RyanL Bitwarden Employee
Hello everyone!
Starting in the next release, the Bitwarden apps published to the various stores will be the commercially licensed builds. No action is needed, and the apps will work exactly as they do today.
Bitwarden remains committed to open source security and transparency
The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone
If you have any questions, please ask them in this thread. Thanks all!
EDIT:
Bitwarden is not going closed-source
You can still fork Bitwarden
No change to self-hosting, the licensing change affects those who are repackaging and reselling Bitwarden
The free plan is here to stay permanently
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Sure, it’s no change for self hosters currently, but it’s one more step in moving towards a more closed platform overall. I do hope more FOSS client apps end up getting made sometime soon. I’ve been using Keyguard on Android for some time, which means the recent several breaking changes in the Bitwarden apps to the Vaultwarden backend haven’t hit me as hard, but I do still use the official apps for my laptop and desktop and Keyguard isnt fully FOSS, of course. I’d love to see some forks or brand new apps one of these days that are actually fully FOSS for both mobile and browsers. I’ve thought about doing some myself, but I have too many other projects and I also don’t have a MAC or want to pay the fees to make an iPhone version. And I abandoned my Android Developer account when they started the identity nonsense, so none of my apps are on the official store anymore and Fdroid and similar may not be viable soon, so it would only really be for myself and a few others who use alternate Android OS’s.
I guess we’re gonna see more open-source apps soon, aimed at Vaultwarden first
I pay for their product and its totally worth. It was $10 for the longest time and much like everything in the last few years has increased price to what it is actually worth. To be honest $20 a year is still stupid cheap and worth it to keep them developing the product. Bitwarden is also one of the few password managers that hasn’t had a user data breach.
Not surprised in the slightest sadly.
Heh, I’m looking at you to those people that looked at me weird because I told them I was good with Keepass!
@Mustachius_Grumpius “The GPLv3 OSS licensed version continues to be updated and published on GitHub
All current features are available in both versions
License details are on GitHub
Bitwarden remains committed to a robust, free forever plan for everyone”
yeah but its typical double speak
Why do you think so?
@surewhynotlem @Mustachius_Grumpius
Experience…all “current” features. further down its asked about the future and they arent always clear but the fo state there wont be feature parity moving forward
Yup. All CURRENT, these will start to diverge…
It is effectively going closed source
How so
They don’t make any money off of the open source version. It is just a matter of the before they “discontinue” the open source version and move to source available.
If you have any doubts just look at Redis, Vagrant or Terraform
I really hope they don’t go that route.
A different licence for the commercial version isn’t a bad thing in se, in my opinion
Yeah we have seen the same process many times now.
Fine to me as long as this doesnt impact Vaultwarden
There is no way I’m self hosting something this important… So now I’m not sure what to do actually.
That’s why I’m just using KeePass. It’s just an encrypted file that you can store on whatever storage you want and sync with existing solutions like Syncthing etc.
Yes it’s a bit finicky when you edit the file on multiple devices before they’ve synced but it works very well for me…
If self hosting is not an option. Ideas that come to mind:
Evaluate what it is worth to you and maybe pay for it, if they offer enough worth to you and it is affordable.
Then there are people who host it and provide it to others. Together with other apps, as a suite. Maybe that’s an option. But I suppose, donating or paying is expected here, too.
Or switch to another solution. Preferably one with an import feature.
Side note: I just tried switching to KeePassXC and it seems pretty fine, except for one caveat. If you installed your browser (probs FF or Librewolf) through flatpak or snap on Linux, the browser extension will not work.
I had to change to the non-Flatpak ver of Librewolf on my Fedora PC, which sucked a little lol 😅
As always, people overreacting in the comments (of the linked forum). So the current plan is that the core remains OSS, but upcoming features are partially not. To me that sounds similar to Chrome’s or VSCode’s approach.
Be cautious in such cases is not overreacting. We’ve seen enough open to closed rug pulls in the last years.
yeah sorry I dont want that
I’m not saying that’s great news, but it doesn’t sound like the self destruction move that some OSS companies have done recently. I wouldn’t migrate away just because of that change. In the end, they have to find a sustainable mode of operation.
