Installation and platform support

We’re interested in the Linux support as well as the multiplatform options.

Multiplatform support is an important consideration. All of these systems support Windows, Mac OS and Linux. They also have mobile apps for Android and iOS, and browser plugins for at least Firefox and Chrome.

KeePass 2 is written in Mono, so the same binary can run on Windows, Linux and other Unix-derived OSes such as Mac OS. The versions in the Ubuntu and Mint repos were out of date, so we installed it ourselves. This involves jumping through extra hoops compared to running it on Windows, such as installing Mono. There’s a variety of options, as KeePass also has some derivative forks, such as the more native-looking KeePassXC.

The Bitwarden website begins to automatically download the AppImage archive when you visit the download page, and this worked (with the manual addition of some dependencies) when we tried it. Installing via Snap or Flatpak are other ways of getting the latest version of the desktop application.

Keeper offers separate downloads for six of the major distributions, but they actually resolve to one DEB and one RPM archive. The DEB archive installed without problems on Linux Mint. The NordPass website detected that we were using Firefox and redirected us to a page where we were prompted to install the browser extension. This is an acceptable way of using

NordPass, but there is also a desktop app, which we installed using Snap.

RoboForm has desktop applications that can operate without internet access for Mac OS and Windows, but only browser plugins (Firefox and Chrome) are available for Linux.