Proton VPN review: Premium, proven privacy and a free tier with no data limits

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Editor's Note: This is the first in a series of VPN reviews we're overhauling in accordance with our all-new VPN testing methodology, which you can read in full here.

Proton VPN posits itself as a VPN for the people. The eight-year-old Swiss provider maintains open-source apps, abides by strong privacy practices that have held up in court, provides censorship bypassing tools, and supports internet freedom causes. It's also the rare VPN service with a free tier boasting zero data limits. No wonder so many Redditors are obsessed with it.

I'm right there with them. I tested (and scrutinized) Proton VPN for a little over a week, and while I have a few nitpicks, I was largely impressed by its dependability, integrity, and accessibility. I especially think it's worth paying for to get the most out of its features and its enormous server network.

At the end of the day, it's only right that Proton VPN is the first VPN we've ever given a Mashable Choice Award.

How much does Proton VPN cost?

Proton VPN's standard paid tier is called Proton VPN Plus, and it's available in three subscription lengths. The following prices were accurate as of March 2025:

• One-month plan: $9.99 per month

• One-year plan: $4.99 per month (billed $59.88 upfront)

• Two-year plan: $4.49 per month (billed $107.76 upfront)

Those yearly plans both renew annually at $79.95 (or $6.66 per month) after your first term, which works out to a price hike of 33% or 48%, respectively. That's not ideal, but those are far from the worst markups I've seen among major VPN providers' plans.

Users also have the option of bundling Proton VPN with other Proton products like Proton Mail, Proton Calendar, and Proton Drive in the form of a Proton Unlimited subscription, which ranges from $7.99 to $12.99 per month depending on the length of the plan. (For the purposes of this review, I only tried Proton VPN.) 

Proton VPN offers a free tier with no data limits, as mentioned up top, though it's severely limited compared to its premium counterpart in terms of features and server access. Proton Free users are subsidized by its paid subscribers, not by selling in-app ads or user data, and you don't need to supply any credit card information in order to sign up.

Proton VPN Plus users have the option to pay via credit or debit card or PayPal, and anonymously via Bitcoin or cash (through the mail). Subscribers are covered by a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Is Proton VPN trustworthy?

Proton VPN is one of the younger VPN services out there, having launched in 2017. (For comparison's sake, industry giants ExpressVPN and NordVPN were founded in 2009 and 2012, respectively.) However, its "privacy-for-all" mission quickly earned it a strong reputation and a bit of a cult following. A deep dive into its company history, policies, and transparency efforts revealed plenty of excellent reasons for the hype, albeit a couple of hitches.

Proton VPN history and reputation

Proton VPN is run by Proton AG, a Swiss tech company owned by the nonprofit Proton Foundation. According to its website, Proton VPN "was born out of a desire to build an internet that puts people before profits," and to help individuals reclaim their online freedom.

VPN service aside, the company's record certainly reflects those goals. It's raised money for privacy activists in Hong Kong. It's called out Apple for allegedly blocking Proton VPN security updates after the United Nations recommended that people in Myanmar use Proton Mail to report crimes during the country's 2021 coup. It's offered discounts to data journalists and added extra free servers before elections in countries with a history of censorship and misinformation campaigns. A lot of VPN providers claim to care about digital freedom and privacy, and while you'll never catch me "yas queen"-ing a company, Proton VPN really walks the walk in an admirable way.

At the same time, I'd be remiss if I didn't broach a recent controversy surrounding a tweet posted by Proton CEO Andy Yen in response to President Donald Trump's cabinet pick for assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice's Antitrust Division.

"10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned," Yen tweeted in December 2024.

After a screenshot of the tweet blew up on the r/ProtonMail subreddit, an official Proton account doubled down in a comment, writing that "Until corporate Dems are thrown out, the reality is that Republicans remain more likely to tackle Big Tech abuses.” The comment was later deleted and retracted as an official statement (despite it opening with the phrase, "Here is our official response"). Yen attempted to do damage control in another thread. More backlash ensued.

