So I have an admission here: I keep seeing HN stuff about these networked password managers and I don't quite understand the appeal.

Is it because everybody else is swapping between several different computers, and you need the synchronization?

I just have everything in KeepassXC, and the ciphertext is subject to the same kind of backup regime I use for other files, [edit: and also additionally] a copy kept on a USB stick in my pocket.

I swap between my phone and my computer. Sometimes I need to get an account password on a workstation, and I can just login online rather than typing several lengthy generated passwords.

Most of the workstations I use completely block USB storage devices (but not fido2 keys!)

What would be super nice is to have USB wedge that I can just send my passwords from my phone to any computer like this https://www.inputstick.com/ (Expensive, sold out and also doesn't ship to the USA)

It’s phones, mainly. People do also have multiple other devices, yes. For me another big pro is having a realtime offsite backup and being able to survive simultaneous loss of all my devices, which is plausible in correlated scenarios like a burglary, fire, mugging, car crash, etc, but I don’t know how much others think of that one.

The people I know who use KeePass live like they’re disabled. You ask them to sign up for something and they need to schedule a half hour for it two weeks out. Ask them to use a website and they need to wait until they’re home because their biweekly manual data transfer was put off because of whatever. And if they ever drop their phone, it’s this totally unforeseeable panic they’re still recovering from two months later. I’m far from convinced it must be like this, but I’m also far from convinced that most KeePass people—or people using any other strategy—have really thought this through.

Syncing is a huge part, UX is another. I was using KeePass on my desktop for several years before I met my wife, and having her use it was a complete failure. My wife did not like the workflow. Having to open another another tool, login, search for the correct site, and copy/paste the password was too much friction. And that was when things worked.

Syncing was an utter disaster. Inevitably something would cause syncs to be delayed, and then there would be a conflict and one of our changes would be silently lost. We were constantly going to lookup a password we entered, and finding it was not there anymore, at which point I would have to dig through sync conflict backup files and manually reenter the passwords that were lost, or go through the password reset flow for the sites. It was a giant mess. I was using btsync at the time but all the issues I encountered apply to any file based synchronization, like syncthing or nextcloud or dropbox. Performing whole database file synchronization is simply not the right approach for password safe.

I switched over to self-hosted BitWarden with the browser plugin and haven't had any problems since.

My KeePassXC database auto-syncs to my Nextcloud instance. Nextcloud client on PCs, Keepass2Android on my phone, and it's the same end result as Bitwarden but without the shenanigans.

Multiple devices and family sharing. My wife and I share several accounts, so it's really nice that we can move them between private and shared vaults on 1Password.

> I just have everything in KeepassXC

Me too, but I rarely add/edit anything in .kdbx file, it rarely changes. So I just keep a copy on my phone and use KeePassDroid to open it sometimes.

If you change/edit your passwords all the time, and you like autofill and I assume other features, networked solutions are much better.

USB stick in your pocket sounds nice but what happens when you drop your keys and it cracks or you get caught in a rain storm and it gets soaked?

Having a password manager synced to phone, desktop, laptop, browsers is handy. I used Keepass 10 years ago but I prefer integrated experiences now, particularly since I often pull them up on mobile.

Also consider teams or multiple teams across an org sharing secrets. Flat files are a tough sell, so these apps eliminate almost all the hassle. We pay for a lot of 1Password accounts, and I couldn’t imagine rolling our own solution.

In my case it's exactly that. I have a Linux gaming workstation, a work-issued (and managed) MacOS laptop and a Google-branded (Pixel) Android phone.

Bitwarden just works in all those places and the tech was, by all accounts, rock solid. AND I can pay for it instead of trying to leech off some privacy-ambiguous free tier.

USB sticks are infamously unreliable, not a great backup plan

Is it because everybody else is swapping between several different computers, and you need the synchronization?

.. and phones, and tablets. Yes