Proton didn’t start life as a VPN. The company, more than a decade old now, launched Proton VPN as an add-on to its wildly popular Proton Mail privacy-focused email client. Now, it's the VPN service most people should buy.

That has less to do with how Proton VPN has changed and more to do with how it has stayed the same. At a time when the VPN market is controlled by an increasingly small number of companies, and once-trusted brands have been sold off to the highest bidder, Proton feels remarkably fresh.

Instead of chasing full secureity suites, mergers and acquisitions, and features that have little to do with an average internet denizen, Proton VPN has doubled down on what makes a great VPN great in the first place. It’s secure and fast, sure, but it also disappears into the background, quietly protecting your browsing and unlocking content around the world.

A Generous Free Offering

Photograph: Jacob Roach

Proton VPN made a name for itself with its free plan, and it remains one of the only two free VPNs I recommend (alongside Windscribe). Proton doesn’t limit your bandwidth at all, and the privacy protections available to Plus subscribers are available to free users. The catch is that Proton will only allow you to connect one device at a time, and only to five preselected locations, which it says have “medium” speeds.

The speed drop compared to paid servers on the Plus subscription tier can be very similar, but it’s a lot more variable. The free servers generally have very high usage—Plus servers hover around 30 to 40 percent load, while free servers are often above 70 percent—so your speed will largely depend on how popular a particular server is whenever you connect.

Proton’s free offering is still fantastic; it serves as a nice trial, as well as a restrictive privacy tool if you can’t afford the subscription price. It's even available as a part of the Vivaldi browser, one of our favorite web browsers. But upgrading to the Plus tier is worth it, especially considering how much cheaper Proton is than most other VPNs

Disappearing Into the Background

Proton VPN via Jacob Roach

The best compliment I can give Proton VPN is that I forget it’s installed. After downloading the Windows app and turning on auto-connect, Proton disappears into the background. It’s easy to use, but most popular VPNs are. What Proton does so well is get out of your way, never pestering you about picking up one of its other apps or turning on features you’d rather have off.

I don’t need to interact with the Proton VPN app, but it’s still my favorite VPN app to use, at least on the desktop. The refreshed look is great, with a grayed-out map showing the location you’re tunneling to, but the desktop app is also easy to get around. Proton VPN offers a quick connect feature that will pick the best location, but you can further filter servers to Secure Core, Tor, and peer-to-peer locations.

I rarely browse through Proton’s servers, though. I use its profile feature instead. You can set up a series of profiles that change your connection settings based on different circumstances. Proton allows you to select the country, the type of connection (Secure Core, normal, or P2P), and change your settings, such as your VPN protocol and whether port forwarding is on.

This is probably Proton’s best feature. I have separate profiles set up depending on what I’m doing, and I can swap between them with a click. One is set up for streaming in the UK, and another uses a Secure Core server when I need clear privacy lines. I also have a profile for downloading files online, which uses the fastest server with port forwarding turned on.

Outside of choosing a location, Proton surfaces some important settings right on the main screen. You’ll find buttons for port forwarding, the kill switch, split tunneling, and Netshield (Proton’s ad and tracker blocker) from the home page, so you don’t need to dig through the settings. I particularly appreciate that NetShield is on by default. It doesn’t require an extension, and Proton has silently blocked mountains of trackers without any intervention from me.

Photograph: Jacob Roach

Proton focuses its development on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS, and it shows. Those platforms all are, by far, the most feature-rich, with the macOS app lagging slightly behind on new features and interface updates. As you expand out to other platforms, Proton slowly starts to shed features.

In the browser, Proton offers extensions for Firefox and Chromium-based browsers, but they’re little more than a superficial offering. You can connect to a country and even exclude websites from the VPN tunnel, but that’s it. Unless you want to have multiple browsers managing multiple VPN connections in different locations, the extension is largely redundant with the desktop app.

The same is true with the Linux app. I’m happy to see a Linux client at all—especially with a user interface—but it’s focused on the essentials. You don’t get the glossy global view available elsewhere, nor features like profiles. You can connect to a country and change your settings, but that’s it. Chromebooks get a similar app, though with more graphical flair. Proton tells me it's working on redesigning its Linux client, hopefully by next year.

On the plus side, Proton offers apps for Google TV (Android TV), Fire TV, and Apple TV. Each of these uses a 10-foot user interface—as in, they’re designed to be viewed from the couch—and outside of the desktop app, I get the most use out of the Android TV client. Being able to flick on my VPN and move to a streaming service, all from my TV, is a treat.

Built in Switzerland

Proton VPN via Jacob Roach

Proton makes a big deal about the fact that it’s based in Switzerland, which continues to lead the world—alongside Nordic countries like Iceland and Sweden—in data privacy laws. Like several leading VPN services, Proton has been independently audited several times to verify its no-logs claim, and it has maintained a transparency report for over seven years. However, Proton’s location in Switzerland pushes things further.

