Bitwarden vs LastPass (2026)

For most people, Bitwarden is the better pick. Its free plan syncs unlimited passwords to every device you own, Premium costs $19.80 a year against $36 for LastPass Premium, and anyone can read its source code. Pick LastPass if you want dark web monitoring and a security score on a free account, a 30-day trial before you pay, or business plans that add single sign-on to other apps and tracking of the AI tools your staff use. Keep in mind that an attacker copied backups of every LastPass customer's vault in 2022. Prices were checked on November 4, 2026.

Pricing compared

Both companies bill their personal plans yearly. These are US dollar prices before tax, checked on November 4, 2026:

Plan	Bitwarden	LastPass
Free	$0, unlimited devices	$0, one device type
One person	Premium, $19.80 a year	Premium, $36 a year
One person with VPN	No VPN sold	Plus, $84 a year (VPN for Windows only)
Six people	Families, $47.88 a year	Families, $48 a year
Small team	Teams, $4 per user a month	Teams, $4.25 per user a month, up to 50 users
Larger business	Enterprise, $6 per user a month	Business, $7 or Business Max, $11 per user a month

Bitwarden costs less at almost every level. Premium is $16.20 a year cheaper than LastPass Premium, and for that money you also get 5 GB of encrypted file attachments and a built-in authenticator for two-step codes. The family plans cost the same to within 12 cents and both cover six people.

LastPass gives you longer to decide. Premium and Families come with a 30-day trial, while Bitwarden Premium has no trial at all and its Families plan gets 14 days. The LastPass price for a team also climbs faster: Teams stops at 50 users, so a growing company moves to Business at $7 per user. Bitwarden Teams has no user cap, and Teams and Enterprise can be billed monthly, though Bitwarden doesn't publish the monthly rate.

Free plans head to head

This is where the two differ most. Bitwarden Free stores unlimited logins, notes, cards and identities and syncs them to every phone, computer and browser you sign in on. You can protect the vault with a hardware security key, an authenticator app or email codes, and you can share items with one other person through a free organization with up to two collections.

LastPass Free also stores unlimited passwords, but only on one device type. You choose computers or mobile devices, and the other side stays locked until you pay. In return, the free plan includes dark web monitoring that checks your saved email addresses against breach data, a security dashboard that scores your vault and lists weak or reused passwords, one-to-one sharing and 50 MB of file storage. Bitwarden Free includes a data breach report you can run on demand against known breaches, but its other vault health reports, which flag weak, reused and exposed passwords, need a paid plan.

If you want your passwords on your laptop and your phone without paying, Bitwarden is the only one of the two that does it. If you only ever use one kind of device and want to hear about breaches, LastPass Free gives you more.

Security and the 2022 LastPass breach

Both encrypt your vault with a key made from your master password, so neither company can read your passwords. Where they differ is their record and how much of their work you can check.

In 2022 an attacker reached LastPass's cloud backup storage and copied backups of all customer vault data. LastPass says the passwords and notes in those backups stayed encrypted with each user's master password key, but website URLs were stored unencrypted, along with some email address data. The same backups held Authenticator seeds and MFA phone numbers in a database whose decryption key the attacker also took. LastPass disclosed the incident on December 22, 2022. Since then it has raised its password hashing to 600,000 PBKDF2 iterations, rebuilt its infrastructure and holds SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, SOC 3 and BSI C5 certification. LastPass published a separate checklist of recommended actions for Free, Premium and Families customers whose accounts existed at the time.

Bitwarden hasn't reported a theft of customer vaults on its own site. Its code for every app is open source on GitHub, so outside researchers can check how encryption works instead of taking the company's word for it. Bitwarden says it pays for annual source code audits and penetration tests of each client, plus a yearly network assessment, and it holds SOC 2 Type II, SOC 3 and ISO 27001 certification and is HIPAA compliant. You can also run the Bitwarden server yourself, so your encrypted vault never sits on Bitwarden's cloud at all.

