I'm curious as to the state of this thread and what participants think after so much discussion.
The OP called password managers a "glorified password protected spreadsheet file browser" nearly 3 years ago and agile bits is an evil company. Is that still the assessment?
For me, I dipped my toe with Bit Warden for a bit of time, but went back to 1Password. My justification is agilebits offered a superior product, and experience then bitwarden - They have provided a safe, secure, well running application and service that allows me to use complex passwords.
After nearly 3 years and over 2,300 posts how content are people with their password managers? How many applications have you all tried and switched? If people are still trying to find a password manager after 3 years, then something isn't right, or have I misread the bulk of the conversations in this thread? I know there were a number of side bar conversations regarding the perceived superiority of open source vs. closed source, and vaults stored in the cloud vs on the device.
How many have people tried before finding one you're happy with? To me there seems to be a large amount of discontentedness - if people (mostly the same people) are still talking finding a replacement for 1password. What are these apps not doing that is causing people to keep looking, and investigating?
I used 1Password for years, from version 3 IIRC and paid the full price each version upgrade. I planned to do this when 1Password announced 1PW8 but removing basic features like storing your vault locally or in the cloud service of your choice, the option for a one time purchase, switching from a native Mac app to a generic cross platform Electron app, and AgileBit’s abysmal responses to customer concerns prompted me to switch.
Bitwarden was really being pushed at that time, and I switched to it. The basic functionality from 1Password is all there but the differences in UI isn’t just about aesthetics, Bitwarden is less intuitive and more clunky to use than 1Password. Still, I stuck with Bitwarden until 1Password announced they were offering passwordless login for your vault, and out of curiosity I switched back.
While I appreciated all the ways that 1PW was better than Bitwarden, I noticed that it was WAY more buggy than in the 1PW7 days, especially with regards to the browser extensions. I would say 85% of the time the Safari browser extension simply didn’t work. I could open the extension, I could manually copy and paste the credentials, but autofill just wouldn’t work most of the time. I would submit tickets to their support and post on their subreddit for help and it would be days or over a week to get responses. I knew this would not be sustainable long term.
This is what led me to seek out yet another alternative and how I ended up at Strongbox, which I wrote about earlier in the thread and is now the most fully featured password manager I’ve ever used, with support for Apple’s native autofill feature on Macs, and incredible support from the devs.
So that’s where I’ve landed. Strongbox is my stopping point unless the devs stop supporting it. It’s an exceptional app with tons of options in all areas and they will get my business from now on.
