U2 Secured vs Bitwarden
Bitwarden's free plan is one of the best deals in this category: genuinely unlimited items, unlimited devices, at no cost. This page says that plainly rather than around it. What follows is where the two products actually differ, sourced from Bitwarden's own site and dated.
If Bitwarden's free tier already covers everything you need, the honest answer is to stay on it. This page is for the two places U2 Secured makes a real case anyway: where your two-factor codes live, and group-based access control inside an organisation.
Who Bitwarden suits
Bitwarden is a strong default for most people, and saying otherwise would not survive a second look at its own pricing page.
- Anyone who wants a large, actively maintained free vault with no item cap and no device limit, and does not need TOTP stored alongside passwords.
- Someone happy to pay $19.80/yr the moment they do want integrated TOTP, file attachments or emergency access — Premium is a small, well-defined step up.
- A household of up to six that wants shared collections under one Families subscription.
What each plan actually includes
Every Bitwarden figure below is read from Bitwarden's own site — the citation on each row goes straight to it, dated the day it was read.
Two products, not one
Competitors sell both factors in one vault. U2 Secured sells them as two products, deliberately kept apart, because a password and its second factor in one store are not two factors.
Bitwarden's integrated authenticator lives inside the same Premium subscription as the vault: one login, one record, both factors. It is a genuinely good feature, and $19.80/yr is not expensive for it.
U2 Secured keeps TOTP out of the vault entirely, in the free U2 Secured Authenticator app. The codes never touch the same store as the passwords they protect, and the app costs nothing to use for that. Its own Premium ($14.99/yr) gates encrypted backup, moving codes to a new device, and web portal access — not the codes themselves.
Which is better depends on what you're optimising for: Bitwarden's is more convenient — one app, one subscription. U2 Secured's is more separated — free codes, and the two stores are structurally independent of each other.
Where Bitwarden is ahead
Said plainly, because a page that only ever wins is not one Bitwarden's own engineers would call accurate.
- Free is unlimited on items and devices. U2 Secured's free plan caps at 500 items and 1 user. For most personal vaults this never matters; for a large one, or a family sharing one free account across devices, Bitwarden's free plan goes further.
- Bitwarden has been independently audited multiple times over roughly a decade in the category, is open source, and has a correspondingly larger community and ecosystem than a new product can have.
- One subscription covers both passwords and TOTP for a Bitwarden Premium user, which is simpler to manage than two separate apps and two separate sign-ins.
Pick U2 Secured if
- You want TOTP kept structurally apart from your passwords, for free, rather than paying to combine them.
- Group-based folder access control across an organisation matters to you — available on Basic and Premium.
- You're comfortable with a newer product that does not yet have a published third-party audit, in exchange for the TOTP separation above.
Pick Bitwarden if
- Free, unlimited storage across unlimited devices is what you need, full stop — its free plan genuinely delivers that.
- You want passwords and TOTP in one app and are fine paying $19.80/yr for that convenience.
- A decade of independent audits and an open-source codebase matter more to you than the TOTP separation argument above.
Said out loud, not left for you to discover
- Passwords and TOTP with U2 Secured are two products, not one subscription — the vault and the free U2 Secured Authenticator app.
- A single person on Basic still pays for a full 5-user block: $60/yr for up to 5 users, whether one seat is used or five.
- No group folders on free (max_groups = 0) — group-based folder access needs Basic or Premium.
- U2 Secured is a new product with no published third-party security audit yet. Bitwarden has been audited repeatedly over roughly a decade.
Questions people actually ask
- Does U2 Secured store two-factor (TOTP) codes?
- Yes — free and unlimited, in the separate U2 Secured Authenticator app, never in the password vault. Bitwarden's integrated authenticator is genuinely good too, but it requires Premium ($19.80/yr); it is not on Bitwarden's free plan.
- Is Bitwarden free really unlimited?
- Yes, by Bitwarden's own help documentation: unlimited storage of logins, notes, cards and identities, on unlimited devices, at no cost. U2 Secured's free plan caps at 500 items for 1 user — a real difference, stated here rather than glossed over.
- Is U2 Secured cheaper than Bitwarden?
- U2 Secured Basic is $60/yr for up to 5 users. Bitwarden Premium is $19.80/yr for 1 account, and Families is $47.88/yr for up to 6 — cheaper per user at the Families size, more expensive per user for a single account, since U2 Secured's block price does not shrink below 5 users' worth of coverage.
- What does group-based access control add over Bitwarden?
- U2 Secured's Basic and Premium plans let an organisation manage folder access by group, so a set of members can share exactly the folders relevant to them. This is a feature of U2 Secured's own paid plans, offered here as one honest reason to look past Bitwarden's excellent free tier — not a claim about what Bitwarden's personal plans include, which this page has not compared in detail.
- Can I move my Bitwarden vault into U2 Secured?
- Yes — the web vault imports a Bitwarden JSON or CSV export directly, encrypting each item in your browser. The full step-by-step guide, including what does and does not come across, is the switch guide linked below.
Sources for the Bitwarden side
Every Bitwarden figure above was read directly from bitwarden.com on the date shown. Bitwarden changes its plans from time to time; if something has changed, its own pages are the authority and this comparison is out of date.
- Bitwarden — Password Manager Plans · read 2026-09-25
- Bitwarden — Pricing · read 2026-09-25
See it for yourself
Create a free U2 Secured workspace, or start with the Bitwarden import guide if you already know you're moving.