I've never tried Mulvad, but Proton, while it has LOTS of exit nodes, which is good for avoiding blocks, is quite bad at any individual node remaining up and recovering automatically on an outage. If your use case is actively connecting for watching youtube or netflix or whatever in another country on a laptop that's mostly off or not VPNed and you don't care, that's great, but if you want to VPN for bittorrent or another always connected purpose from a server or VPS...
this post was submitted on 04 Oct 2025
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Privacy
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That surprises me because I've been running Proton behind a Gluetun container for months without any issues.
I dont use the well known ones, seems to me that those would be the first to have backdoors since people pick them.
I have a vpn that is never mentioned anywhere. Perfect.
What about AirVPN? I haven't chosen any VPNs yet, mostly because I'm still not sure which to go with, but I never see anyone talk about Air, even though I once heard Proton or Air were the best choices.
For sailing the seas, I like CryptoStorm.is Good speed with port forwarding.
Both of them are decent VPN choices at the end of the day. If one is 60% cheaper then the choice should be very easy unless you have too much money on your hand. Try 1 month of each and make a choice.
Mullvad VPN is more private but I find I'm being asked to prove I'm human more often. Proton VPN I don't trust with anything like piracy because they're a large company with too much to lose by being overly private.
EDIT: Oh, and reminder that you should use the Mullvad browser too if you want to keep anything private.
Vote for the unlisted AirVPN because extremely easy to use, very moderate pricing, and specifically why I needed it, port forwarding.
Why don't you use a decentralized VPN like NymVPN? It's impossible for the company or anyone to take logs because your traffic is routed over several nodes. It's like Tor but a decentralized one.
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Moved from Proton to Mullvad to Windscribe
Proton kept getting worse and is moving towards a walled garden.
Mullvad seemed great on the private payment front. Their apps are pretty solid. The device limit was too low for me. For 6-10 devices the price doubles.
Windscribe won me over with their build a plan option. Their apps aren't the most visually appealing but get the job done.
How is proton moving to a walled garden?
A la carte pricing has gone out the window in favor of bundles. This enables the same subsidization model of business used by Apple, Google, etc. Even when you pay, they display ads and reminders to get you to upgrade to higher tiers. Drive launched in beta only for paid users. Drive now encourages the use of their proprietary document format. They hand out storage bonuses for each year of membership. That's not a sustainable long-term practice and purposefully creates stickiness. Generally speaking, they don't have easy export tools, so they're not very interoperable. Forwarding emails sent to @proton.me or @protonmail.com addresses to a new inbox is not possible unless you're a paying customer, which makes switching more difficult.
If you care about things beyond the operations, the Proton boss came out in support of 47's adminstration with regards to regulating big tech IIRC. I'm not aware the Mullvad chief did something similar.
Proton works well. But it's designed to be the basket for all your eggs (VPN, office suite, email, etc.). They want you to use all their services and push for upgrades to the highest tier. I found their customer support you be ... very ... slow.
If you need port forwarding, AirVPN is another option. I think they're cheaper than Mullvad but it's held together by dedication and duct tape. It works okay but read their website first to see if you're okay with how it's set up.
Why do you want a VPN? Is it just for some light piracy? Staying safe on public wifi? Or do you actually NEED to maintain your privacy, with real consequences if you can't?
If you need true privacy, the answer is Mullvad. But there's also more required than just switching on a VPN if you want privacy. If you want a convenient and easy VPN that's part of a bigger privacy-focused suite of tools, then I'd recommend Proton. They make some pretty good products.
Why do you want a VPN? Is it just for some light piracy? Staying safe on public wifi? Or do you actually NEED to maintain your privacy, with real consequences if you can’t?
Nice try, FBI.
Not your problem.