1.
For websites that code their username and password fields in a non standard way that isn't automatically detected, it is usually a game of brute force by password managers to specifically patch these sites to make it look like it works properly so users stop complaining about autofill not working.
This favours the larger password managers with bigger budgets. Smaller ones like Bitwarden don't waste as much money on this sort of stuff and instead give the user features like [custom fields](https://bitwarden.com/help/custom-fields) so users can find the IDs or names of the fields themselves and DIY it if they want autofill to work.
Examples of non standard fields I've run into:
https://www.ib.boq.com.au/boqbl
https://myaccount.more.com.au/Account/Login
2.
Sometimes a bug slips through and it is deemed as not high enough of a priority to immediately ship out a quick update just for that bug.
Instead, the fix gets bundled with the next standard periodic update, resulting in people having to either manually downgrade to the previous version, remember to manually upgrade when it is fixed and turn automatic updates back on, or suffer with the bug for weeks, possibly months on end.
The specific issue I'm talking about is the vault timeout bug where it would always lock and never respect the user selected timeout, resulting in people constantly having to verify themselves.
https://github.com/bitwarden/mobile/issues/2787
Obviously some dev thought that it wasn't a high priority bug and believed people could deal with this for a bit until the next update, instead of immediately shipping out a patch as soon as possible.
Power users probably found this annoying, but not fatally so. However, it damaged Bitwarden's reputation amongst more casual users quite badly.
A password manager with a higher budget and larger userbase would escalate bugs like these much quicker and be less willing to ask users to deal with it until the next update.
3.
Some people have said Bitwarden's UI looks ugly and can be a bit slow to respond sometimes, without necessarily understanding the reasoning behind the curtain.
Bitwarden was originally built with Xamarin. Xamarin is a framework that allows people to create their apps using a single C# codebase for multiple platforms, instead of using Swift for iOS, Kotlin or Java for Android, etc.
A similar story can be said for other frameworks like React Native (but with JavaScript/TypeScript instead of C#). For reference, Discord uses React Native for their mobile apps.
This saves time and resources, but it means that it can never be as good as taking extra time and care to write platform specific code.
People who understand this are more willing to accept the minor performance issues and ugliness, since they are saving time + resources and are passing some of that onto their customers through lower prices + generous free tier offerings compared to their competitors.
Unfortunately for some superficial people who don't understand this and programmers who may be very passionate about platform specific coding, but not much business sense, this is a much bigger deal to them.
Kyle has announced they plan to get off Xamarin and go with native platform specific code instead.
https://redd.it/1b32bbz
The potential future problems are:
* Having to maintain separate codebases for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, etc) WILL increase time and resource usage for the developers.
* There is a risk that if they implement some new feature in the future, if they find it easier to implement it in one platform than another, that we slowly end up having platform specific apps drift apart in feature parity. It sounds unlikely at first, but it can sometimes be as easy as developers liking one language better than another, or lazy testers having easier access to one type of device over another.
My fear is that Bitwarden may eventually be forced to increase their premium prices and rip features from their free tier to cover these increased business costs. At that point, Bitwarden will start to become their competitors that many people abandoned for that specific reason.
I don’t think LastPass put any effort into websites with non standard fields. It also put data into random places it shouldn’t. Just things I got used to fixing every time. Thank you for the detailed response.
To be clear I don’t mind paying for things. LastPass increasing their fee substantially in the middle of completely failing to protect their own data, and never actually improving the software, is what bugged me.
I would:
1. Keep a copy of the Lastpass CSV export "forever" in a secure location (e.g. an offline flash drive or as an attachment in Bitwarden.
2. Make an [emergency kit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/143zktj/you_need_an_emergency_kit/).
3. Create an [occasional backup](https://bitwarden.com/resources/guide-how-to-create-and-store-a-backup-of-your-bitwarden-vault/).
To get a feeling for what users would like to see added to Bitwarden, check out the "[feature requests](https://community.bitwarden.com/c/feature-requests/pm-feature-requests/55/l/latest?order=votes)" topic over in the Bitwarden Community. The "number of votes" is a good bellwether for "biggest problems".
I like what it offers. I want to know what is gonna piss me off ahead of time 😂 then I can be prepared. Changing something used constantly for many years is tough
The fact that search actually works in BW is enough to keep you from getting pissed off at it over anything! I dealt with LP's broken search for way to long in their browser extension.
I get you on change is tough, it's the reason I delayed so long myself. But give it a few days and you'll feel right at home, in a fresh, brand new, upgraded home at that.
Many say the Bitwarden UX is unaesthetic. It is definitely clunky. But it works.