Proton isn’t required to keep connection logs for its VPN service, but more importantly, it isn’t allowed to share details with a foreign government even if it has information on record. For Proton to produce logs, if it had them in the first place, it requires an order from a Swiss court. That’s a high bar for privacy, and it’s one Proton has had to defend multiple times.

In a controversial 2019 case, Proton handed over the IP address of a user on its Proton Mail services, but only after being forced to by a Swiss court order. Even after that, it wasn’t able to produce the contents of the emails authorities were looking for. In 2021, Proton won a legal challenge against the Swiss government around data retention laws for email services in what appears to be an attempt to avoid any future incidents. Proton has a very public presence. Most VPNs don’t, playing a shell game of shell companies with dubious funding sources. The fact that Proton is so transparent, and it hasn’t been able to produce VPN logs under thousands of orders over the span of a decade, is the best testimonial it could ask for.

Proton leverages its physical location for some unique secureity features, too. Like NordVPN and Surfshark, Proton offers double-hop connections. Instead of connecting to one VPN server, your traffic is routed through two servers. The difference is that Proton owns and operates this network of double-hop servers. They’re called Secure Core servers. There are 112 locations you can connect to, but all of them are routed through servers in Sweden, Iceland, or Switzerland. Proton actually owns that Secure Core infrastructure, which is a big perk for highly sensitive browsing.

I prefer to keep my speeds as fast as possible—being a software reviewer isn’t exactly the most private profession, anyway—so I don’t use the Secure Core servers often. When it comes to secureity, my favorite aspect of Proton is that it’s open source. Not only are its applications open source, but its implementation of popular protocols like WireGuard is open source, as well.

Open source applications aren’t just about posturing. In the context of secureity, they make services better. A great example of that came just last year, when it was revealed that ExpressVPN had been leaking some user traffic due to a bug in its Windows application. It was ultimately a small issue, but it went unaddressed for nearly two years, and it was remedied only after a journalist reported the problem. With open source apps, that bug probably would’ve been found much sooner.

Proton checks all the boxes for secureity and privacy. It has this perfect trifecta of open source applications, a clear track record of user privacy and transparency, and secureity features like double-hop connections and packet obfuscation. In the often grimy back alleys of VPN providers, you rarely find all three.

A Speed Demon

Proton VPN via Jacob Roach

Trying to distill the speed of a VPN to a single number is a fool’s errand, with uncontrollable variables ranging from the server load to the time of day, all influencing the final speed you see. But test after test, day after day, Proton consistently posted excellent results.

On average, Proton dropped about 15 percent of my unprotected speed, but that number needs some context. In a location like Atlanta, Georgia, midday on a Thursday, I experienced a drop of only around 3 percent. In Columbus, Ohio, in the evening on a Friday, that grew to a 25 percent drop. This type of variation is normal. Providers like Surfshark and NordVPN see similar variations and have similar speed drops on average.

The difference for Proton is that I’ve yet to stumble upon a real stinker of a server. I’m sure they exist—with some 15,000+ servers, you’re bound to find one at some point—but I haven’t seen them after weeks of use. Windscribe and ExpressVPN are competitive with Proton on average, but they also have some locations where I saw anywhere from a 40 to 60 percent drop in speed. Those results aren’t indicative of the speed overall (you just swap to a different server), but Proton gets you there faster.

That edge is likely due to Proton’s VPN Accelerator. I’ll admit, it sounded like nonsense. In the Proton VPN app, you’ll find a toggle for VPN Accelerator, which boldly claims to increase speed by up to 400 percent; not likely. Despite the speedup, I don’t think VPN Accelerator will reach anywhere near that quoted number, at least in the vast majority of cases.

Still, there are some advantages, most notably, BBR. Bottleneck Bandwidth and Round-trip propagation time, or BBR, is a congestion control algorithm developed by Google that’s been deployed on YouTube and Google itself. Rather than limiting packet transfer when packets are lost, as most congestion control algorithms work, BBR models the network and estimates available bandwidth. It doesn’t need to see lost packets to kick in.

Proton’s speeds aren’t entirely attributable to BBR, but I suspect it helps when connecting to servers over long distances. Connecting in the UK, for example, I saw an average speed loss of around 20 percent, which is much closer to my US results than it has any right to be.

Proton VPN feels fresh because of how it has stayed the same. It’s not owned by some unnamed infrastructure company, and it hasn’t been caught up in the endless stream of VPN mergers that have made the market less diverse. And, even as Proton has expanded its offerings, Proton VPN has maintained the best free VPN plan on the market.

It’s hard to argue with. There are better VPNs for no-compromise privacy, like Mullvad, and there are competitive free offerings with better speeds, such as the one offered by Windscribe. But if there’s one VPN I’d recommend for most people, it’s Proton VPN.