this post was submitted on 30 Apr 2025
75 points (96.3% liked)

Selfhosted

46595 readers
1360 users here now

A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.

Rules:

  1. Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.

  2. No spam posting.

  3. Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.

  4. Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.

  5. Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).

  6. No trolling.

Resources:

Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.

Questions? DM the mods!

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

I am looking into password managers, as number of my accounts are increasing. Currently I am weighing two options:

  • Host Vaultwarden on a VPS, or
  • Use the free bitwarden service.

I want to know how they are in practical aspects.

While I am fine self-hosting many services, password managers seem to be one of the most critical services that should not admit downtime. I surely cannot keep it up, as I need to update it time to time.

On the other hand, using bitwarden might require some level of trust. How much should I trust the company to use the free service? How do I know if my passwords would be safe, not being exposed to the wide net?

I want to gauge pros and cons, are there aspects I missed? How are your opinions on this? If you are self-hosting vaultwarden, how do you manage the downtime? Thanks in advance!

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] GnuLinuxDude@lemmy.ml 9 points 3 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

If in the future you think you might bring family/relations onboard to the password manager, it may be worthwhile to pay for a BitWarden family plan. BitWarden is really low-cost and they publish their stuff as FOSS (and therefore are worth supporting), but crucially you don't want to be the point of technical support for when something doesn't work for someone else. Self-hosting a password manager is an easier thing to do if you're only doing it for yourself.

That said, I use a self-hosted Vaultwarden server as backup (i.e. I manually bring the server online and sync to my phone now and again), and my primary password manager is through Keepassxc, which is a completely separate and offline password manager program.

Edit: Forgot to mention, you can always start with free BitWarden and then export your data and delete your account if you decide to self-host.

[–] neatobuilds@lemmy.today 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

that was my thinking too, if something happened to me I dont want all my wifes passwords to be locked out so I made her an admin on the account as well to be able to continue paying for the service or export her passwords

[–] AbidanYre@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

Vaultwarden has an "emergency access" feature so if something happens to me my wife can take over the account.

I also added the kids to our "organization" but didn't give them write permissions to their passwords yet so they can't accidentally change something.

I'm sure official bitwarden has those options too.

[–] neatobuilds@lemmy.today 1 points 1 day ago

oh interesting Ill have to look into that! thank you