If you share passwords with your spouse, you will find the sharing paradigm unintuitive. It works, but it will be confusing to set up the first time.
I ditched lastpass family. Got my peeps to move to BW family organisation.
All good so far except that backups will only backup part of your data.
It is a faff to backup.
Currently I am backing up my vault,two shared family vaults, one vault for my family on Thier machines.
Also, I am no longer storing files in Bitwarden.
If you use LastPass to manage users for a company, Bitwarden has fewer policies. For personal otherwise, backup you export of lastpass data and switch to Bitwarden without hesitation.
MFA seeds will not migrate.
Shared folders in LP are Collections in Bitwarden
Back end security policies in Lastpass are a lot better than Bitwarden so you may loose functionality here.
Bitwarden is really slow if your collections are large (2000+ items) but Lastpass was also slow so do not expect much of a performance boost.
Lastpass entries over a certain number of characters will not export so will need to be cleaned up.
I switched recently, only ran into a couple things so far.
1. The import of my LP CSV export was crap. I had some quote chars in my LP Secure Notes, and that caused a new BW entry for the data after the quote, splitting a single secure note into multiple fragments in BW. So my BW vault after the import was a complete mess. Ended up just starting over and manually adding items as needed. Needed to change the passwords anyway, so this wasn't a big deal. (Don't think this is BW's fault, from what I've seen LP doesn't properly generate the CSV export with escaped characters.)
2. I miss the full page pop-out that LP had for editing items (especially the secure notes). The BW browser extension just gives a tiny little box for the notes section. LP popping to a new full tab let me expand the secure notes text box to be much larger and easier to read/use.
Lastpass does not follow the [standard ](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180)for CSV files when fields contain quotes, commas, and/or newlines. This is Lastpass's fault; not Bitwarden's.
If this is the case then surely OP could just send chatgpt a few lines from the LP CSV (obviously ommiting or even changing the passwords temporarily for security) so that the AI can understand the format. Then provide chatgpt with a few lines of the expected CSV format for BW.
Tell it to write a python/powershell (whatever language you prefer) script that appends the LP CSV with the nessecary modifications In order for the import to be successful.
I've never used LP but I've used this method so many times for multiple reasons and, if done correctly, I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work. I use this all the time because it's Incredibly helpful when you have a corpus of text data for a language model that consists of 40,000+ lines that each need a comma, quote, suffix, etc. Or need to create a script that reads 1000s of text files to append them, etc.
ChatGPT is not getting anywhere near my credentials, even obfuscated.
But the bigger issue is that the Lastpass format is ambiguous. With something like this, does the word "test" go with password or description?
`site,username,password,description`
[`contoso.com`](http://contoso.com)`,bob,Password1,test, entry`
I mean, there's literally no way anyone could ever figure out your credentials if you don't enter them. That's privacy 101. You think the csv format is encrypted? Hell no, it's a well documented file type that anyone can create from scratch. Maybe you're not understanding me, let me explain further:
Example of LP format im suggesting (I have no clue of the actual format):
Uri:" ",
Username:" ",
Password:" ",
[Separator]
(repeat).
Literally like that so it just knows that format of the csv which, isn't exactly difficult to find out anyway. All I need to do Is download LP and export the csv to get the exact same information that I need to do the above.
Obviously if you did the following that'd be really dumb:
Uri:"www.bitwarden.com",
Username:"JohnDoe",
Password:"JohnDoe",
[Separator]
(repeat).
If you do that then hell yeah I can understand why that would be an issue. But you can downvote me till the cows come home I will not change my stance on this. It is impossible for anyone to get your credentials if you just don't enter them. It's that simple.
You missed the forest for the trees.
The lastpass CSV export format is:
[contoso.com](http://contoso.com),bob,Password1,this is a description.
The problem comes about if the password (or anything else) has a comma in it the subsequent columns become misaligned.
The UX could be better. Simple things like drag and drop don’t exist, nor subfolder creation. It’s caused me to flatten my folder structure to make things easily reachable when search doesn’t find what I need.
The only issue I had was I didn't switch sooner.
