Proton Pass vs Bitwarden: Price, Passkeys and Security Compared

Proton Pass and Bitwarden are both open-source, end-to-end encrypted password managers with genuinely usable free tiers, which is exactly why they keep getting cross-shopped. The short version: Bitwarden is cheaper and more configurable, with a deeper, publicly documented audit history and the option to self-host. Proton Pass costs a little more but ships a more generous free plan (unlimited hide-my-email aliases are paid-only, but 10 aliases and 2 vaults are free), built-in email aliasing, and tighter integration with Proton's broader privacy suite. Neither is a bad choice; the right pick depends on whether you want the cheapest capable vault (Bitwarden) or the most polished all-in-one privacy stack (Proton Pass).

This is a direct, two-way read on Proton Pass versus Bitwarden specifically — not the three-way match that also drags in 1Password. If you want that broader view, Pandromeda has already run the three-way Bitwarden vs 1Password vs Proton Pass comparison, and a separate deep dive on how 1Password and Bitwarden compare on price and passkeys. Here, the only two contenders are Proton Pass and Bitwarden, judged on price, passkeys, security architecture, and platform coverage.

Quick verdict: who should pick which

Pick Bitwarden if price and flexibility matter most: its Premium tier runs about $10 a year cheaper than Proton Pass Plus, its free plan has no vault limit, and it's the only one of the two that offers a mainline self-hosting option. Pick Proton Pass if you want unlimited hide-my-email aliases and dark web monitoring bundled with a paid plan that also gets you Proton Mail, Calendar, Drive, and VPN at a similar price point to Bitwarden's standalone Premium, or if you're already a Proton user and want one account across services.

Pricing and free-tier limits compared

Both companies publish plan pricing directly, and both bill their cheapest paid tier annually for the advertised per-month rate. Here's what each actually includes, pulled straight from their pricing pages.

On raw price, Bitwarden wins at every comparable tier: Premium undercuts Pass Plus by roughly $16 a year, and Families undercuts Pass Family by about $12 a year. Proton's case is the free plan's alias allowance (10 hide-my-email addresses versus none natively on Bitwarden's free tier) and the fact that its priciest tier, Proton Unlimited, also buys an encrypted mail, calendar, VPN, and cloud storage bundle rather than just a password manager.

Passkey support: storing versus logging in with one

"Passkey support" means two different things, and the two products split on the second one.

Storing and autofilling passkeys for other sites: both support this. Proton Pass's pricing page lists "Passkeys supported on all devices" on every plan, including Free. Bitwarden's help documentation confirms its vault can save and autofill discoverable passkeys created on other websites, synced across whatever devices you use Bitwarden on, with saving triggered through the browser extension or mobile autofill integration (iOS 17+ Settings, or Android's Autofill service).

Logging in to and unlocking your own vault with a passkey: this is where Bitwarden goes further. Its documentation describes a separate feature — using a passkey instead of a master password to log in to or unlock the Bitwarden account itself — available through the web vault and browser extensions in Chromium-based browsers, provided both the browser and the authenticator support the PRF extension. Bitwarden notes Windows 10 has known PRF issues, and that passkey login won't work for accounts under an organization's Require SSO policy. You can register up to five passkeys for this purpose. Proton's security page does not describe an equivalent "log in to Proton Pass itself with a passkey" feature; its passkey messaging is about storing and using passkeys for other services, backed up by a traditional master password.

Security architecture and encryption

Both are end-to-end encrypted, zero-knowledge-style tools, meaning each vendor says it cannot read your stored vault contents — but they describe the cryptography differently.

Proton Pass: per Proton's security page, each vault is encrypted with 256-bit AES-GCM using a random 32-byte key generated per vault; vault keys themselves are protected and shared using OpenPGP with Curve25519 elliptic-curve cryptography, which Proton describes as modular enough to later add post-quantum algorithms. Usernames, URLs, and note content are also encrypted, not just passwords. Proton Pass's apps are open source, and Proton says the product has been independently audited, with public reports, though the security page itself doesn't name the audit firm or date. Proton is legally based in Switzerland, which it says puts it outside direct US/EU data-sharing jurisdiction, and it runs Proton Sentinel, an anti-account-takeover system combining automated detection with human analysts, plus a public bug bounty program.

