Bitwarden moves its app store builds to a commercial licence

Bitwarden moves its app store builds to a commercial licence

9 October 2026: From its next release, the Bitwarden apps people install from app stores, and the installers on its own download page, will be commercially licensed builds rather than the GPLv3 open-source ones. The open-source clients will still be built and published on GitHub, but Bitwarden says some future components will exist only in the commercial build, so the two will drift apart over time.

Not yet independently verified. The change is announced only in a notice on Bitwarden's community forum, with no version number or date beyond the next release, and the poster's role at the company is not stated on the page. We have not found a matching post on Bitwarden's blog or a licence change in its GitHub repository yet. We will update this when it can be confirmed, and remove this note.

The notice, titled "Published version update in app stores", went up in the Announcements section of Bitwarden's community forum on 9 October. It says users need do nothing and the apps should keep working as they do now, that the free plan stays, and, in a later edit, that Bitwarden is not going closed source and self-hosting is unaffected.

Two builds from one codebase

Today the clients repository on GitHub is covered by two licences: GPL v3.0 by default, and the Bitwarden License v1.0 for code kept in a separate bitwarden_license directory. That file has not changed since May 2025. The new arrangement adds a third layer on top: a commercially licensed build of the same apps, which is what app stores and the download page will carry.

According to the replies from the company's side of the thread, every feature that exists today is in both builds. New features will be decided case by case, and some future components will be published under the commercial licence only. The notice does not name which components, which release brings the first of them, or what the commercial licence itself permits.

Resellers, not self-hosters, are the target

Asked in the thread who the change is aimed at, a Bitwarden representative said self-hosting with a Bitwarden subscription does not change and that the licensing change affects people who repackage and resell Bitwarden. Third-party servers such as Vaultwarden, the community-built server many small teams use, can keep choosing which features to support.

That leaves the open questions businesses will care about. The thread does not say whether features that reach the commercial build later will ever come to the GPLv3 clients, whether pricing or plan limits will change, or whether a team that standardises on the open-source clients will lose compatibility with future server features. Whether the Windows portable build and the Linux Flatpak count as commercial or open source was still being checked when we read the thread.

Managed service providers have the most to check

For most companies on Bitwarden's hosted plans nothing changes on the day: the same apps update from the same stores. Two groups have more to check. A managed service provider that packages Bitwarden clients for its customers should read the commercial licence before the next release reaches them, because redistribution is exactly what the change covers. And an organisation whose policy requires open-source clients, which some public bodies and security teams have, will need to install from GitHub rather than from app stores, and watch which features stay out of that build.

Our password management category lists 15 products, Bitwarden among them.

Company profile on TrustList: Bitwarden

Sources

• Bitwarden Community Forums, Announcements: Published version update in app stores, 9 October 2026
• Bitwarden clients repository: LICENSE.txt (read 2026-10-11), 11 October 2026