What Is the BEST Password Manager in 2026?

So there's nothing that you can do to protect your security that is better for you than using a password manager. That includes protecting your network with a firewall, using something like Pi-hole. Securing SSH, nothing is more important than using a password manager. And I truly believe this because really your biggest source of vulnerability isn't your home network because the chances are of that actually getting penetrated by some hacker is pretty low unless you're out there downloading a whole bunch of malware or ransomware, right? But when it comes to things that you sign into online, you're relying on companies and random people on the internet to protect your data and that includes your password which means that if you use the same password for every single website that you sign into you are creating a risk where if someone breaks that trust if someone loses your data or they have a poorly managed network or Someone leaves a laptop somewhere that has all of their customer data on it. Whatever it happens to be, if they drop the ball and you use the same password all over the place, that means every single place that you use that password is in danger of being broken into. And the reason why that's important is because your passwords protect everything else. It protects your social security number, your name, your address, your... Personal data that you probably should be more interested in protecting than you probably are. So what I want to do today is talk about five. Open source, or at least mostly open source, password managers that you can try, all of them at least mostly free, that you can use to protect your passwords and therefore the rest of your data. So let's go ahead and jump in. The first one on the list is Vaultwarden. Now, Vaultwarden is an offshoot of Bitwarden. Now, if you listen to the rest of this video, you'll notice that Bitwarden is actually not on the list because I highly believe that if you're going to use Bitwarden, you should just use Vaultwarden. The differences basically lie in that Vaultwarden is self-hosted. You can put this on your own computer, on your own home server, whatever it is, maybe a VPS if you don't have a computer at home, whatever it happens to be, right? You can store this and run it right on your computer, the entire stack from top to bottom. It has excellent 2FA support, has clients for Linux, Mac, Windows, iOS, Android, and a CLI. It is, like I said, 100% self-hostable. That means you just pop it into a Docker container and press run, and it works phenomenally well. It's based on Bitwarden bit by bit. So if you are familiar with Bitwarden and you use Bitwarden, or maybe you pay for their premium subscription, but you would prefer to not rely on them to host your data, you can run Vaultwarden instead and have the exact same experience. And because of the way this runs, it's a server-client relationship. It means that all of your clients are feeding back into the server and your server is feeding back into all the clients. That means that you have no single source of failure and you're not responsible for the sync like you will be on some of the other things that we're talking about today. So that's Vaultwarden. Honestly, this should be the one that happens last in this video because I think that this is the best solution for most people. But why bury the lead? Vaultwarden is the first one on the list. So the next one on this list is called KeePassXC. Now, this is a very popular choice amongst open source enthusiasts, amongst Linux enthusiasts, simply because it is very simple. There's no server here whatsoever. You don't have to run anything. It's literally just an application. You tell it where you want to store your passwords in your file system. It will create a vault there that is encrypted, and it stores everything there. That's basically what it is. Personally, I find the UI to be a little bit overcomplicated, but most people disagree with me and say that it's just fine. It is one single app. Like I said, there's no server support, so that means there's no sync whatsoever built in. Now, that doesn't mean you can't take that file because it literally just stores a file. And transfer it somewhere else where you can find a client. So there are third-party clients for mobile. There are applications for Mac and Windows and, of course, Linux. So you can take that file and put it on those computers or on those mobile devices and still have access to your passwords. It's just that it's on you to figure out the synchronization of that file. So whether you put it in something like Dropbox or Google Drive or... Something like pCloud or you use SyncThing, whatever it happens to be, right? You still have to be in charge of syncing. It has none of that capability built in. It does have 2FA support, but I found that it's not quite as good as Vaultwarden or some of the others that are on this list. So if you're going to rely on it for 2FA, just know going in that it's not quite as good. It also does have browser extensions. I didn't mention browser extensions for Vaultwarden. Vaultwarden uses Bitwarden's browser extensions. Option in the browser extensions for Vaultwarden or for self-hosted options, you just fill in your server information there. For KeePass, it relies on a local daemon that runs on your computer while KeePass XC is running and allows it to access that file that KeePass saves. So you can access your passwords through a browser extension. The next one is actually the one that I use, and that is ProtonPass. Now, this is the first one on the list that's not fully open source. And that's because it's just the way Proton works. So they provide a fully managed service, kind of like Bitwarden does, in that they have clients that are open source that you can see the source code of, and then they have a back-end server where everything is kind of synced that is closed source and proprietary. Now, personally, I trust Proton simply because of the way that they do audits and stuff like that. They are very clear that they're a security and privacy-first company, and I trust them. But they're still a company, so a lot of people are going to push back on that, and that's fine. Not everybody's going to want that model for their password manager. When it comes to the password manager itself, it's actually really good. It has clients for web, iOS, Android, Linux, Mac, and Windows, of course. It has browser extensions. There is a CLI tool as well. And all of it just works phenomenally well. One of my favorite parts of this actually is the 2FA support. So something that Proton does better than any of the other apps on this list actually is provide you the 2FA code via a little pop-up that comes up whenever a website asks for it. And a lot of times, if you're on like Android or something, it will... Copy, when you go into copy your username and password, it will also add the 2FA code to the clipboard, so you have all three things stored in the clipboard, so you don't have to go back to the app again to find that code. So, it saves you time. Now, it doesn't work on every application, because it kind of has to support that workflow. Some developers have chosen a different password workflow, where they'll ask for the email