PrivacyGuides local password managers recommendations

[Eireannach]

I notice in the local password manager section that KeePassXC is the recommendation. Is there a reason that the original KeePass by Dominik Reichl is not included here ?

[kissu]

I’m not sure about what is the original but looking at his own personal website

Software - Dominik Reichl's Website

he redirects to the Keepass official one

KeePass Password Safe

which is the v2 of Keepass with all the available clients

all the download there are quite good quality

Downloads - KeePass

but KeePassXC is the fully FOSS, most cross-platform compatible and probably the most secure solution of all

Download – KeePassXC

hence the best (and de-facto) PrivacyGuides’ recommendation^[1]

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If you want to decide on your own, you can always pick any other one that you deem good but PG just made that choice for you so that you can just pick the go-to without wondering too much about which one to pick.

@Eireannach

Is there a reason that the original KeePass by Dominik Reichl is not included here ?

As for exactly why this one. I feel like he passed the flag to other folks in the FOSS community based on his current (non-)activity on Github

DReichl - Overview

And that’s very much fine, you don’t need to be the maintainer of a thing for 20 years, you can just choose some nice healthy successor(s) to continue the project, which his own website subjects quite well too.

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1. as a reminder, PG rightfully chooses to have 1 nice pick rather than 3/4/5 good-enough ones because it is better to just have the best rather than decent as a bar to reach ↩︎

[Eireannach]

I’m not sure about what is the original but looking at his own personal website

My understanding is that KeePass is the original having commenced in 2003 ?

[kissu]

Probably yes. Not sure it does matter a lot tho.
The software could probably have been improved as most things in security realm and needs to be constantly patched, hence the v2 was released.
Then daily/weekly maintenance to align with the latest breaches/attack vectors was needed, hence why it’s safer to use the current v2 from keepass.info

Overall, using old-software is never the right call because of security reasons.
“Good old” only applies to hardware/appliances not software.

[kissu]

I assume your idea was maybe to use the old v1?
Hence why I directed my answer towards recommending not going that way.

But maybe I misunderstood the question/intention here?
Overall, there is no point listing the old maintainers/software versions because things move on and the legacy is usually not that important.
Most people also do not care the 12 maintainers and the lore/drama/fights around a project/tool before using it, they mostly want 1 job done well.

[user1]

KeePass

We all know about the existence of KeePass and talk about it. But I was surprised to see that it isn’t mentioned in the recommendations as password manager. Only some forks are listed (KeePassX, KeePassDX). Although KeePass is mentioned in the Guides about MFA. Why isn’t KeePass listed?

[kissu]

Moreover, KeePassXC just has an amazing website, they are super intense about security and transparent while keeping their tool up to date as shown in this thread

Is KeePassXC still trustworthy if they are allowing AI generated contributions?

I’m a KeePassXC maintainer and I’ve been following this thread for a while. Thanks for keeping this a mostly grounded discussion (I wouldn’t post here otherwise). I don’t want to add very much. Most arguments have been exchanged, the sides are clear, and we covered a lot in our blog post. There’s one issue, however, that keeps coming up and that I feel needs a bit more context. That issue is the sycophantic nature of LLMs as a particular danger. We touched on it in the blog post, but there’s ob…

So definitely a good recommendation to me.

[lyricism]

KeePass is a .NET app, it works on platforms other than Windows but it doesn’t have a native looking UI or integrations. KeePassXC is a C++ Qt app with full native support for Linux and macOS.

That’s really the only significant difference, even according to KeePassXC themselves.

General - Documentation and FAQ – KeePassXC

KeePass is a very proven and feature-rich password manager and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with it. However, it is written in C# and therefore requires Microsoft’s .NET platform. On systems other than Windows, you can run KeePass using the Mono runtime libraries, but you won’t get the native look and feel which you are used to.

KeePassXC, on the other hand, is developed in C++ and runs natively on Linux, macOS and Windows giving you the best-possible platform integration.