, but nothing changed and my frustration grew over time. I eventually switched back to 1Password one year ago and I'm delighted.
For example here some issues I flagged to the team. Note that some of them may possibly have been resolved since then:
– The “incorrect ciphers” error that keeps happening where you have to restart Bitwarden and lose all your changes.
– Basic searches take multiple seconds if you have more than 400 entries.
– Editing items is awkward. Whenever I scroll down an item and want to edit a specific entry, I have to find the edit button and then WOOSH a new panel appears and I don’t know where the field I wanted to edit ended up in the new panel.
– Bitwarden doesn’t automatically categorize login items by type and it's not possible to exclude items from the “All Items” list. So it's a big mess and when you try to search a massive amount of irrelevant auto-generated entries pop up.
– Scrolling is super laggy on Android.
– Android logins don't have icons (they could very easily extract them when Bitwarden automatically creates an entry when logging on an Android app).
– Phone numbers are not formatted. Same for many other data types.
– Credit/debit cards show a generic icon rather than Mastercard, Visa, American Express, etc.
– The whole interface is marked as selectable in CSS and when you try to move the window around it keeps selecting irrelevant text from the UI such as “Search Vault” and “Item Information” instead of moving the window. Likewise, if I try to select actual text the selection isn't constrained to the field I'm selecting from so I often select a bunch of crap I didn't mean to select.
– Clicking on a password field doesn't offer the option to generate a password.
– Password generation settings don't synchronize between Bitwarden instances. Every time you install the app or the browser extension you have to reconfigure the length, symbols, letters, casing, etc. Again. By default it uses Bitwarden's default basic (and pretty insecure) criteria.
– Bitwarden frequently doesn't detect password fields, and frequently doesn't offer to automatically save the password.
– Can’t drag & drop an item from the list to a folder. I have to manually edit the item entry and select the folder from the dropdown. Every time.
– When editing an item, the ‶Attachments″ entry is a tiny line hidden below ‶Master password re-prompt″ so it's incredibly easy to miss and hard to find.
– Attachments don’t have previews and you can't rename them. You have to manually download a given item and open it in order to see what it's about.
– Can't copy attached images to the clipboard. Instead you have to press the download button, pick a folder, find it, copy the file (or possibly open it with an image editor when you need to copy the image itself), and then paste it where you want.
– Automatic entry names are dumb. For example for Android apps it just picks the package name (e.g. com.voyagerx.scanner) instead of the name of the app (in this example the corresponding app's name is vFlat, so not clear from the package name!).
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. I had many more issues than those with Bitwarden. None of these issues happen on 1Password.
Thanks for spending the time on that list. Hopefully Bitwarden will see this and reprioritize there game plan. You cant have a solid password manager without these things working. I have been using Keepass for years, but was thinking about switch to another product in the future, but I think I am going to stay with Keepass.
For example here some issues I flagged to the team. Note that some of them may possibly have been resolved since then:
– The “incorrect ciphers” error that keeps happening where you have to restart Bitwarden and lose all your changes.
– Basic searches take multiple seconds if you have more than 400 entries.
– Editing items is awkward. Whenever I scroll down an item and want to edit a specific entry, I have to find the edit button and then WOOSH a new panel appears and I don’t know where the field I wanted to edit ended up in the new panel.
– Bitwarden doesn’t automatically categorize login items by type and it's not possible to exclude items from the “All Items” list. So it's a big mess and when you try to search a massive amount of irrelevant auto-generated entries pop up.
– Scrolling is super laggy on Android.
– Android logins don't have icons (they could very easily extract them when Bitwarden automatically creates an entry when logging on an Android app).
– Phone numbers are not formatted. Same for many other data types.
– Credit/debit cards show a generic icon rather than Mastercard, Visa, American Express, etc.
– The whole interface is marked as selectable in CSS and when you try to move the window around it keeps selecting irrelevant text from the UI such as “Search Vault” and “Item Information” instead of moving the window. Likewise, if I try to select actual text the selection isn't constrained to the field I'm selecting from so I often select a bunch of crap I didn't mean to select.
– Clicking on a password field doesn't offer the option to generate a password.
– Password generation settings don't synchronize between Bitwarden instances. Every time you install the app or the browser extension you have to reconfigure the length, symbols, letters, casing, etc. Again. By default it uses Bitwarden's default basic (and pretty insecure) criteria.
– Bitwarden frequently doesn't detect password fields, and frequently doesn't offer to automatically save the password.
– Can’t drag & drop an item from the list to a folder. I have to manually edit the item entry and select the folder from the dropdown. Every time.
– When editing an item, the ‶Attachments″ entry is a tiny line hidden below ‶Master password re-prompt″ so it's incredibly easy to miss and hard to find.
– Attachments don’t have previews and you can't rename them. You have to manually download a given item and open it in order to see what it's about.
– Can't copy attached images to the clipboard. Instead you have to press the download button, pick a folder, find it, copy the file (or possibly open it with an image editor when you need to copy the image itself), and then paste it where you want.
– Automatic entry names are dumb. For example for Android apps it just picks the package name (e.g. com.voyagerx.scanner) instead of the name of the app (in this example the corresponding app's name is vFlat, so not clear from the package name!).
And this is only the tip of the iceberg. I had many more issues than those with Bitwarden. None of these issues happen on 1Password.