I have an instance of vaultwarden server up and running and am evaluating usage for my extended family before jumping in completely.
I was just wondering what the cons/pro of running the bitwarden server would be over vaultwarden.
I don’t need a lot of details just a good reason to stick with vaultwarden or go with the bitwarden server.
I saw one reason is that bitwarden is “resource heavy”. I’ll be running this on my own decent server so have sufficient processing power.
Hello @dgk,
I actually posted reply to a similar question by a user in the Bitwarden forums
Ultimately it comes down to what your intentions are and how comfortable you are with self-hosting, etc.
If you are a tinkerer and the only one using Vaultwarden then I see no issue, I run an instance to test with.
But if other members are using Bitwarden then you may want to go with the official solution to prevent any issues, already hard enough getting some family to use a password manager let alone if they have “techy” issues.
Just my thoughts, but there are pros and cons to each.
@cksapp thanks for you input and link.
Since I posted this I spun up a bitwarden server. It’s a bit more work and I had to figure out the config.yml to remove the ssl part of the nginx conf file so I can do my ssl reverse proxy elsewhere with caddy.
So I’m with you. I’ll just use valultwarden for my own internal hacking vault and spin up bitwarden for the family.
And HA! even after I got my wife set up on keepass she was still writing everything down in a book and carrying that in her laptop case… geez. So after getting on her case she sees the illogic of that. I am thinking that the bitwarden clients are just easier to use than keepass which was never great for multiple devices anyway.
Wanting to put this on your radar, it’s still beta and brand new so definitely would be a great home lab testing case.
Though I wouldn’t quite say I would trust it being ready for production, though seems to be fairly lightweight and a bit more configurable with your own proxy solution as well.
I’ll definitely be trying it out myself to play around with.
cool, in terms of deployment more like vaultwarden. Here is link directly to install page. https://bitwarden.com/help/install-and-deploy-unified-beta/
I have spun up all three servers (bw, bw-unified, and vaultwarden) and I have identified a VERY significant difference. That is with vaultwarden you can turn off registration and the admin can invite new users. If you run either flavor of bw self hosted servers you have to pay for that ability. Obviously bw has done this in order to create a monetary stream from self-hosted users some kind of “freemium”.
So I guess the bottom line for me is that I will run vaultwarden.
Also with vaultwarden you can enable any of the two factors methods which some you must pay to unlock (e.g. fido and yubikey) with bw.
So far I haven’t found issues with running the bw clients and vaultwarden and the latest release is Oct. so at this time VW is an active project. If I can migrate my extended family from Keepass then I’d be happy to support the VM project with some $$.
Realized this link was dead, cannot edit so posting the new link on the merged forum post for anyone interested in reading that may come across this in the future.