Someone approved a $38,500 wire to a Shenzhen supplier last month from an inbox that also connects to a freight forwarder portal, two banking platforms, and an Alibaba admin account. Maybe that sounds like your shop. The FBI logged $2.9 billion in business email compromise losses in 2023, and stolen credentials open most of those doors. If your sourcing team still rotates three reused passwords across supplier logins, or worse, keeps bank details in a shared spreadsheet (I’ve seen that exact setup more than once), then the LastPass or Bitwarden question isn’t tech trivia. It’s risk management with a six-figure number attached. Below: 2025 pricing, the hard security record, and a 25-minute migration plan built for import operations.

LastPass vs Bitwarden on Security: One Has a Receipt From 2022

Here’s the part that decides it for me. In August 2022, an attacker compromised a single LastPass developer account and held access to source code and technical documentation for four days. November brought a second intrusion. Then on December 22, 2022, LastPass disclosed that attackers had grabbed cloud backups containing encrypted vault data for more than 25 million users. Encrypted, yes. But LastPass admitted it still protected legacy accounts with as few as 5,000 PBKDF2 iterations against the 100,100 default, and researchers demonstrated that modest master passwords on those vaults could fall to cloud GPU rigs.

Bitwarden’s response was the telling bit: it raised its default to 600,000 iterations and shipped Argon2id support, the modern memory-hard KDF that LastPass still doesn’t offer. Bitwarden’s code is open source, published on GitHub, and audited by Cure53 in 2018 and 2020 with ongoing third-party reviews. LastPass is closed source, so you accept its cryptography claims on faith, from a company that sat on a vault theft for months. No Bitwarden vault infrastructure breach is on the record to date. When you’re guarding supplier payment credentials, that asymmetry settles most of the debate.

2025 Pricing: The Real Math for a 10-Person Sourcing Team

Headline prices first, because they’re almost funny. Bitwarden Premium costs $10 per year. LastPass Premium runs $3.60 per month billed annually, which works out to $43.20, roughly 4x more for the same core job: unlimited passwords, device sync, basic sharing. Families plans? Bitwarden charges $40 per year for 6 users, LastPass wants $48.

Now scale it. A 10-person sourcing operation on Bitwarden Enterprise pays $5 per user per month, or $600 per year. The same team on LastPass Business at about $7 per user per month is looking at $840 per year. That’s 40% more, and $720 more over a three-year contract. Honestly, that $720 covers 28 YubiKey security keys at $25 each, hardware two-factor for the entire office plus spares. Verify rates before you commit, since both vendors nudge prices upward. The individual-plan gap has held at 3x-plus since 2020, though, so I don’t see it closing.

  • Solo importer: Bitwarden Free, then Premium at $10/year, vs LastPass Premium at $43.20/year
  • Family office or partnership: Bitwarden Families at $40/year (6 users) vs LastPass Families at $48/year
  • Trading company or agency: Bitwarden Teams at $3/user/month or Enterprise at $5, vs LastPass Teams around $4 and Business around $7
  • Hidden line item: Bitwarden gates unlimited TOTP codes behind its $10 Premium; LastPass bundles its authenticator into Premium

Bitwarden or LastPass on the Free Tier: The Device-Type Trap

Since 2021, LastPass Free has restricted you to one device category, mobile or desktop, never both. Picture this: you check supplier quotes on your phone inside the Yiwu Futian market, then head back to your hotel to issue a purchase order from a laptop. LastPass Free locks you out of one of the two. Bitwarden Free imposes no device limits. You get unlimited passwords, unlimited devices, secure notes, passkey storage, and Bitwarden Send for encrypted self-destructing text, handy for a one-time bank reference. For a bootstrapping importer, Bitwarden Free alone closes 80% of credential risk at $0. The remaining 20%, file attachments, TOTP, vault health reports,