address first, and then it kind of messes up with the clipboard a little bit. But overall... I find Proton to be really, really good. It also has something for people who have a family. So if you are someone who wants to protect your family when it comes to a password manager, you kind of want everybody to use the same thing. Proton is an excellent choice for that for many reasons. They have a family plan, which does cost money. Everything that I've talked about so far is available on the free plan. But if you do have the family plan. One of the cool things that they allow you to do is share your passwords and your vaults. You can actually create a family vault for passwords that you want to share amongst everybody, which everybody can then access and also keep updated. So if you have, say, a shared checking account with your wife or your significant other, and you want to share that password with them on their personal computer, And to keep it updated, you can do that very easily with ProtonPass. And it's very easy, so that's really cool. So I highly recommend ProtonPass. That's the one that I use. The next one is the password manager for nerds. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm not being derogatory here, because as you guys can actually see, I am a Linux nerd. And that is GNU Pass. The GNU Pass is the most minimal password manager you probably can have. If you want to use this, you're going to be responsible for the infrastructure surrounding it So all this does is manage your passwords. That's literally all it does. It's all CLI based. There are no clients. There's none of that stuff. If you want a client, you have to go out and make one. You have to figure out how to get actually get it on your phone, how to get those passwords in your browser, whatever happens to be right. One of the benefits of having no infrastructure, though, when it comes to this, and it's just in the CLI, is that you can script it very easily. That means you can use things like Rofi or Dmenu to interact with GNU Pass, and you can then, basically, the sky's the limit. You can create your own password manager. It's just you interacting with the service underneath that that stores your password, and that's really cool. Cool, again, I say this one is... Pass is the one for nerds, and I truly believe that if you are interested in just kind of the bare minimum, but you still want this kind of thing, you should check out Pass. Now, on the other hand, just to be fully transparent here, because there's no frills here, there's nothing like sync or 2FA or any of that stuff. It's just not something that Pass offers. It's literally just password management in the terminal. That's it. The last one on the list is the one I'm actually the least familiar with and I actually wasn't able to try it all that much simply because of the requirements it takes to set up an account. So, and that the. The name of this one is called Psono. I'm not sure if I'm saying it right. It is fully self-hostable although they do have managed plans so if you want to do something like Bitwarden or ProtonPass you can All of the clients are, again, open source, and the source code for the self-hosted community edition is also open source and available for you to put on your own servers. Has good 2FA support, has password sharing similar to what... Proton Pass, so technically it would be better than Proton in that it's fully self-hostable and it has that password sharing so you don't have to pay for it. Psono has clients for Linux, Mac, and Windows, iOS, and Android. I'm not sure if it has a CLI. I didn't see one, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Like I said, I'm not as familiar with Psono as I am the other ones. And I will just kind of put this one note on here. And the reason why I'm not as familiar with it simply is because I wasn't able to try it on my own computer. It requires a mail server in order to set up an account. So if you're going to self-host this, part of the container that runs it is a mail server, which means you have to set that up so that it can send out emails. And if you don't set that up, you can't actually sign up for an account to try it or even use it. So of the ones that are on this list that are fully self-hostable, Psono sounds like it is the one that is kind of the most complex to get up and running. But I will say that it looks very nice. So if you're interested more, you know looks and aesthetics Psono is quite good So there you go. Alright, so those are the five Password managers that I have on the list and this isn't an exclusive list by any means there are quite a few other ones There's like 12 different versions of KeePass out there. Some of them have some features. Some of them have sync built-in Some of them haven't been updated in forever. So if you're going to use something other than KeyPass XC, I recommend actually going and looking at the source code to make sure that the project is still maintained. And there are other versions of Vaultwarden out there as well that are written in other things. So you can go check those out. But these are the five that I found and mostly that I've used, the four first ones to begin with for sure, that I can recommend. I use ProtonPass, and I'm not going to go out there and say that it's perfect. It's not. But it's the one that I use and probably the one that I'll stick with simply because the 2FA is really, really good and it allows me to synchronize stuff between clients without having to self-host anything. The reason why I don't self-host Vaultwarden, because I did for a little while. Personally, I don't trust myself not to delete it accidentally. I have a tendency to do that. And when it comes to password managers or passwords themselves, you can't have that possibility. And I want to make sure that that's not the case. So I have something, I prefer a more managed system than something that's self-hosted. But that's more of a personal choice than anything else. It's more of a reflection on my inability to not hit shiny keys. If you have a password manager that I didn't cover or that you'd like to talk about, you can do so in the comment section below. If you use one of these and you want to share your experience, you can do that down below. If you haven't already, make sure you hit the like button on this video. I'd really appreciate it. I'm trying to get back into making videos and getting my subscriber count heading back in the right direction after everybody abandoned me after the I well Not everybody. It was like 20 people, but I felt that for a single one of them. If you want to follow me on Mastodon honestly, those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash linuxcast. You can also find hats and t-shirts and stuff like that on shop.thelinuscast.org. All those places you can find to support me if you'd like to do so. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube. You guys are all absolutely amazing. You guys just seriously, for sticking with me through this down period of my YouTube channel over the course of the last two months, that you're still sticking around. I truly do appreciate it. So thank you so very much to all of you. And thanks everybody for watching. I hope you have a wonderful day. I will see you next time.