Feb 05, 2021 But we didn’t test them because they lacked minor features that 1Password, LastPass, Dashlane, and Bitwarden all had. Enpass, RoboForm, and Sticky Password don’t monitor for hacked passwords.

• LastPass is changing its free plan. You can easily move from LastPass to Bitwarden, an open source password manager. This video is NOT sponsored. Soci.
• Apr 13, 2021 Dashlane matches LastPass in platform support and has better desktop software. Its killer feature remains the bulk password changer that can reset hundreds of passwords at once, although the sites.
• If you use dashlane's password generator, I would recommend exporting to excel instead of CSV. Clean it up and then save as CSV. Dashlane will use commas in passwords which screws up CSV pretty good. Plan on sanitizing the data before you import to Bitwarden.

The importance of a capable password manager is unmatchable. The majority stick with the Chrome Password manager or iCloud Keychain as they come by default on Android and iOS, respectively. However, there are many powerful third-party alternatives out there. Among them, both Dashlane and Bitwarden top the list on GT recommendations. If you are getting confused between the two, then read along to find the differences.

The comparison covers interface, cross-platform availability, features, price, sharing, password audit, and more. Let’s get started.

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Cross-Platform Availability

While Apple product users are mostly prefer iCloud Keychain solution, but it's not available natively on Windows and Android.

Cross-platform availability in a password manager is essential for the ease of access on all your devices, including the ones you plan to buy in the future. .

Bitwarden covers every possible platform and browser you can think of. It’s available across iOS and Android; it has native desktop applications on Windows, macOS, and Linux; and it also integrates with every major browser, including Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge.

Dashlane isn’t far behind either. The software is accessible on Android, iOS, Windows, and Mac.

User Interface

Both the Dashlane and Bitwarden use the standard macOS menu for navigation. We like Dashlane’s approach since has a better-looking translucent effect on the sidebar. It matches perfectly fine with the modern macOS design.

We found Bitwarden to be a bit on the safer side. It uses a standard white theme with black text across UI. For the fans of Dark theme, the app supports that as well.

Adding a New Item

Click on the ‘+’ button at the bottom, and you can add new items on Bitwarden. New item types are limited to Login, Card, Identity, and Secure Note only. Compared to that, Dashlane offers Business, Career, Shopping, Social Media, Tech, and more.

On Dashlane, you can create profiles to auto-fill forms and make payments. There is also a separate tab to save a digital copy of your important documents and receipts of purchases that you make online.

Bitwarden follows the folder model. You will have to create one and organize password entries manually. One can also add TOTP (Time based one-time password) and add relevant notes like security questions, birthdate, and more.

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Security and Backup

Dashlane audits passwords for strength and can generate complex, random passwords with the click of a button. You can view your overall identity protection strength at the Identity Dashboard and Password Health platforms.

Dashlane also offers other security features in paid plans, including a VPN, identity theft protection, and dark web monitoring. Getting a VPN separately would have cost more but may offer additional features.

With Bitwarden, all your data is fully encrypted before it ever leaves your device. Only you have access to it. Not even the team at Bitwarden can read your data, even if they wanted to. Your data is sealed with end-to-end AES-256 bit encryption.

As for Backup, Bitwarden stores all the user data on the Microsoft Azure Cloud platform.

Other Features

We love Dashlane’s audio report. It is one of the most reliable and comprehensive reports among all password managers.

The rigorous evaluating system can not only spot weak and duplicate passwords but also scans the dark web to see if your email address or other online accounts have been exposed.

Bitwarden is full of useful functions as well. The list of features includes encrypted file attachments, security audit reports, two-factor authentication, user groups, shared items, and more.

Pricing

Bitwarden does have paid tiers, but we think most people will be able to do without most of the features they offer. Paying gets you access to encrypted file attachments, more second-factor security options, and reports on the overall security of the passwords you have in use.

Bitwarden only costs $10 per year. That is way cheaper than the competition out there. The family plan is set at $3.33 per month.

Dashlane plans are slightly on the expensive side at $3.33 per month, but they offer VPN. The Family plan is $5 per month per user.

Also on Guiding Tech

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Secure Your Online Identity

Using a capable password manager like Dashlane and Bitwarden takes away the pain of remembering hundreds of login information across dozens of apps and services. Dashlane has a better UI and the audit report is one of the best we have seen. Bitwarden is open-source, available everywhere, and it’s cheaper than the rivals.

Next up:LastPass is another excellent Bitwarden rival to consider. Read the comparison post below to find all the differences between the two.

