Bitwarden lite self-host deployment, formerly unified, is now generally available! This self-host option is a more lightweight and flexible deployment alternative, ideal for homelab enthusiasts and community members who want to get started quickly with self-hosting Bitwarden. With the release of general availability, Bitwarden lite users can benefit from enhanced performance and reliability.
Seems to be an official alternative to Vaultwarden
Wonder what’s the reasoning behind offering this Lite version. I don’t imagine competing with Vaultwarden is very lucrative financially.
They’ve been offering self hosted options for years and this is just another method that isn’t much more work to put out. I dont think they care about vault warden that much. I’ve been using the full self hosted stack since 2019 at home.
It’s a pretty normal model. You offer a free version to help make your product popular. People will use it at home and then at work they will gravitate to the thing they are familiar with. Small companies will start on the free version and eventually upgrade.
Yeah it’s a normal model, but BitWarden is a bit special in that their original server-side implementation was enough of a pain to self-host on a small scale that an alternative implementation Vautlwarden was created. And Vaultwarden became very popular in self-hosted circles. And now many years later BitWarden offers a Lite server which scales down. I think it’s a good thing, just a bit unusual. I’m struggling to think of similar examples.
I’m sure Vaultwarden still funnels plenty of enterprise use of BitWarden, since Vaultwarden users still use official BitWarden client.
I mean, fair take, but sometimes more thoughtful and forward-looking companies aren’t looking for fast return on investment.
It could be argued similarly for Valve that all their investment in Linux ecosystems and open source in general when Linux desktops account for just over 3% of all desktop installations while Windows sits comfortably at 70% of the desktop market, just isn’t a lucrative investment.
While in the long-term it frees Valve from the restrictions of the Microsoft environment and from the risk that Microsoft would make it more and more difficult for Steam to integrate as they try to make their own game store and Game Pass the premiere gaming experience on Windows, those are future risks that are speculation, even though they are rational speculation.
Investing so deeply in open source isn’t a lucrative thing for Valve to be doing, but they’re looking at long-term goals.
In other words, I could see the goal here being something like protecting the Bitwarden brand and making sure more people are using their official client than unofficial with the goal of making it easy to use and enticing people into the general Bitwarden ecosystem long-term. Ten years from now, people who have been running Bitwarden Lite might have a lot more options for integration and paid services than people simply using Vaultwarden.
Is that lucrative? No, but it’s still pursuing brand-name dominance and keeping people officially within their ecosystem as a way to grow userbase and give users more features (including paid ones) that may not be immediately available or easily integrated with Vaultwarden.
It could also be argued that what might have been a loss leader for Valve might just pay off as more and more disgruntled MS users are moving to Linux, and gaming on Linux has exploded despite the 3% market share.
Forward thinking venture capital funded companies are getting rarer, hence the question on motivation. Especially the last few years many VC Foss companies have squeezed harder the other way (gitea, Terraform, docker). So all kudos to BitWarden for launching Lite.
What you say a about brand dominance, or brand protection makes a lot of sense. It’s not a good look for them that a large number of people choose to use an unofficial implementation instead of theirs. And should there ever be a catastrophic security issue with Vaultwarden, it would still reflect bad on BitWarden as that kind of nuance (like “unofficial server side implementation”) tend to get lost in reporting. Having more IT workers self-host official version probably also helps pave the way for bringing enterprise-bitwarden to companies.
Valve are a bit of a unicorn though, because they are privately owned. There’s no investors demanding ROI the next quarter, which gives them freedom to think long term.
When Microsoft launched windows8 and the Microsoft Store, Valve took that as an existential threat to their whole business model (the Steam store). Valve feared that Microsoft was trying to position itself like Apple on iOS and Google on Android, where there is only one platform store, and all apps are purchased through the platform store, and the platform store takes that sweet sweet 30% cut. So Valve pivoted to ensure the Steam store would not be obsolete, and give customers a reason to still use the Steam store. And what they achieved is awesome, for Linux, for Valve and for gamers. But it took nearly a decade, which is a level of patience few companies have.
I think it’s nice they offer their own lite version.
Just because there is a more popular OSS solution doesn’t mean they should be complacent and accept people will use Vaultwarden.
This shows they support their users directly instead of just letting their users fend for themselves.
They also could indirectly be blamed by some people using vaultwarden should an issue arise with it.
By publishing the first party lite version they can say “well you’re not using our supported version”. While still being friendly to self-hosters.
It’s probably not but if all the system admins are using vault warden at home then they may consider using vaultwarden at work and that would cost bitwarden money.