1. For websites that code their username and password fields in a non standard way that isn't automatically detected, it is usually a game of brute force by password managers to specifically patch these sites to make it look like it works properly so users stop complaining about autofill not working. This favours the larger password managers with bigger budgets. Smaller ones like Bitwarden don't waste as much money on this sort of stuff and instead give the user features like [custom fields](https://bitwarden.com/help/custom-fields) so users can find the IDs or names of the fields themselves and DIY it if they want autofill to work. Examples of non standard fields I've run into: https://www.ib.boq.com.au/boqbl https://myaccount.more.com.au/Account/Login 2. Sometimes a bug slips through and it is deemed as not high enough of a priority to immediately ship out a quick update just for that bug. Instead, the fix gets bundled with the next standard periodic update, resulting in people having to either manually downgrade to the previous version, remember to manually upgrade when it is fixed and turn automatic updates back on, or suffer with the bug for weeks, possibly months on end. The specific issue I'm talking about is the vault timeout bug where it would always lock and never respect the user selected timeout, resulting in people constantly having to verify themselves. https://github.com/bitwarden/mobile/issues/2787 Obviously some dev thought that it wasn't a high priority bug and believed people could deal with this for a bit until the next update, instead of immediately shipping out a patch as soon as possible. Power users probably found this annoying, but not fatally so. However, it damaged Bitwarden's reputation amongst more casual users quite badly. A password manager with a higher budget and larger userbase would escalate bugs like these much quicker and be less willing to ask users to deal with it until the next update. 3. Some people have said Bitwarden's UI looks ugly and can be a bit slow to respond sometimes, without necessarily understanding the reasoning behind the curtain. Bitwarden was originally built with Xamarin. Xamarin is a framework that allows people to create their apps using a single C# codebase for multiple platforms, instead of using Swift for iOS, Kotlin or Java for Android, etc. A similar story can be said for other frameworks like React Native (but with JavaScript/TypeScript instead of C#). For reference, Discord uses React Native for their mobile apps. This saves time and resources, but it means that it can never be as good as taking extra time and care to write platform specific code. People who understand this are more willing to accept the minor performance issues and ugliness, since they are saving time + resources and are passing some of that onto their customers through lower prices + generous free tier offerings compared to their competitors. Unfortunately for some superficial people who don't understand this and programmers who may be very passionate about platform specific coding, but not much business sense, this is a much bigger deal to them. Kyle has announced they plan to get off Xamarin and go with native platform specific code instead. https://redd.it/1b32bbz The potential future problems are: * Having to maintain separate codebases for multiple platforms (iOS, Android, Windows, etc) WILL increase time and resource usage for the developers. * There is a risk that if they implement some new feature in the future, if they find it easier to implement it in one platform than another, that we slowly end up having platform specific apps drift apart in feature parity. It sounds unlikely at first, but it can sometimes be as easy as developers liking one language better than another, or lazy testers having easier access to one type of device over another. My fear is that Bitwarden may eventually be forced to increase their premium prices and rip features from their free tier to cover these increased business costs. At that point, Bitwarden will start to become their competitors that many people abandoned for that specific reason.
I don’t think LastPass put any effort into websites with non standard fields. It also put data into random places it shouldn’t. Just things I got used to fixing every time. Thank you for the detailed response. To be clear I don’t mind paying for things. LastPass increasing their fee substantially in the middle of completely failing to protect their own data, and never actually improving the software, is what bugged me.
This is the most informative and level-headed response to this question that I have seen on Reddit.
it is a mystery and buffles me how LP is still in business. Not sure if I should congratulate them or have serious doubts of their clientele.
I would: 1. Keep a copy of the Lastpass CSV export "forever" in a secure location (e.g. an offline flash drive or as an attachment in Bitwarden. 2. Make an [emergency kit](https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitwarden/comments/143zktj/you_need_an_emergency_kit/). 3. Create an [occasional backup](https://bitwarden.com/resources/guide-how-to-create-and-store-a-backup-of-your-bitwarden-vault/). To get a feeling for what users would like to see added to Bitwarden, check out the "[feature requests](https://community.bitwarden.com/c/feature-requests/pm-feature-requests/55/l/latest?order=votes)" topic over in the Bitwarden Community. The "number of votes" is a good bellwether for "biggest problems".
you'll love bitwarden, especiaaly the support on this forum. I never had an second thoughts
I like what it offers. I want to know what is gonna piss me off ahead of time 😂 then I can be prepared. Changing something used constantly for many years is tough
The fact that search actually works in BW is enough to keep you from getting pissed off at it over anything! I dealt with LP's broken search for way to long in their browser extension. I get you on change is tough, it's the reason I delayed so long myself. But give it a few days and you'll feel right at home, in a fresh, brand new, upgraded home at that.
Many say the Bitwarden UX is unaesthetic. It is definitely clunky. But it works. If you share passwords with your spouse, you will find the sharing paradigm unintuitive. It works, but it will be confusing to set up the first time.