Bitwarden: Bitwarden's own description is also zero-knowledge, encrypting "every piece of information in your vault." Where it separates itself is audit transparency and cadence. Bitwarden's published audit history lists named third-party assessments stretching from 2018 through 2025, including repeated engagements with Cure53 covering the web vault, desktop app, browser extension, mobile apps, and core cryptography libraries; a 2025 audit of core cryptographic operations by the Applied Cryptography Group at ETH Zurich, performed under an assumption of a fully malicious server; Unit 42 (Palo Alto Networks) and Mandiant audits of the mobile and mobile-authenticator apps in different years; and IOActive and Fracture Labs audits of client SDKs and the web app/network layer. Bitwarden is also ISO 27001 certified, HIPAA-compliant with an annual third-party audit, SOC 2 Type 2 and SOC 3 certified, and runs a private HackerOne bug bounty program. Its full codebase is published on GitHub under AGPL v3.0 and the Bitwarden License v1.0.

Neither company's claims here are independently re-verified in this article; they're drawn directly from each vendor's own security and audit pages, which is the most current public information available from either side.

Platform and app coverage

Both cover the same basic set of platforms, with small differences in where full functionality lands.

Functionally, day-to-day coverage is a wash for anyone on mainstream devices. The gap that matters is self-hosting: Bitwarden explicitly supports running your own server instance, while Proton Pass is cloud-only by design, consistent with Proton's broader approach of operating all its own infrastructure rather than letting customers run it themselves.

Where each pulls ahead on extra features

Beyond the core vault, the two products diverge in useful ways:

• Proton Pass advantages: built-in hide-my-email aliasing (10 free, unlimited on Plus) so you can generate a masked address per signup without a separate tool; Proton Sentinel's anti-takeover monitoring; and, if you go to Proton Unlimited, a bundled suite that also replaces a separate encrypted email and VPN subscription — worth comparing against Pandromeda's look at how Proton VPN stacks up against Mullvad if the bundle is the real draw.
• Bitwarden advantages: the lower price at every paid tier, self-hosting, a longer and more granularly documented audit trail, and (per its help documentation) dedicated passkey-based login/unlock for the vault itself on supported browsers.

Business and team plans

Beyond personal and family tiers, both vendors sell to organizations, and the structures look fairly different. Bitwarden's business lineup runs Teams at $4 per user per month and Enterprise at $6 per user per month, both billed annually; Teams adds centralized ownership, secure credential sharing, event-log auditing, directory sync, and SCIM provisioning, while Enterprise layers on granular access control, passwordless SSO, enterprise policies, self-hosting, and Access Intelligence risk remediation, plus a free Families plan for every employee. Proton's family-style tier, Pass Family, tops out at six users under one admin panel rather than offering a dedicated per-seat enterprise product on the Pass pricing page itself; organizations that need broader admin controls, SSO, or directory sync would be looking at Proton's wider business offerings rather than Pass alone. If managing dozens or hundreds of credentialed employees is the goal, Bitwarden's published per-seat business tiers make it easier to budget up front.

Switching between them

Both products support CSV and common competitor-export imports, so moving a vault from one to the other is mostly a matter of exporting from your current manager and importing into the new one, then manually re-saving any passkeys, since passkeys generally can't be exported and re-imported the way plain password entries can. If you're mid-decision, it's reasonable to run both free plans side by side for a week: load your real logins into each, try the browser extension and mobile autofill on your own phone, and see whether Proton Pass's alias generator or Bitwarden's self-hosting option actually changes how you'd use it day to day before committing to a paid plan.

Which should you choose?

If you're optimizing purely for cost and don't need built-in email aliasing, Bitwarden Premium or Families is the cheaper, equally capable option, and its audit documentation is the most transparent of the two on paper. If you want a more all-in-one privacy product — masked email aliases without a second subscription, a bundle that also covers VPN and encrypted mail, and you're fine paying a few dollars more a year — Proton Pass, especially via Proton Unlimited, is the better fit. Either way, both vendors publish real pricing and real security documentation rather than vague marketing claims, which is more than can be said for a lot of the password-manager market.

What to do next

Start with each vendor's free plan — both are genuinely usable, not just trial bait — before paying for anything. If aliasing and bundled privacy tools matter to you, test Proton Pass Free first. If you might eventually want to self-host or need the cheapest paid tier, start with Bitwarden Free and upgrade to Premium when you need attachments, an authenticator, or emergency access. Whichever you pick, turn on passkeys where the sites you use support them, since both managers can store and autofill them today.

Written bySana Qureshi

Sana Qureshi runs the security and privacy desk. She reports on actively exploited vulnerabilities, vendor patches and data breaches, and covers the password managers, VPNs and authentication tools readers use to protect themselves. Her alerts cite vendor advisories, CISA and the CVE record directly.

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