Basically I started with mullvad then turned to proton but after they introduced AI and a crypto wallet I’m just looking for what peoples opinions are.
EDIT: Thank you all for your suggestions and opinions :D
Mullvad is currently highly trusted by the community. If you lost your trust in proton I recommend switching back to it.
Use Mullvad, unless you absolutely require port forwarding.
Or you already use Proton Mail / Drive etc and want to save a bit of money with Proton Unlimited at 9.99 EUR/USD / mo. That’s why I switched from Mullvad. I do agree that overall though Mullvad is the best in terms of trustworthiness (so far as we know anyway)
Proton has port forwarding? Source?
God damn that’s complicated compared to PIA
Pia is owned by very sketchy Kape Technologies, just FYI.
Yeah but their stack is open source, with no evidence of wrongdoing, and proven no log track record. Their servers have no persistent storage. The threat model isn’t the fuckin NSA lol
While PIA Might not have done any wrong doing, Kape Technologies definitely has. Imo, it’s not worth funding.
I dont know why that has you doing so much, I use port forwarding with proton vpn and all I did was press a button in the proton vpn app and it was on.
That’s the manual setup for use cases like on a server or whatever (a common place where you would need port forwarding)
Isn’t mullvad better and cheaper?
think I didn’t get it?
protonvpn is a few pennies cheaper when goin’ for 2 years and even much more when you wait for the black friday offers.
so if you can’t wait and don’t use a vpn on a daily basis, mullvad is 100% cheaper, so yes kinda.
I wouldn’t pay for 2 years for a privacy service. Eventually you’ll loose privacy. Better to create a new account at least every 6 months.
I switched to Proton because I use all the products of their unlimited plan so it makes financial sense to go for that.
However, I feel like Mullvad VPN is vastly superior. Their no bullshit payment options are fanstastic. 5 euros a month, no matter if you buy 1 month or 10 years. I feel like speed and connection stability was noticeably better as well.
I miss Mullvad VPN, really.
I’m really happy with Mullvad and their pricing. I can pay for only one month if I need it so I don’t have another subscription to pay each month.
IMHO Mullvad
Mullvad only!!!
Mullvad is better imo, unless you need port forwarding. I’m currently using Proton since I pay for Unlimited for that encrypted drive space, and using their VPN saves me money since I just think of the payment as just for Proton Drive. This is a change I made just a few days ago though, for about a year I’ve paid for both Proton Unlimited and Mullvad, and I legitimately prefer Mullvad over Proton, it just made sense for me to switch money wise. Can’t really go wrong between the two imo.
Experience wise i’ve had a better time with mullvad at every corner when it comes to vpns than proton.
Protons still a respectable company i’d say but there focus is gonna become spread more thin while mullvads gonna continue providing a stable and simple experience.
Plus mullvads never gonna confuse you when it comes to pricing unlike proton, no extra time spent finding the difference between a monthly and annual subscription.
they’re both good but I use mullvad only because I use proton for email and I don’t want one company to have both my emails and web traffic
I suggest RiseupVPN.
Riseup is good, but I try to use other services as it’s aimed at activists, journalists, refugees, and other people in need who will need the bandwidth a lot more than I do.
I daily drive Proton mostly because of speed for gaming, but I keep a mullvad account handy for special occasions. I have zero interest in the full Proton stack, I don’t want to centralize my data like that. Especially once they joined the AI train, I’m glad I kept my VPN and email separate.
I host my own private git server and use Unix Pass for my password vault, FastMail for email, Syncthing and SMB for file sharing, don’t really use crypto so I couldn’t care less that they added a wallet. The VPN interface on mobile and Windows/Mac is fine. I’d love to see the Linux options improve, but I just use OpenVPN profiles and it works well enough.
Just curious: why do you use a vpn for gaming?
There’s some games that use peer to peer connection that can expose your IP if the person on the other end cares to do the digging. In some competitive games people that are trying and caring way too hard will use this to say DDoS people in order to win games. While I’m probably not good enough, or well known enough for people to be doing this, you’ll hear streamers mention it happening to them every now and then.
Mullvad/IVPN for their pay with cash policies
Huge fan of Mullvad for the work around respecting users privacy. They are implementing ways of skewing AI-guided traffic analysis. VPN encrypts your data but companies are starting to use AI to look at traffic patterns and help determine what that data is. I won’t pretend to understand it completely so I’d recommend reading their blog about it.
I’ve been eyeing PIA for it’s price and the inclusion of port forwarding but not sure if anyone has experience with PIA.
I would recommend Windscribe over PIA. They’re open-source and rank highly on Techlore’s VPN toolkit.
Mullvad is cheaper, and probably a bit more trusted, but Proton has port forwarding. Currently I use Mullvad. I don’t like the Mullvad’s 5 device limit on Wireguard clients though. You can only have 5 devices added to the account, no matter if just 1 or all 5 are currently connected. And after using Wireguard once, I don’t want to use OpenVPN again where wg can fully replace it.
Both support cash payments, though Proton makes me feel like they expect it for larger sums of cash:We cannot be responsible for lost shipments, so we strongly recommend sending your payment using a service that provides a tracking number so you can track the shipment. It’s also helpful to notify us that you’re sending us cash in the mail, so we know to expect it.
While Mullvad asks you not to use registered mail nor send larger amounts of cash. I feel like the latter is implied by asking to notify them. I suppose “Hey, I am sending you 10 bucks via mail.” is not what’s expected here.
What I absolutely like is the fair pricing. It’s same price no matter how much time you buy, whether it’s 1 month, a year or two. Even their direct competitor IVPN does this crap (and so does Proton). I value that quite a bit.
So currently Mullvad is winning for me.
Mail is extremely insecure, it’s actually really nefarious for them to recommend it. I still use Mullvad sometimes because it’s just so cheap and fast. I know it’s some kind of high level NATO spyware though. Just look at where their servers are. I mean fucking come on now.
Just look at where their servers are.
Kind of… al around the place? What do you mean?
Also, in the mail you don’t send the account number, just a payment token. So the postman won’t be stealing your account, just your cash at most.
Vouchers are probably the safest, but I actually like sending mail, and this is basically my only opportunity to do so nowadays.
They can just scan and open and reclose the mail they do this to everyone now I am so serious. Difficult to do at scale though so honestly I take it back, if everyone did it the mail way it could increase surveillance costs? Escalating everyone’s piracy to require forensic cracking at a federal or international level would skyrocket costa which should be a goal
Okay let me try again. Where are their servers conspicuously NOT located?
Oh does the 5 device limit not apply to OpenVPN? Interesting