Without getting too in the weeds — The Intercept has a good recap of how everything went down — the reason for the fallout was threefold: Proton has repeatedly positioned itself as a neutral organization, to say that Republicans haven't been in bed with Big Tech is frankly goofy, and ultimately, the company's response to the criticism was uncharacteristically messy.

I personally think the entire incident was sloppy more than anything else and not a symptom of a sinister ulterior motive. But it might give some users pause or leave a bad taste in their mouths if they interpret it as an instance of corporate knee-bending to the Trump administration.

Proton VPN privacy policy and transparency efforts

Proton VPN is technically covered by two privacy policies: the main Proton Privacy Policy and Proton VPN's own sub-policy. The latter is brief and crystal clear, but Proton's general policy can get a little confusing, as some portions of it don't apply to Proton VPN. More specifically, users of other Proton products may be subject to occasional IP logging. (These inconsistencies aren't always plainly identified, either — I had to reach out to the Proton team for clarity on a few points). Overall, though, it's thorough and comprehensive.

Proton VPN's dedicated privacy policy specifically calls it "a no-logs VPN service" that doesn't record user traffic or session data, discriminate against any devices, protocols, or apps, or throttle connections. It goes on to say that some user data is needed to maintain accounts (very standard), and that it's stored on servers that are owned and operated by Proton or its subsidiaries. That's pretty much it.

The same sub-policy covers Proton VPN's free tier, which "has in general no speed restrictions," though Proton may levy them "in cases of excessive consumption" so there's enough bandwidth to go around for all free users. Don't get too wild.

Proton VPN has had its infrastructure and operating procedures independently audited every year since 2022 to verify its no-logs policy. The most recent audit was conducted by the Polish penetration testing company Securitum in July 2024, and it once again confirmed that Proton VPN doesn't keep any logs of metadata or VPN activity (nor does it "engage in any practices that might compromise your privacy"). Anyone can read the audit without making a Proton VPN account. This is all great, but it would be even better if the company had committed to doing these regular audits sooner.

Having said that, it's crucial to note that Proton VPN's no-logs policy held up in court years before it started undergoing annual third-party audits. In 2019, Proton VPN was ordered to cough up user logs as part of a data request from a foreign country that was approved by a court in Switzerland, where Proton is headquartered. (Under Swiss law, such requests can't proceed without a court order.). However, Proton VPN couldn't comply with the request because it didn't have any logs.

This is one of dozens of such data requests flagged in Proton VPN's transparency report, which is updated every time it receives a legal request for information via court order or a government entity (most recently in September 2024). To date, all orders have been denied. Anyone can read the report without needing an account.

Proton VPN also deserves high praise for open sourcing all of its apps in 2020, becoming the first VPN provider to do so. This makes it so that anyone can inspect the apps' code for vulnerabilities. (It also had its apps undergo security audits in 2020 and 2021.) What's more, Proton VPN has offered a bug bounty program since 2017, encouraging developers to hunt down weaknesses in its servers and apps. It's awesome to see this "nothing to hide" approach existing in some form since the Proton VPN's inception, and the longer it continues to prove itself, the better.

Branching outward, the main Proton privacy policy opens with a line that the company "strongly [believes] in an internet where privacy is the default." Furthermore, its "overriding policy is to collect as little user information (personal data included) as possible to ensure a private user experience when using the Services." 

Some of the user information that Proton does collect includes analytics when you visit its website (sans IP address), your email address (for account creation and communications), referral attributions, and app statistics (for collecting crash information to fix bugs). Payment information is shared with third parties like Chargebee, PayPal, and Stripe in order to process subscriptions, while support requests may get handled by Zendesk or Calendly. (The former provides Proton VPN's live chat feature, for example.) This is all very standard.

There's one instance when the company does save a Proton VPN user's IP addresses for a brief period of time, which is if they need to verify the person's account via Proton Captcha, email, or text message. "IP addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers provided are saved temporarily in order to send you a verification code and for anti-spam purposes," reads the Proton policy. To be clear, this is very different from logging a user's IP address whlie they're using the VPN service, which Proton VPN vows not to do. Refer back to the results of its third-party audits and transparency report for reassurance.

For what it's worth, Proton users can access, delete, and export any personal data the company has processed through their account interface.

