Proton VPN is a VPN service that was launched in 2017. It's owned and operated by Proton AG, a Swiss company that also operates Proton Mail, the encrypted email service. Proton VPN offers open-source applications on multiple platforms, servers located in over 110 countries, and additional features such as obfuscation, multi-hop, and DNS filtering.
Our Verdict
Proton VPN is great for torrenting. It allows you to download torrents, has no data limit, and keeps your IP address and DNS queries within the VPN tunnel, ensuring your traffic remains private. Its kill switch effectively blocks unencrypted traffic leaking from your device after a restart or software crash, too. That said, it lacks anonymity-preserving registration options, requiring an email address and password to create an account.
Accepts a variety of privacy-preserving payment options.
Proper TLS implementation doesn't leave you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Doesn't leak your IP address or DNS queries.
Kill switch works as intended.
No registration options that preserve anonymity.
Proton VPN is good for private browsing. The service has excellent security that effectively protects your IP address and DNS queries. Beyond that, its policies and company practices are just acceptable. Its policies aren't written in a way that's easy to understand for everyone, and specify that they collect more of your personal information than is absolutely necessary for the service to function. They also employ aggressive marketing tactics that encourage you to stay subscribed for as long as possible.
Accepts a variety of privacy-preserving payment options.
Proper TLS implementation doesn't leave you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Doesn't leak your IP address or DNS queries.
Kill switch works as intended.
Generally transparent in its user interactions.
No registration options that preserve anonymity.
Jargon-filled policies are difficult to understand.
Proton VPN's policies and business practices are mediocre. Its privacy policies and terms of service are not written in a way that's easy for anyone to understand, and allow the company to collect more of your information than necessary for the service to function. Proton publishes frequent third-party security and policy audits that return positive results, but the latter's scope is somewhat limited. Proton generally conducts itself in a way that instills trust, but a few scattered incidents, mostly pertaining to other services under the parent company's umbrella, are enough to raise an eyebrow.
Generally transparent in its user interactions.
Jargon-filled policies are difficult to understand.
Proton VPN has impressive security. It doesn't leak your IP address or DNS queries while you're connected to it, and it has proper TLS implementation, protecting you from man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, its kill switch works as intended, blocking unencrypted data from leaking from your system in case of a reboot or reconnecting after a loss of internet connection.
Proper TLS implementation doesn't leave you vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks.
Doesn't leak your IP address or DNS queries.
Kill switch works as intended.
We're testing this VPN's speed on an ongoing basis and will update this verdict when we have more data. See the Performance section of the review to look at the data we've collected so far.
Performance Usages
Changelog
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Updated Jan 23, 2026:
We've updated the text throughout the review to reflect the changes from test bench 0.10.1.
- Updated Jan 23, 2026: We've updated this review to Test Bench 0.10.1! This is a minor update to how we conduct our speed tests. Read the changelog for more info.
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Updated Dec 16, 2025:
We've added text throughout the review to correspond with the new privacy tests in Test Bench 0.10.
- Updated Dec 16, 2025: We've updated our review to Test Bench 0.10! This update focuses on privacy and evaluates the trustworthiness of a VPN in keeping your personal information private. Read the changelog for more details.
Check Price
Differences Between Sizes And Variants
Proton VPN has a free tier and a paid Plus tier, which we bought and tested in this review. We also tested Proton VPN Free separately.
| Plan | Maximum Devices | Torrents (P2P) | Country Selection | Speed Throttling | Split Tunnelling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 1 | No | No (5 available countries, fastest chosen automatically) | Yes | No |
| Plus | 10 | Yes | 117 | No | Yes |
It's also included in Proton Unlimited, a subscription with all of Proton's services.
Popular VPN Comparisons
Proton VPN is a solid choice that offers excellent security and features, including multi-hop, obfuscation, port forwarding support, and servers located in over 110 countries. That said, it has higher latency than many other VPNs, which is a downside if you're concerned with gaming performance and general responsiveness.
The VPN is suitable for browsing the web privately, but with a few caveats regarding how the business operates. Namely, its privacy policies specify that the company may collect more of your data than necessary for the VPN to function, and the terms of service are not written in an easily digestible way. VPNs that do a much better job of this are Mullvad and IVPN.
To see which services we recommend, check out our articles on the best VPNs, the best VPNs for Windows PCs, or the best VPNs for iPhone.
Mullvad and Proton VPN are both good VPN services, but Mullvad is better. It does a better job of preserving your personal information, as you are assigned a randomly generated account number upon registration instead of being required to provide an email address. Mullvad also has clearer privacy policies that don't specify any sort of logging, compared to Proton's unclear and jargon-filled policies that indicate possible data collection. That said, Proton has a few more nice-to-have features, like servers in more countries, and you can connect up to 10 of your devices simultaneously.
NordVPN and Proton VPN excel in different areas. Proton has better security as it has a functional kill switch that blocks your internet connection if the VPN client crashes or your system restarts. On the other hand, Nord has significantly better latency, so it feels significantly snappier when browsing the web and performs better in latency-sensitive tasks. Otherwise, the two VPNs have very similar feature sets.
Test Results
We achieved these results with Proton's most strict kill switch option, 'permanent kill switch.' Without this setting enabled, Proton leaks some unencrypted calls to Windows servers after a system reboot.
Like most VPN providers, Proton VPN doesn't secure its internet routing (BGP) properly. This means that even if your ISP protects against attacks like route hijacking, your traffic could still be misdirected once it enters Proton's network. This is only a concern for highly targeted and resource-intensive attacks that are feasible only for governments or large corporations to orchestrate.
Note that Proton VPN's privacy policy is a sub-policy of Proton AG's (the parent company) privacy policy that applies when you create a Proton account, which is mandatory to use the VPN service.
While a no-logs policy that specifies Proton doesn't log your traffic or IP address while connected to the VPN, there are several instances in the privacy policy that claim to record your IP address for various, sometimes vague purposes and for unspecified periods of time.
Proton commissions clear and detailed third-party audits yearly, but the scope is limited to the no-logs policy and not the wider privacy policies.
Proton VPN's company practices are just okay. The terms of service are difficult to understand if you're not familiar with the legal jargon that's used to write them. They also lack information about data retention, disallow class action lawsuits, and require arbitration instead of going to trial in public courts, demonstrating a lack of confidence in their ability to publicly settle disputes with users.
Proton also engages in pushy marketing practices, such as offering large discounts to new subscribers, long subscription periods, exclusive third-party offers, and sending marketing emails. While not inherently an indictment of the service's quality, it signals where the company's priorities lie.
Otherwise, Proton is generally communicative and transparent with its users about the service, but there have been incidents in the past where executives haven't rigorously upheld the company's policy of political neutrality.
ProtonVPN accepts credit cards, PayPal, and Proton credits. You can purchase Proton credits using bank transfers, Bitcoin, or cash, but you must first sign up for an account.
We're testing this VPN's performance on an ongoing basis, and will update the text for the download speed, upload speed, and latency tests when we have more data.
This VPN has native Linux apps for Ubuntu, Debian, and Fedora GNOME desktop environments. Proton indicates that the app should work on most derivative distributions, despite not being officially supported. You can also manually configure OpenVPN or WireGuard on Linux.
It's also available on various platforms, including iOS, Android, Chromebook, Android TV, Apple TV, Fire TV, as well as Chrome and Firefox extensions.
Stealth is a proprietary protocol that utilizes obfuscation to disguise your VPN traffic as HTTPS traffic. This is useful if you're dealing with internet censors that block access to a site through a VPN.
If you want to learn about the performance differences between WireGuard and OpenVPN, check out our comparison.
