I am an expert at password management, but I don't necessarily know all the vendors of such.

Without exhaustively testing all the vendors, my personal judgement is that 1Password is about the best across many axes. However when they forced the subscription model (with VC-rationalized justifications) I abandoned them and went to BitWarden. BW is very much not as good but it's more than just good enough.

One defect that has bothered me about BW is that to unlock the vault, locally, you have to be able to contact the BW server. (I'm using the BW free cloud, not self hosted.) Right now, for the past 30 minutes, I've been unable to unlock my local vault due to being unable to login to the BW server. BW status page says all green. It could very well be a local/regional connectivity issue and not their systems actually being down. Doesn't really matter, this situation is unacceptable.

I do want to sync between a few devices, without hoops, so I do need their cloud service for that (don't I?). I cannot run an available enough self hosted service. I'm perfectly ok with BW and the way sync is done, it's just the vault unlock dependency which I can no longer tolerate.

Does the community here either know how to configure BW to retain sync but not have this cloud dependency on local unlock (sorry for basic tech support question!), OR do people have recommendations for a different provider that is either free or perpetually licensed? Obviously one can't run a cloud service for free, but I'm thinking iCloud or wifi or other kind of sync.

I am confident that KeePass can do this but I am also confident the UX and the DIY-ish nature of it is not for me.

I'm ok with a ios+mac-only solution, I can do something different/disjoint for the rare other usage I might have.

user:	kdwikzncba
created:	October 8, 2023
karma:	46