What I Use: Bitwarden (Premium)

I wasn’t a LastPass user, but the recent security issues with the service were the push I needed to adopt a standalone password manager. I chose Bitwarden.

Taken on its own, this isn’t a big deal: after all, exporting and importing passwords is easy. Maybe too easy. But the bigger deal, I think, was removing my passwords from my previous password managers, which in my case were all web browsers. That requires a leap of faith. Or at least enough experience with the new thing to know that it will work everywhere you need it, every time.

And to be sure of that, you need to do some testing over time. On all of your devices. Which in my case is the PC, where I use Bitwarden in the Brave web browser, and on mobile, across my iPhone, iPad, and Pixel 7 Pro, where Bitwarden can also be configured as the device-wide password autofill source.

Configuring Bitwarden in Brave or any other Chromium-based browser is easy enough: after installing the extension, signing in, and configuring it, you just need to disable the browser’s built-in password manager. Just navigate to chrome://settings/passwords (yes, this works in Brave and Edge too) and disable two options: “Offer to save passwords” and “Auto Sign-In.” (Or similar: there are three options in Edge, for example.)

Mobile requires a bit more work because of the system-wide auto-fill capabilities. I made Brave the default browser on each device, and then went through the auto-fill configuration via the Settings app on each device. (On the iPhone and iPad, this is in Passwords > AutoFill Passwords. On my Pixel, it was in Passwords & accounts > Password Options.) Interestingly, the iPhone and iPad let you configure multiple auto-fill services, and you can choose which to use when you need to auto-fill. But Android only allows one.

Once all that’s done, you also need to configure some security features (on both mobile and desktop). Otherwise, Bitwarden will require you to enter your master password, which is hopefully long and complex, after it times out. And this can get tedious whether you’re on mobile or the desktop.

Interestingly, this doesn’t differ much between platforms: just go into Bitwarden settings and then enable biometric and/or PIN unlock. Then you can use the native sign-in method on whatever device to access the service. It’s easier and it’s a lot more natural.

After I did all that, I gave it a couple of weeks to make sure that Bitwarden was working correctly everywhere as my only password manager and, on mobile, as my only auto-fill source. And once that was done, I took the difficult step of removing my passwords from my previous password managers (which, again, in my case were all web browsers).

Deleting your passwords from a browser varies by browser. Here, Edge makes it easy, thanks to a “Select all” widget at the top of the list of passwords. But in Brave, you need to do a bit more work. First, click the “Customize and co...