Features you use every day

Autofill and passkeys work in both. Bitwarden has extensions for nine browsers, including Brave, Vivaldi, DuckDuckGo and Tor, plus desktop apps for Windows, macOS and Linux and a command-line tool. LastPass covers Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari and Opera, has desktop apps for Windows and Mac, and adds an Apple Watch app. Both save passkeys in the vault and sync them across devices. Bitwarden also lets you use a passkey to log in to Bitwarden itself, while LastPass's passkey page says you still use your master password, or its separate passwordless login, to open the vault.

Sharing is closer than it first looks. Each free plan shares with one person. LastPass Premium shares with several people at once. Bitwarden Premium adds no extra sharing, so beyond the one person a free organization allows, you need Families or a business plan.

Emergency access is on every paid plan of both. You name a trusted contact who already has an account, set a waiting period, and they get in if you don't refuse their request in time. Bitwarden lets you choose between view-only access and a full takeover.

Each also has something the other lacks. Bitwarden Send gives you an encrypted link for a note of up to 1,000 characters, or a file of up to 500 MB on Premium, that deletes itself within 31 days. Bitwarden Premium also stores two-step codes for your other accounts and fills them in after the password. LastPass Plus bundles a VPN, though only for up to 10 Windows devices, and the LastPass phone app can read passwords off paper with its Mobile Smart Scanner.

Business plans

For a small company the two start at almost the same price, but they spend the money differently. Bitwarden Teams ($4 per user a month) gives every user Premium, unlimited sharing, event logs, user groups, an API, Directory Connector and SCIM provisioning. Policies, login with SSO, custom roles, account recovery and self-hosting wait for Enterprise at $6, which also gives each employee a free Families plan.

LastPass Teams ($4.25) has an Admin Console, shared folders and 25 security policies for up to 50 users. Business ($7) removes the user cap and adds more than 100 policies, groups, directory sync with Active Directory, Entra ID, Google Workspace, Okta, OneLogin and PingOne, SIEM feeds to Splunk and Microsoft Sentinel, a free Families account for each employee, and single sign-on for 3 apps. That last one means staff sign in to other company apps through LastPass, from a catalog of 1,200+. Business Max ($11) removes the 3-app limit and adds monitoring of the SaaS and AI tools employees use, with alerts when someone tries to paste credentials into an AI tool.

If you want the password manager itself at the lowest price, with SSO into the vault and the option to host it, Bitwarden Enterprise is cheaper than LastPass Business. If IT also wants app sign-on and AI tool controls from the same vendor, LastPass sells something Bitwarden doesn't.

Switching, ease of use and support

If you are leaving LastPass, Bitwarden's import tool lists it by name, and both apps import saved passwords from Chrome, Edge and Firefox. If you drop from LastPass Premium to Free, the free plan locks you to one device type, so check which side you need before your renewal date.

We didn't test either app for this page, so we won't rank one interface above the other. On paper, LastPass asks you to manage less: its free plan has a ready-made security score, and Families includes a family manager dashboard. Bitwarden asks more of you on the free plan, where only the data breach report is included, but it lets you install the same vault on every device without deciding which one matters most.

Support favors Bitwarden at the free level. Bitwarden answers email around the clock on every plan, Free included, and paid plans get priority. LastPass Free has self-service help and a community forum, and personal support starts with Premium. Neither company's pricing page promises phone support for personal plans.

Who each one suits

Bitwarden suits most individuals and families. You get a free plan you can use everywhere, the cheapest paid plan of the two, published code and the option to host it yourself. Developers and Linux users get a desktop app and a command-line tool, and small teams pay $4 per user with no cap.

LastPass suits people who use one type of device and want breach alerts for free, buyers who want a full month to try Premium or Families, and companies whose IT team wants sign-on to other apps, more than 100 policies and AI tool monitoring in one product. If the 2022 breach rules it out for you and you still want a polished paid app, look at 1Password or Dashlane.