When it comes to password sharing, Password Safe, Bitwarden and KeePass are all good options that allow you to complete this function with little hassle.
In order to ascertain which solution provides the best functionality, our team of cybersecurity experts have conducted a study of all three, evaluating the features they offer and how simple they are to use.
For a lot of password manager users, password sharing is a crucial feature. It can regularly be the case that staff need to share certain passwords or other information with specific colleagues, clients or entire teams and create read-only or editing authorization(s).
This study was conducted over a time period of more than 10 hours, with this article covering the testing and reviewing of the password sharing capabilities of each solution. This is a very important feature for some companies as they may have a large workforce and authorization will need to be given to a number of individuals to use the same app in order to complete their work duties.
Bitwarden Password Sharing
Password sharing is possible on both the Bitwarden free and premium versions. Sharing can be completed with one other individual on the free version and there is an option with the family and team versions that allows sharing with up to five individuals if the monthly fee is paid. More users can be included on the team version and unlimited user access for an additional fee. The enterprise version automatically comes with unlimited sharing in return for a per user/per month fee.
Unlimited shared items is available on all versions of Bitwarden and there is an upgrade available for unlimited collections.
Password Safe Password Sharing
While Password safe has no formal password sharing features, it is still possible once users who need to be included have Password Safe installed. When this is the case, a new safe with a unique master password can be established for each different set of passwords that need to be shared. Using the shared master password, multiple users can then access the safe.
KeePass Password Sharing
Just like Password Safe, KeePass has the capability to allow multiple users to share a database using a shared master key. For simple access, the database should be placed on a shared network drive. KeePass tries to alert users if more than one person is working in or accessing the database at the same time and enables a read-only mode in this instance. This means that only one user can make changes to the database at any one time. If this security feature wasn’t in place, changes could be lost as it will not sync between two simultaneous users at once. However, there is built-in synchronization between multiple copies of a database available with KeyPass 2.x.
Conclusion
While KeePass and Password Safe have a number of options that allow simple sharing, neither solution has password sharing features any where near as comprehensive as Bitwarden. Bitwarden is therefore the recommended password manager if you are seeking to maximise your safe password sharing capabilities.
