I've Switched Password Managers 4 Times Since the LastPass Breach. Here's Where I Landed.

December 2022. LastPass announced that attackers had stolen encrypted password vaults. Not just metadata — the actual vault files, containing every username and password you'd ever saved, sitting on someone else's server, waiting to be cracked.

I had 340 passwords in LastPass.

What followed was six months of the most tedious security work I've ever done. Prioritizing which accounts to change first. Wondering which sites would be brute-forced. Changing passwords on accounts I'd forgotten I had.

My migration history, with brutal honesty:

LastPass to Dashlane (Month 1): Nice UI, expensive, used it for 2 months. Realized I was just paying for anxiety in a prettier box.

Dashlane to 1Password (Month 3): Finally felt like a product made by people who understand security culture. Excellent family plan. Travel Mode is genuinely clever. I almost stayed.

1Password to Bitwarden (Month 7): Open source. Self-hostable. Independently audited. Costs $10/year for premium, or nothing for the free tier. The UI is less polished than 1Password but the architecture is more trustworthy.

Bitwarden, still (now): It's where I landed. The honest verdict: if you want the best UX and don't want to think about it, use 1Password. If you want to be able to verify that no one is lying to you about how your data is handled, use Bitwarden.

LastPass had the best UX for years. We know how that ended.