The above article may contain affiliate links which help support Guiding Tech. However, it does not affect our editorial integrity. The content remains unbiased and authentic.

Read Next

LastPass vs Bitwarden: Should You Switch to An Open Source Password Manager

Here is an in-depth

14 Dec 2020

It’s 2020. If you aren’t using a password manager yet, drop everything you’re doing and switch to one.

Using password managers is a very good idea. Up until last year, I was using Chrome’s password manager, and it worked well, for the most part. However, I wanted something more dedicated, since I had started to see obvious issues with it (no concept of “master” password, no special characters in password generators, no cross platform support, etc.). I searched around for password managers, and most reviews recommended options like Dashlane, 1password, Lastpass, etc. Figuring that there wouldn’t be much difference between these options, I decided to give Dashlane a try. After all, everyone did say “you can’t go wrong with any of these”. Boy, was I wrong.

Bitwarden To Dashlane Sign In

The more I used Dashlane, the more puzzled I became at some of the design decisions the company chose to make. I ran into some bugs that are not only deal breakers, but are outright security issues. Since I had paid for a year of Dashlane’s premium subscription, I decided to give it a chance anyway. After having none of those issues go away after 11 months, I decided to just give up and switch to Bitwarden yesterday. In a couple of hours, all my issues magically went away. Here are my gripes with Dashlane:

Dashlane’s Autofill feature

One of the things that annoyed me the most with Dashlane was the “auto login” feature. If you’re on a website’s login page and Dashlane has only one login for that, it’ll simply fill the credentials in, and then click the submit buttom for you. The first time it happened to me I was so confused I had no idea what happened. This is just straight up no-no in my books. Software should never do things for you unless you specifically configure it to do that. It should merely suggest and serve helpful suggestions, never do actions on your behalf. Not only that, but:

• You can’t click the “Remember me” checkbox or interact with the page in any way.
• Some sites have a login page on their home screen, and this feature just makes you jump directly without even asking if you want to log in in the first place.
• There’s no global switch to turn off this feature. You literally have to open each password item in the Dashlane app and turn it off. Needless to say, for hundreds of passwords, this feasible at all.

Broken Popups

Dashlane’s password fill in popup would just randomly not appear sometimes, both in the extension, and on my Android device, requiring me to open the app and manually copy the password from there. Besides being annoying, this is a very serious security concern, since the only time the password fill in pop up should not appear is when you’re on a phishing site.

I even got phished because of this once. Someone messaged me an invite to their Steam account, but the URL was staemcommunity.us (Notice the ‘a’ and ‘e’ flipped. Also, Steam doesn’t have a .us domain, but it looked official enough for me in that moment). The page was a 1:1 replica of the steam page, and Dashlane refused to show the password popup. Rolling my eyes, I opened the dashlane app, copied my username and password and even submitted the form. Thankfully, the minute I submitted it I realized something was wrong (the page told me that my username/password combo was incorrect, which it couldn’t possibly be), and I figured out I was phished, and changed my credentials quickly. This would have never happened had Dashlane’s popup been more reliable for me.

No Desktop App support for Linux

I solely use Pop!OS for everything, including gaming. Imagine my disppointment when I found that Dashlane’s desktop app only supports Windows and Mac. Without the app, you can’t use Dashlane’s VPN (why would you pay for premium then?). You also can’t use features like password export.

To shift to Bitwarden, I literally had to download Windows 10, create a virtual machine, install the app, then use the export feature. Why doesn’t the web app have such a basic utility feature?

No ability to lock extension on sleep

Whenever I lock/put my device to sleep, I want to extension to lock itself too, otherwise there really isn’t any point to having a master password. Dashlane has no such feature. Anyone who can someone get in my machine also suddenly has access to all my passwords. Bitwarden, a free service, has that feature.

Broken Password Export

Thankfully, Dashlane offers to export all your stored information in a JSON so you can shift to some other (read: better) password manager. However, after migrating to Bitwarden, I noticed that it wasn’t working well with subdomains. My first instinct was to blame Bitwarden, but upon inspecting the JSON export of my information, I found out that Dashlane had grouped together passwords for all subdomains into the domain. For example, the passwords for abc.example.com and pqr.example.com were stored in the JSON as 2 different passwords for example.com. Morever, none of my “Secure Notes” had made it in the export. I’m going to have to manually spend some time to clean up this mess.

Bitwarden To Dashlane App

Conclusion

Just use Bitwarden. It’s free, and the premium plan is 1/5th the price of Dashlane, and it is much more usable and has more features than Dashlane.

Bitwarden Export To Dashlane

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