#LastPass Free is dead 🪦 this Tuesday (no more multi-device 📱) : Time to #switch: pay - #1Password | free - #KeePass | easy - #BitWarden (read on for my experience) | #security #privacy #tech
I’m here to tell you: do not fall for LastPass’s trick of making you pay for cross-device as a Premium product (36 bucks a year).
This change represents the end-game of the venture capitalists who bought LP’s parent LogMeIn in 2019, and they should be punished by losing all of their customers. Seriously, tech companies should never, NEVER reduce the free feature set (this drastically). They should widen the value prop of purchasing paid plan through extending & expanding that feature set. In fairness, LP have done this with dark web monitoring etc. though for a while even that was on Free plan, so we should have seen this coming.
Anyway, let’s make sure they don’t see any increase in Paid Users. Everyone on Free should switch.
Options
Option Pay: NYT Wirecutter have 1Password is best paid option incidentally, not LastPass Paid, so really Zero Excuse to upgrade with LP.
Option Free: KeePass. Avoid potentially all trackers which have recently been discovered in almost all major cloud password managers by using KeePass’s local storage.
Only take on if you literally don’t care about good UI/UX and are confident on navigating some technical choices common to FOSS solutions.
Option Easy (what I’m doing): BitWarden Free
Yes it had a couple of Firebase trackers, yes it’s privately owned so could follow LP’s path.
But it’s open-sourced and seems mission committed long-term to free tier.
Option Easy: BitWarden
Super easy to switch. Here’s a couple guides:
Step 1: Export from LastPass:
- GHacks
On Export step 1, it does disclaim “Note: The data is saved without protection, all passwords are visible. Make sure you protect the file properly.” But also check this article to about quite how dangerous this process really is: askleo.com/how-do-i-… The csv download is an unencrypted file containing ALL your passwords. Save this locally only (I did so also in an encrypted Cryptomator vault for good measure), definitely not on Cloud Storage!
Step 2: Import to BitWarden:
Looks like you can only do it on the Web Vault.
BitWarden texperiment
I’m gonna do an accelerated 2-day texperiment on BitWarden before deleting LP on Monday, and will share insights again on Monday.
Here’s a couple quick observations:
It seems to have kept all major per password fields (including Notes). Plus, and here’s the pleasant surprise: meta-information, like Favorites, Folder.
Also they’ve largely preserved the Type of Item including Cards, and Secure Notes. The only ones I can see which haven’t are some of the more niche LP cateogries like Bank Account, Drivers License etc. which they have converted to their Secure Note.
I’m immediately impressed with the fact they have more login logos (I think they’re simply using website favicons rather than LP using some official logo database).
I believe their Send feature is premium only, which is fine as ProtonDrive recently launched on iOS, so now cross-device on encrypted file sharing anyway!
Can anyone who knows Bitwarden advise on any major differences they’ve found or things to prepare for?
w4rner
Appendix
- Update (minutes after): forgot to mentioned what’s pictured: I closed this annoying Firefox ‘sidebar’ which auto-appeared when downloaded BitWarden Firefox Extension
