On March 16th, LastPass Free is going to be almost useless to most people. Most of us use LastPass as our main password manager, and we use it on both our PC’s and Mobile devices, however after March 16th, you have to chose one of the two: Unlimited PC or Unlimited Mobile, and you’ll be permanently locked in once you have selected your option. Read the official statement/FAQ here.
Of course you can upgrade and pay for the premium version to keep these features, which is $3 a month or $36 a year, which might not sound like much, but bills add up, and there are better or even equivalent free alternatives to LastPass out there. I don’t mind paying for services, but a Password Manager is a simple service, and nearly $40 a year isn’t a value. I could understand paying for like a toolkit package, that comes with a Password Manager, maybe an adblock and a gig of cloud storage, but just a simple password manager? nope.
Luckily there is a perfect FREE alternative that works and operates nearly identical, if not better on both PC and Mobile as Lastpass does. I actually like using it more. The Alternative is called Bitwarden. It too offers premium services, but the basic password manager and form filler is free on both Mobile and desktop, and has no limits.
Like LastPass, it has a vault which all your passwords are stored in. Has browser extensions for every mainstream browser out there, along with apps for both Apple App Store, and Google play.
Firefox Extension:
iOS:
It works identically for me on everything as LastPass does, so there is no learning curve, or habit changes.
You can import all your data from LastPass almost effortless as well, it only took me a minute or two.
How to move data from LastPass to Bitwarden:
Make sure you are on your trusted device and on a secure connection! Your lastpass data including all passwords will be decrypted and will be shown in plain text.
- Create Bitwarden account (free)
- Log into your LastPass vault.
- Select “Advance Settings” on the left side navigation menu on Lastpass
- Select “Export” and enter your LastPass master password, it will give you a print out of all your data.
- Right click and Select all, then right click and select copy. You can paste this into a text file, or past it into Bitwarden directly.
- Log into your Bitwarden vault, and select “Tools” from the top menu.
- Select “Import Data”
- If you saved your exported data to a text file, you can hit browse in find it, or just paste the text you copied from lastpass into the text box.
- Click “Import data” and wallah. All done.
I didn’t have any major issues, all my passwords and form data imported just fine.
Make sure you clear your copy clipboard, or delete the text file if you made one.
If you know how to use LastPass, then everything should be fine and work the same.
Links:
Bitwarden
Extensions:
Chrome/Chromium
Firefox
App Stores:
Apple App Store
Google Play
