Home › Comparisons › Bitwarden vs 1Password
Bitwarden vs 1Password: free and open, or polished and paid
Both are genuinely good password managers. The decision is whether 1Password's extra refinement is worth roughly 50% more per user — and whether you want software you can audit and host yourself.
Bitwarden
vs
1Password
The short answer
For most people: Bitwarden. Its free plan is genuinely unlimited — unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, no expiry — and that alone solves the problem for the majority of individuals. It's also open source, so the security claims can be independently audited rather than taken on trust, which for a password manager is not a small thing.
For teams: Bitwarden, on cost. $6/user for Enterprise against $8.99 for 1Password Business. For ten people that's about $359 a year of difference, and Bitwarden Enterprise throws in free Families accounts for every user.
Choose 1Password if polish matters to you. It's the better-made product — smoother apps, better onboarding, an interface people actually enjoy. That's a real benefit, particularly for a non-technical team where adoption is the hard part, and it's worth paying for if the price difference is noise to you.
Side by side
| Bitwarden | 1Password | |
|---|---|---|
| Free plan | Yes — unlimited passwords and devices | None (14-day trial) |
| Individual | $1.65/mo$19.80/year | $2.99/mo promo$3.99 standard |
| Family | $3.99/mo — 6 users$47.88/year | $4.49/mo promo — 5 users$5.99 standard |
| Small team entry | Teams $4/user/mo | Teams Starter Pack $24.95/moincludes 10 members |
| Business tier | Enterprise $6/user/mo | Business $8.99/user/mo |
| Open source | Yes — auditable | No |
| Self-hosting | Yes (Enterprise) | No |
| SSO | Enterprise — passwordless SSO | Business — Okta, Entra ID, OneLogin, Duo |
| Zero-knowledge encryption | Yes | Yes |
| Passkeys | Yes, all plans | Yes |
| Encrypted export | Yes, all plans | Yes |
All prices USD, billed annually, read from each vendor's own pricing pages on 16 September 2026. Taxes excluded by both.
The free plan is the headline
Bitwarden's free tier is the most generous in this category and it isn't marketing: unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, browser, mobile and desktop apps, zero-knowledge encryption, passkey support, a password generator, and encrypted export so you can leave whenever you want.
Compare that with the category norm, where free plans cap you at one device type or a fixed number of credentials to push an upgrade. Bitwarden's doesn't, and it has stayed that way for years.
1Password has no free plan at all — a 14-day trial, then you pay. That's a defensible business decision and it funds the polish, but it means the comparison for an individual is "free forever" against "$35.88 a year at the standard rate". For a tool most people use to solve one specific problem, that gap is hard to argue past.
1Password's promotional pricing — read the asterisk
1Password advertises Individual at $2.99 and Families at $4.49. Its own footnote says the promotional pricing applies to new customers subscribing directly through 1password.com, for the first year, with annual billing.
So the number to plan against is the standard rate: $3.99/month Individual, $5.99/month Families from year two. That's not a trick — the asterisk is right there on the page — but it does change the comparison, and a lot of articles quote the promotional figure as though it were permanent.
What it costs a team
Where this gets financially interesting is at team scale, because the per-user gap compounds.
- 10 users: Bitwarden Enterprise $720/year · 1Password Business $1,078.80/year → $358.80 more for 1Password
- 25 users: Bitwarden $1,800/year · 1Password $2,697/year → $897 more
- 50 users: Bitwarden $3,600/year · 1Password $5,394/year → $1,794 more
And Bitwarden Enterprise includes a free Families plan for every user — meaning your team's personal password hygiene improves at no extra cost, which is the kind of benefit security teams care about more than feature lists suggest.
One caveat in 1Password's favour at the small end: the Teams Starter Pack at $24.95/month includes 10 members, which works out around $2.50 per user — cheaper per head than Bitwarden Teams at $4, if you actually have close to ten people. Below ten, you're paying for seats you don't use.
Open source, and why it matters here
For most software, "open source" is a preference. For a password manager, it's closer to a security property.
Bitwarden's clients and server are open source, which means the encryption implementation can be reviewed by anyone rather than accepted on the vendor's word. You can also self-host on Enterprise, keeping the vault inside infrastructure you control.
The honest counterweight: 1Password's closed-source model has not produced a known vault breach, it commissions independent audits, and its security architecture is well documented and well regarded. "Open source" is not the same as "more secure", and anyone telling you otherwise is oversimplifying. What it does give you is verifiability rather than trust — and whether that matters depends on your threat model.
Questions we get asked
Is the free Bitwarden plan enough for one person?
For most people, yes. Unlimited passwords across unlimited devices covers the core job completely. You'd upgrade to Premium ($1.65/month) for the built-in authenticator, file attachments, emergency access and security reports — genuinely useful, but not required to solve the password problem.
Is 1Password worth paying more for?
If you're rolling it out to a non-technical team, quite possibly. The interface is better, onboarding is smoother, and adoption is the thing that actually determines whether a password manager improves your security. A tool people use beats a cheaper tool they avoid.
For yourself, or a technical team, the extra polish is harder to justify against free.
Can I switch between them later?
Yes, in both directions. Both support encrypted export and both import from the other — migrating password managers is one of the easier moves in software. That makes this a low-stakes decision: start with Bitwarden's free plan, and if it frustrates you, you've lost nothing.
You earn from 1Password but recommend Bitwarden. Why?
Because Bitwarden is the better answer for most readers and saying otherwise would be a lie we'd get caught in. It has a genuinely unlimited free plan, costs a third less per user at business scale, and is auditable.
We'd rather you trust the next twenty recommendations than earn a commission on this one. If you do choose 1Password after reading this, the polish argument is real — and using our link costs you nothing extra.
The verdict
Start with Bitwarden's free plan. It's unlimited, it's open source, it's audited, and it costs nothing. For a large majority of individuals that is the end of the decision.
For a team, Bitwarden Enterprise at $6/user — a third cheaper than 1Password Business, with SSO, self-hosting and free Families accounts for everyone. The exception is a team of close to exactly ten, where 1Password's Teams Starter Pack is cheaper per head.
Pay for 1Password if you're deploying to people who won't tolerate rough edges. That's a real reason, not a consolation — the best password manager is the one your team actually uses.
Whichever you pick, the important thing is picking one. The gap between "no password manager" and "any password manager" is vastly larger than the gap between these two.
Pricing read from bitwarden.com and 1password.com on 16 September 2026, in USD with annual billing. 1Password's promotional pricing terms are quoted from its own footnote. Under our methodology this comparison is at the "researched, not tested" level — we verified plans and limits first-hand but have not deployed either across a team. Found something out of date? Tell us.