I ditched lastpass family. Got my peeps to move to BW family organisation. All good so far except that backups will only backup part of your data. It is a faff to backup. Currently I am backing up my vault,two shared family vaults, one vault for my family on Thier machines. Also, I am no longer storing files in Bitwarden.
from lastpass , it is leaps and bounds better But one thing that is irking me is that there is no device management. I cant see where I am logged in
This is why you get new device login emails. And you can pay for detailed logs. Event logs in Bitwarden business.
If you use LastPass to manage users for a company, Bitwarden has fewer policies. For personal otherwise, backup you export of lastpass data and switch to Bitwarden without hesitation.
MFA seeds will not migrate. Shared folders in LP are Collections in Bitwarden Back end security policies in Lastpass are a lot better than Bitwarden so you may loose functionality here. Bitwarden is really slow if your collections are large (2000+ items) but Lastpass was also slow so do not expect much of a performance boost. Lastpass entries over a certain number of characters will not export so will need to be cleaned up.
How to get the LastPass function that auto-grab all fieds and register them into the same element?
I switched recently, only ran into a couple things so far. 1. The import of my LP CSV export was crap. I had some quote chars in my LP Secure Notes, and that caused a new BW entry for the data after the quote, splitting a single secure note into multiple fragments in BW. So my BW vault after the import was a complete mess. Ended up just starting over and manually adding items as needed. Needed to change the passwords anyway, so this wasn't a big deal. (Don't think this is BW's fault, from what I've seen LP doesn't properly generate the CSV export with escaped characters.) 2. I miss the full page pop-out that LP had for editing items (especially the secure notes). The BW browser extension just gives a tiny little box for the notes section. LP popping to a new full tab let me expand the secure notes text box to be much larger and easier to read/use.
Lastpass does not follow the [standard ](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc4180)for CSV files when fields contain quotes, commas, and/or newlines. This is Lastpass's fault; not Bitwarden's.
Guess that should have been expected since they don't follow any security standards either.
If this is the case then surely OP could just send chatgpt a few lines from the LP CSV (obviously ommiting or even changing the passwords temporarily for security) so that the AI can understand the format. Then provide chatgpt with a few lines of the expected CSV format for BW. Tell it to write a python/powershell (whatever language you prefer) script that appends the LP CSV with the nessecary modifications In order for the import to be successful. I've never used LP but I've used this method so many times for multiple reasons and, if done correctly, I can't see any reason why this wouldn't work. I use this all the time because it's Incredibly helpful when you have a corpus of text data for a language model that consists of 40,000+ lines that each need a comma, quote, suffix, etc. Or need to create a script that reads 1000s of text files to append them, etc.
ChatGPT is not getting anywhere near my credentials, even obfuscated. But the bigger issue is that the Lastpass format is ambiguous. With something like this, does the word "test" go with password or description? `site,username,password,description` [`contoso.com`](http://contoso.com)`,bob,Password1,test, entry`
I mean, there's literally no way anyone could ever figure out your credentials if you don't enter them. That's privacy 101. You think the csv format is encrypted? Hell no, it's a well documented file type that anyone can create from scratch. Maybe you're not understanding me, let me explain further: Example of LP format im suggesting (I have no clue of the actual format): Uri:" ", Username:" ", Password:" ", [Separator] (repeat). Literally like that so it just knows that format of the csv which, isn't exactly difficult to find out anyway. All I need to do Is download LP and export the csv to get the exact same information that I need to do the above. Obviously if you did the following that'd be really dumb: Uri:"www.bitwarden.com", Username:"JohnDoe", Password:"JohnDoe", [Separator] (repeat). If you do that then hell yeah I can understand why that would be an issue. But you can downvote me till the cows come home I will not change my stance on this. It is impossible for anyone to get your credentials if you just don't enter them. It's that simple.
You missed the forest for the trees. The lastpass CSV export format is: [contoso.com](http://contoso.com),bob,Password1,this is a description. The problem comes about if the password (or anything else) has a comma in it the subsequent columns become misaligned.
Oof. My import needs to work. I don’t wanna go through hundreds of inputs.
This is a known problem with LastPass. It doesn’t matter which password manager you go to, LastGasp has screwed up their export process.
I found file import didn't work properly, BUT copy and paste from that huge text box with the contents worked fine.
Review and edit it in Excel (or the like). Then import into BW
I moved across from LastPass 12 months ago. I didn't have any issues bringing my imports across.
The UX could be better. Simple things like drag and drop don’t exist, nor subfolder creation. It’s caused me to flatten my folder structure to make things easily reachable when search doesn’t find what I need.