Proton Pass vs. Bitwarden

Most password managers offer free and paid plans with different features and functionalities. Depending on your needs, you might prioritize being able to securely share data or being able to customize the items you create, for example.

Here's a comparison of the free and paid plans for Proton Pass and Bitwarden:

Premium plans for both services offer significant additional functionality, such as a built-in 2FA authenticator, support for file attachments, emergency access, advanced account protection, and monitoring.

Proton Pass Plus is $35.88 annually while Bitwarden Premium is $10. Both cover the main premium features you’d expect, but there are clear differences.

Email aliases let you hide your real address by creating a unique email address for each app or service you sign up for, which then forwards messages to your inbox. They help reduce spam and phishing and prevent data brokers from selling your personal data.

Proton Pass offers email aliases with its free and paid plans. It lets you create, manage, and use aliases automatically without extra setup. With a paid plan, you can send and receive emails across multiple inboxes, and use your custom domain.

Bitwarden supports integration with alias services such as SimpleLogin and Addy.io, but you have to set it up yourself. You need to create an account with a provider, then generate and paste the API key and server URL into Bitwarden. Because these services require separate subscriptions, the costs add up: Both SimpleLogin and Addy.io are $36/year.

Sometimes you may need to share data from your password manager, whether that’s a company credit card with a colleague or a streaming service login with your spouse. Both Proton Pass and Bitwarden support secure sharing with end-to-end encryption, but they handle it differently.

With Bitwarden, sharing is complex: you're required to create an Organization and then movd items into a Collection before they can be shared. This setup can be confusing for people who aren't comfortable with tech or aren't used to Bitwarden's terminology. You can’t share individual items directly from your vault, but you can generate a temporary link for a secure note.

In Proton Pass, sharing is built into the app. You can share vaults or single items directly with other Proton Pass users, or generate secure links with expiration options for people who don’t have a Proton Account. Sharing is managed directly from your vaults, with the option to track and revoke access at any time.

Proton Pass has 14 predefined item types (e.g., logins, credit cards, IDs, Wi-Fi password, medical records) with the option to create fully customizable items for unique needs. It's highly flexible and suitable for personal and business information beyond passwords.

Bitwarden has five predefined item types (logins, cards, identities, secure notes and SSH key) with the option to add custom fields or create secure notes as a generic catch-all. It offers less flexibility for specialized or structured data compared to Proton Pass.

Two-factor authentication improves the security of your accounts by making it harder for anyone who isn't you to log in to your accounts. Using an authenticator to generate unique codes is simple and effective, and both Proton Pass and Bitwarden include built-in authenticators in their premium plans.

Your password manager stores critical information, such as financial, legal, and healthcare data, which family members or trusted contacts may need to retrieve in an emergency. Both Proton Pass and Bitwarden include an emergency access feature in their paid plans, which lets you designate people in advance who can access your account if something happens to you.

To protect your data, Proton Pass and Bitwarden both offer account protection and monitoring built in to their services.

Proton Pass includes Pass Monitor on all plans, with alerts for weak, and reused passwords and inactive 2FA. Proton Pass Plus adds Dark Web Monitoring for breached credentials and Proton Sentinel, an always-on system with behavioral monitoring and advanced fraud detection.

Bitwarden offers a Data Breach Report on all plans using Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) to check for exposed emails, while Premium adds Vault Health Reports that flag weak, reused, or exposed passwords and inactive 2FA.

Making its source code available to view is a company's way of proving that its software does what it says it does. It also helps a company welcome examination from security experts and bug bounty programs. Both the Bitwarden and Proton Pass apps are open source and have committed to maintaining this model for full transparency.

Self-hosting lets you to run your password manager on your own infrastructure, giving you direct control over your data and security. While it can be a good fit for organizations with the right resources and expertise, it requires advanced technical knowledge and may not be suitable for most individuals or small businesses.

Bitwarden allows you to self-host so that your data never leaves your environment. Proton Pass, like other Proton services, isn't designed to be self hosted due to its complex architecture.

A company's source of funding shapes both its incentives and how transparent it is willing to be. Proton has been community-funded since the beginning, following the launch of Proton Mail in 2014 with a successful crowdfunding campaign. It's not funded by venture capital firms or advertisers and is owned by the Swiss nonprofit Proton Foundation, whose mission is to protect the privacy of its customers.

Bitwarden has raised more than $100 million from five investors through venture capital funding. While this type of backing can help accelerate growth, it can also create pressure to prioritize profits, sometimes at the expense of product quality or user trust.