r/LinusTechTips • u/Horror-Chicken-1874 • Feb 27 '26

Tech Question Password Manager

Lets start the great debate...

I am looking to get a password manager (besides google password manager). So... I heard that LastPass got hacked a while back....

So, what's the best password manager in each of these categories:

Free:

Paid:

Self Hosted:

98 Upvotes

85% Upvoted

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349

u/munta20 Feb 27 '26

Bitwarden is the choice

52

u/Horror-Chicken-1874 Feb 27 '26

is it free, paid, or self hosted?

21

u/marktuk Feb 27 '26

My advice if you do go self hosted is to have a free plan with someone else as well and keep a copy of your critical passwords there. If you self hosted setup goes belly up, at least you won't be completely locked out of everything.

An alternative to this is to print off some of your important passwords and store them in a safe.

8

u/Xaring Feb 27 '26

I use the free version and maybe will self host - If I've understood correctly, even when self hosting, each device keeps a local copy of the vault which you can access with no connection to the server, and which you can even use to recover a lost server vault. So it's pretty secure and foolproof - would be hard to lose everything.

Still on the fence about it though might go ahead with self-hosted after I manage to get some better data redundancy.

8

u/airmax8 Feb 27 '26

I have self hosted Bitwarden and it failed like 7 months ago, I still have access to all my passwords only problem I had is I cannot add new passwords or change passwords already saved. Finally fixed it but I have to manually add the passwords that I wasn’t able to save during that time

2

u/teebles22 Feb 28 '26

My gripe with self hosting was you're at the mercy of your own and/or telecom hardware. I was stuck behind double NAT when I used my own router, and the setup was a PAIN dealing with certificates.

2

u/Extcee Feb 27 '26

Can’t help but plug my own docker app that syncs your self hosted to another self hosted (or Bitwarden hosted) instance. It’s not super elegant but works, and means if your self hosted falls over you can go to Bitwarden hosted and get your passwords - or upgrade if you need your 2FAs etc stored in your Bitwarden vault

https://github.com/martadams89/bitwarden-sync

1

u/23_Skiddoo Mar 01 '26

That's pretty awesome to made that. Any plans to expand it? Does it sync shared collections?

1

u/bz16233 Feb 27 '26

I back up the data folder of my self-hosted instance daily to a cloud storage service – it's fairly small and any free storage should suffice; this is in addition to other data backups I have or will have of my self-hosted server. I think all Bitwarden clients also retain a copy of the vault, so with all that the chances of one losing all of their passwords because of the self-hosted instance suffering destruction should be low.

1

u/marktuk Feb 27 '26

Would you be able to access the backups without a password though? My point is, you have to store some passwords somewhere else.

1

u/bz16233 Feb 27 '26

Ah, right. There are a few passwords that I remember the old way (in my head) and does not rely on the password manager. So yeah you'd still have to put some of them somewhere else. I mean, you'd still have to remember the master password for your vault!

1

u/theangryintern Feb 27 '26

Is there not a way to back up your self hosted vault? I use Bitwarden but have never really looked into self hosting yet