LastPass VS Bitwarden: The Exodus

Introduction: moving to Bitwarden

In my previous article on LastPass vs Bitwarden you learned WHY we moved from LastPass over to BitWarden.

Now I'm going to show you HOW to make this transition do that as well.

Fasten your seat belts!

Migrating from LastPass to Bitwarden

Import your passwords to BitWarden – Video explanation

Import your passwords to BitWarden – Text explanation

1 – Login to web version of the LastPass

2 – Select ‘More options' on bottom left of the page

3 – Go to ‘Export'

4 – For security reasons you will be asked to re-enter your password, once this done you will see a picture like this:

This is all your data from LastPass sorted as Coma Separated Values (CSV), your next step will be to save it to a file using any text editor.

For the following instructions pretend that you are using Windows as your system, for Mac OS there are slight differences in key combinations and software.

5 – Select all text on page (CTRL+A) and Copy it to clipboard (CTRL+C)

IMPORTANT: There are known bugs (for years now) with the LastPass exporter regarding special characters such as the ampersand (&), the greater than sign (>), and the less than sign (<).

The LastPass exporter may change (HTML encode) these and possibly other special characters in your passwords to their respective HTML encoded values (ex. &, >, and <).

If this LastPass bug affects your exported data you should use a text editor (such as Notepad) to find and replace all of these values before importing into Bitwarden.

For example, you may want to do a find and replace for & → & and < → <).

6 – Open any text editor, we will be using Notepad (You can quickly access it by pressing Win+R, typing ‘notepad' and hit ENTER)

7 – Paste text you copied to clipboard (CTRL+V)

8 – Go to ‘File', select ‘Save As'

9 – In the dialog make sure you have selected :

• Save as type: All Files
• Name of your file has .CSV at the end (ex. LastPass.CSV)
• Encoding is set to UTF-8

10 – Now open web version of the BitWarden

11 – Go to ‘Tools' in the top navigation menu

12 – Select LastPass (csv) from the dropdown:

13 – Choose the file you created in Step 9

14 – Click ‘Import Data' button

Congratulations! You have just transferred all of your data from LastPass into Bitwarden!

Import your form fills into BitWarden (OPTIONAL)

LastPass does not include form fills with the standard export from the LastPass web vault.

If you want to import form fill information into Bitwarden you can export the form fill CSV data from the LastPass browser extension.

NOTE: You can only export form fill data from the LastPass browser extension.

1 – Click the LastPass icon from the browser toolbar to open the LastPass popup interface.

2 – Navigate to More options → Advanced → Export → Form Fills.

3 – This will take you to a page that then asks you to enter your LastPass master password for verification. Enter your LastPass master password.

4 – Your data will be decrypted and shown on screen in CSV format.

Follow the same import steps starting from Step 5 from previous section.

Congratulations! You have transferred your form fills data to BitWarden.

Conclusion

People tend to stay with old but sub-optimal solutions due to the difficulty of switching to something better. Luckily, as you learned in this article, the process of switching from LastPass to Bitwarden is easy and intuitive. 🙂

If you have any questions – do not hesitate to leave comments below and we will answer on them on the first opportunity!

Now let’s hear from you!

Have you ever been doing a transition to another password manager?

Tell us your experience in the comments section below!