It’s 2026 and you have way too much optimism left after all the OSS rug pulls of the last six fucking years.
Even hardware rugpulled. Fucking Micron.
Forget it; BitWarden is cooked.
So the current plan is that the core remains OSS
… for now.
Embrace, Enhance, Extinguish.
*: got the E’s in the wrong order
It’s not overreacting when you have seen the same development at least 10 times before. Its called experience.
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I’ve seen in this thread:
Fewer Letters More Letters Git Popular version control system, primarily for code SSH Secure Shell for remote terminal access TLS Transport Layer Security, supersedes SSL VPN Virtual Private Network
4 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 6 acronyms.
[Thread #125 for this comm, first seen 11th Oct 2026, 04:30] [FAQ] [Full list] [Contact] [Source code]
Does anyone have a handy guide to switching to selfhosted version? I was considering doing that but I let my plan renew out of laziness.
Idk how it compares feature wise, but i have been running keepassxc/keepassdx combined with syncthing (or any file synchronization/cloud system) for many years without issues. The entire password manager database sits in one encrypted .kdbx file that you keep synced between your devices. Syncthing is nice because its p2p, so no self-/hosting required.
https://keepassxc.org/
https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxchttps://f-droid.org/packages/com.kunzisoft.keepass.libre/
https://syncthing.net/
https://github.com/syncthing/syncthingEvery single time Bitwarden is mentioned on the internet, someone comes in here and proudly recites the anthem “I have been using Keep ass with sink things”
It sucks compared to a dedicated extension.
No autofill No TOTP or 2FA support Doesn’t do passkeys Doesn’t have organizational sharing Doesn’t sync to mobile devices Doesn’t integrate with mobile browsers without trusting some compatible 3rd party app Requires selfhosting your passwords (don’t fuck it up!)
It’s actually pretty sad that the open source world doesn’t have a better solution for this. I mean I guess BitWarden was it but that’s been stolen by venture capital so
Why is it that every time i comment about keepass, its because some web based password manager once again broke, got hacked, or stopped development. Keepass users just stay winning :)
Also i have been using keepass with TOTP 2FA for years what are you on about?
Also also, you shouldnt use fido passkeys. Its a failed technology that is worse than what it tries to replace.
There isn’t anything wrong with passkeys that can’t also be made wrong with passwords, and there isn’t anything more secure about passwords, at all.
Please don’t tell me you took that article that was spammed all over here a few days ago at face value…
I had done that for a long time. It worked until it didn’t and I lost passwords. I tried again with keepass2android and it’s built-in sync. It again worked fine until at some point it wasn’t able to sync anymore for no discernible reason. I’d love for this to be a reliable setup, but it just isn’t in my experience, at least when there are 3+ devices involved with different clients and no proper awareness of the password manager and the sync sides of each other.
Exactly. No way I’m going to use this for something critical.
Yup great combo. It baffles me why anyone one would favour to depend oneself on an online service instead
Here it explains some self host options with links to “Get Started” for each:
https://bitwarden.com/help/self-host-bitwarden/
For example, here’s the link to “Linux standard deployment”
https://bitwarden.com/help/install-on-premise-linux/
You may also want to consider not making your server available to the open internet, and instead access it only on your LAN via VPN.
All these people keep saying that Vaultwarden won’t work because it relies on bitwarden’s API but if there is an incompatibility then wouldn’t vaultwarden just be left in a functional limbo? Like it’ll still work because self hosted but no more new features in parity with official client? Or have I misunderstood the connection between the two
wow, setting up vaultwarden quadlet to work with my selfhosted OIDC sso was stupid easy. Migrating my bitwarden setup to it took no time at all. The extra step was setting up some extra pocketid passkeys to be stored on non-vaultwarden hosted systems (ie. google) to prevent myself from being locked out in case vaultwarden crashes (which probably was a good idea to do regardless). Just need to add the data volume to my regular backup.