Hands on with Proton VPN

Proton VPN is available on macOS, Windows (including Windows on ARM), iOS, Android, Linux, Chromebook, Chrome, Firefox, Android TV, Apple TV, and Firestick. For this review, I tried it on macOS.

Proton VPN lets users connect via WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2, and its custom Stealth protocol, which is designed for bypassing censorship in areas where VPNs are blocked. You can also enable a Smart Protocol feature (under Preferences > Connection) that will automatically connect you through the protocol that performs the best and/or bypasses censorship based on your location.

Proton VPN uses AES-256 encryption for OpenVPN and IKEv2 and ChaCha20 for WireGuard, which are both safe and solid.

A Proton VPN Plus subscription gets you up to 10 simultaneous connections and city-level access to its full server network, which has ballooned to more than 11,800 servers in 117 countries as of March 2025. At the time of writing, Proton VPN had the largest and most globally diverse server network out of all the VPNs I've tested. Users have myriad location-spoofing options and should never struggle to find a reliably fast local server location. That was certainly my testing experience, at least.

Proton VPN app design

Proton VPN's app is intuitive and sleek, with a purple and black color scheme that gives it a modern, vaguely cyberbougie look. A box in the top-left corner of the Proton VPN app contains your current server name and location (with a corresponding flag in the background), a server load percentage that shows how crowded it is, your current IP address, your protocol, and your download and upload speeds.

Hitting the "Quick Connect" button at the top of the app automatically connects you to your "Fastest" server, which is selected based on "the best combination of low latency and available bandwidth," a Proton VPN rep told me. Under a "Profiles" tab below it, there are options to switch to another Fastest server, hop on a random server, and create custom profiles for different use cases with your choice of routing, country, server, and protocol.

Users can peruse all of Proton VPN's server locations in the form of a list (under a separate "Countries" tab) as well as a map, which is studded with triangles representing places where servers are available. The map itself doesn't have any labels on it, so it's a little difficult to tell what country each triangle corresponds to unless you've memorized every national border. But the list is conveniently searchable, and there are percentage load icons next to each server name.

Proton VPN performance

I used Proton VPN nonstop for a week, and my Fastest servers were usually in Illinois (I live in Chicago), though I occasionally landed on servers in Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. I also spent an hour on a UK server to see if that would make my connection sluggish, since my data had to travel further — but nope. No matter which server I used, Proton VPN connected instantly, never dropped, and felt just as fast as my normal connection. There was one time Reddit asked me to tick a box to verify that I wasn't a bot (my server was probably on the fuller side), but otherwise it was like the VPN wasn't there. In that sense, Proton VPN is forgettable in the best way.

Users in search of a VPN that can skirt geo-restrictions on streaming services will also be happy to hear that the UK Proton VPN server I used was easily able to unblock Love Island UK on ITVX.

A VPN is always going to put some kind of damper on one's connection (negligible or not), so in addition to anecdotal observations, we run speed tests to quantify it. My download speed fell by just 5.7 percent when I was hooked up to my Fastest Proton VPN server using Wireguard, while the UK server resulted in a 13 percent download speed drop. That's stellar on both accounts.

I should note that Proton VPN's "VPN Accelerator" tool was on the whole time I was trying the VPN and when I conducted my speed tests. Proton claims this feature "boosts VPN speeds by up to 400 percent" and "improves VPN connection stability." It's enabled on all Proton VPN apps by default with a Plus subscription.

Proton VPN features

Above the server list, you'll find a row of icons for three different Proton VPN Plus features. A padlock pulls up an option to enable "Secure Core," which sends your connection through one of Proton VPN's self-owned Secure Core servers (located in high-security data centers) before routing it through a standard VPN server. This is a multi-hop/double VPN tool that adds an extra layer of encryption for extra peace of mind.

Proton VPN serves users a pop-up message warning them about possible internet speed slowdowns before they connect to a Secure Core server for the first time. I used one that routed me through Iceland and the U.S., and while webpages loaded noticeably slower while I was connected to it, it was still totally usable. Another speed test showed that it resulted in a 7.7 percent download speed drop compared to my regular internet connection.

