Back when I was a foolish young man, I used the same password everywhere so that I won't have to struggle with remembering what password I set for what account. In retrospect, that was a very, very stupid decision. And as you can guess, I got pwned!

So after that I finally decided to use a password manager. So I'll be sharing my experience with the ones I've used so far.

LastPass (don't)

I chose LastPass at first because Daddy Google had it on top of the search results when I looked up 'Best Password Manager'. I was using it until LastPass had a data breach last year, it was a huge mess. A few months later the company revealed that GoTo's (the company behind LastPass) other services were also attacked, plus encrypted backups with encryption keys for said backups and MFA data were also stolen.

GoTo didn't give any more details about it, like how old the backups were etc. LastPass is a horrible service. GoTo is a horrible company, the handled the breach very poorly. Constantly getting spammed with promotional e-mails was also very annoying. I just exported all my data, changed all my passwords and switched to BitWarden.

BitWarden (great)

I just said to myself, "Heh, it can't be worse than LastPass", and went in. First of all, BitWarden is open source on GitHub. I used the free plan but the personal premium plan is also great, only $10/year. Unlike LastPass, BitWarden actually encrypts all your fields. I had a very strong and long (that's... what... she.... said....) master password.

Regular security audits conducted by notable third-party security firms, open source, self-hostable, generous free plan, transparent company, zero knowledge encryption (white paper), good reputation and I like their philosophy towards security.

BitWarden one day randomly locked me out of my account with the following error: "Traffic from your network looks unusual" - why? I don't know! But either way, it was enough of a reason to not use BitWarden anymore.

KeePassXC (currently using, great)

I currently use KeePassXC. There's no server involved, you just download KeePassXC and start using it. Importing data from BitWarden wasn't hard though it wasn't seamless either. I just save regular backups of my database on the cloud, and use a strong master password. Plus, you can also use YubiKey and OnlyKey for extra protection. It is also open source software and I like that everything about it is handled by me and me only. I also use it for OTP.

I'm no encryption/security specialist, I just wanted to share my experience so if I've made any mistakes then comment below or send me an email on: furtidev@poto.cafe.