We generally love Passbolt and have installed dozens of instances. It is a great fundamental platform, and the Passbolt team has done fantastic work to ensure it is smooth, reliable and secure. The key reason we loved Passbolt is that it’s extremely easy for non-tech users, requiring no long, complicated training, instruction manuals, or policies.
Click add, click save, click share! Simple.
We loved Passbolt up until version 3.0 - since then, not so much, and have decided to roll back or permanently freeze all our installations at 4.12 and leave them there.
Maybe we aren’t “using it right” or misunderstand the direction Passbolt is going - but the latest versions just don’t work for us, the content organization is getting messy, and the add password process is becoming too complicated for non-tech users to master without hand-holding and a dozen questions to the technical team.
Folders don’t work in a way that users can understand. Encrypted Metadata made a mess. We now have some entries with Notes, some with Descriptions. Yet, Passbolt is still missing basic, simple functions that nearly every other password manager has had from their version 1.2 release, such as:
- Copy a password entry
- Set entry as Archive or “Inactive”
- After login, open to a short or empty list of passwords (like favorites) instead of ‘everything’
For the record, we use only internal, heavily secured Passbolt servers. We don’t use or allow the mobile app. We strictly use groups to manage, restrict, and audit password access.
Folders: We were excited about the folders feature, but we soon had to disable it because no one could figure out how it affects “sharing” security and explain it to everyone. Too many incidents occurred where a large group of password entries was suddenly shared with everyone because someone didn’t understand the effects of moving entries.
So we axed all the folder functions.
Metadata encryption: We now have a mess where users don’t understand what metadata is and the difference between a note and a description. We have some entries with “Notes” and some with “Descriptions”. We can NO LONGER NAVIGATE OR LIST PASSWORDS BY GROUP!
We want searchable descriptions! This is often critical to find one entry among 12,000 credentials. Now we seem to have no way to add a description, only encrypted notes. We need both.
We reverted to backups and then completely disabled the encrypted metadata feature. The broken group listing of passwords was a deal-breaker.
So we now have several version 5.2 installations in place where all of the new major features are completely disabled and the password create dialog box is more complicated.
Again, everyone’s situation, users and use-case is different. For us, Passbolt v3 or v4 suits our basic requirements and we can’t justify keeping up with the later versions just to disable everything.