Bitwarden

1Password is closed-source, polished and $35.88/year individual — the strongest UX in the category. LastPass is closed-source and suffered a major breach in 2022 disclosing customer vaults, making it the de facto unrecommended option in 2024-2026. Bitwarden is open-source (GPL-3.0), free for unlimited passwords across unlimited devices, $10/year for Premium, and self-hostable. It is the choice when you want either a free password manager or a fully-owned self-hosted vault. UX is slightly behind 1Password but ahead of every other free option.

Yes — Bitwarden Free covers unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, all core features (browser extensions, mobile apps, autofill, TOTP, secure notes, identities, cards). The $10/year Premium adds emergency access, file attachments (1GB encrypted), advanced 2FA (YubiKey, U2F), and password health reports. Families ($40/year for 6 users) and Teams/Enterprise are SSO-aware paid tiers. The self-hosted version is fully featured and free. Bitwarden's free tier is the most generous of any major password manager.

KeePassXC is a fully local, file-based password manager (.kdbx file you sync via Nextcloud / Dropbox / Syncthing). It has zero cloud surface but requires manual sync setup. Vaultwarden is a Rust re-implementation of the Bitwarden server, dramatically lighter (50MB Docker image), self-hostable on a $5 VPS, and compatible with all official Bitwarden clients. Use KeePassXC if you want zero servers; use Vaultwarden if you want a self-hosted multi-device manager with the polished Bitwarden client apps; use Bitwarden cloud if you want zero ops.

Yes. All Bitwarden clients (browser extension, mobile, desktop, web vault) cache the encrypted vault locally. After your first sync you can read, search and autofill passwords offline. New entries and edits queue locally and sync when you reconnect. The encryption is client-side — the server only ever sees ciphertext, so your master password is never transmitted. The PWA web vault (vault.bitwarden.com) installs to home screen and works offline for read access.

Bitwarden is the default recommendation in r/sysadmin, r/privacy, on Hacker News and across the security community. It is deployed in thousands of small-to-mid-sized businesses (Teams/Enterprise tiers), and self-hosted Vaultwarden runs in homelabs and small companies wanting full data control. After the 2022 LastPass breach, Bitwarden reported 60%+ growth in paid signups. It is used by US Department of Defense in some contexts (FedRAMP authorized), and by privacy-focused journalists and activists worldwide.