A shield icon in that same row of icons pulls up Proton VPN's "NetShield" feature, which can block malware alone or malware, ads, and trackers. Some websites displayed pop-ups asking that I disable my ad blocker when I browsed with NetShield on, including Twitch and Slate. A few sites wouldn't load at all, showing a "This site can't be reached / [so-and-so's] server IP address could not be found" error message. They loaded properly once I turned NetShield off, though.

The last icon in the row is a lightswitch symbolizing Proton VPN's kill switch, an important tool that stops all traffic if your VPN connection drops (keeping your real IP address hidden). Users need to enable it manually. 

Proton VPN offers an advanced feature called "Tor over VPN" that lets you connect to the Tor network via specialized Tor servers (indicated by the "TOR" in their name). On macOS, this only works if you have the kill switch enabled. Users can find Tor servers by scrolling through its server list and looking for countries that have a little onion symbol next to their drop-down arrows. 

I found six Tor servers in Colorado, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Sweden, and Switzerland, and all of them were extremely full (to the tune of 88 to 97 percent load — they're easily the most packed servers in Proton VPN's network at any given time). The average user can disregard this, as they probably won't ever really need to use Tor over VPN, but the activists and journalists who might benefit from this doubled-up privacy method will need to be patient with extremely pokey connections.

The one Proton VPN Plus feature I wanted to try but couldn't was its split tunneling tool, which lets users exclude some of their traffic from the VPN tunnel to boost connection speeds and access content in different locations at the same time. It was only available on Windows, Android, and Android TV at the time of writing. However, a fall 2024 product roadmap teased future support for macOS and Linux in the near future.

Proton VPN Plus users who run into issues with their account or any of the service's features can get premium support via live chat, submit questions via email or website form, and look for answers via Proton VPN's online "knowledge base" of how-to guides. I'll add that the company is very active and responsive to user feedback in the r/ProtonVPN subreddit.

More on Proton VPN's free plan

Proton VPN's free users get access to its service on one device at a time and don't have to deal with any data limits, which is extremely clutch and something I haven't encountered in any other free VPNs I've tried. (For comparison, TunnelBear's free tier caps you at 2GB per month.) You can have it running 24/7.

The trade-off is that free users only have access to about 2,300 Proton VPN servers in five countries — Japan, the Netherlands, Romania, Poland, and the United States — which means they tend to get clogged. It also means your location-spoofing options are severely limited, and that unblocking regional content in areas outside of those five countries is impossible. You can't choose which server you're connected to, either, and there's a timeout between server changes that increases every time you switch. If a server you land on is unusably slow, you might have to hang out there for a while.

My experience using Proton VPN's free tier for a few days was fine, but not great. It was occasionally difficult to make a solid initial connection: I'd get on a server and wouldn't be able to load any websites. This was made more frustrating by the fact that I got hit with that timeout every time I switched servers in search of a working connection; at one point, I had to wait 20 minutes to switch again.

Things were mostly okay once I was on a working free Proton VPN server. While the ones I used were always crowded, with 70 to 91 percent loads, they weren't as dramatically slow as those numbers imply. (Granted, they did feel a tad pokier compared to the Plus servers I used, but only if I really paid attention.) That said, there were two occasions when my connection randomly dropped. Make sure the kill switch is on — it's basically the only feature Proton VPN's free users have access to besides its censorship-skirting Stealth protocol. Secure Core, VPN Accelerator, Tor over VPN, and split tunneling are all off-limits to its free users across all platforms, as is its live chat support.

Is Proton VPN worth it?

Proton VPN Plus is easy to justify. The service's paying subscribers enjoy consistently excellent performance and receive access to useful privacy features as well as a server network that's currently unrivaled in size and geographic spread (with city-level selection to boot). VPN veterans will appreciate the customizability of their connections, while casual users will like its "set it and forget it"-ness the most.

Proton VPN's free tier can be a pain to use at times, but it works well enough once you find a decent server — and the fact that you aren't inhibited by any data limits makes its occasional connection issues tolerable.

Above all, Proton VPN is a privacy mensch that doesn't just say it cares about online freedom, but actually shows it. In a crowded industry with a lot of loud voices, this makes it a decisively worthy pick.