I’m thinking about paying for a VPN, I currently don’t use one.
I’d like to use Mullvad but they don’t seem to have regional prices, while Proton does.
I wonder if Proton is still a reliable option, Proton is 60% cheaper in my country, probably because regional pricing (but I didn’t check if it’s really the case).
If anyone has any other suggestion I’d like to hear it.
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…
That surprises me because I’ve been running Proton behind a Gluetun container for months without any issues.
I like mullvad because I can pay for it with vouchers and have nothing to tie my payment to my account#
I don’t think any other VPN can do that.
Theres also the fact that mullvad was raided by the (Swedish)police and even though they fully complied, the police ended up walking away with nothing because mullvad had nothing to give them.
Proton on the other hand, will at the very least be storing your email, payment info, and possibly other info in your account that mullvad won’t. I also don’t like how they have aligned themselves with conservative politics.
You can also pay with cash in an envelope
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.
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.
I use Proton VPN only because I use Proton everything else. If not, I’d probably consider Mullvad. But I’m in the US and regional pricing doesn’t apply.
Same. Use Proton to get the suite of tools for 1 price. Mullvad if you just need a VPN.
Vote for the unlisted AirVPN because extremely easy to use, very moderate pricing, and specifically why I needed it, port forwarding.
I use both (not suggesting that). I mostly use Proton because it’s already included in my plan, and they seem to have more connections to choose from, but I frequently have to switch because the one I’m on starts to get really slow. I like Mullvad’s flat pricing and lack of commitment (they even accept cash), and it was an easier setup on Linux (at least Arch).
I chose Mullvad because they don’t ask for any personal details and you can pay anonymously, which means that their service is privacy protecting by design. You don’t have to rely so much on trust.
Proton seems to be a large and rapidly expanding company which looks like it’s trying to be a more privacy respecting competitor to Google’s many services. While that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I prefer companies that value stability over rapid expansion. I also don’t like relying on a potential single point of failure for everything. I have a Proton e-mail account but I don’t use any of their other services because I don’t want everything in the same place.
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.
Proton’s CEO sucks. I canceled my extremely low-priced, grandfathered subscription and moved elsewhere. I had been a user since basically day one, a subscriber since available, and converted family members and friends to it. Not anymore.
Mullvad has been stellar. Fast, anonymous, easy to use. Zero complaints.
Damn, I couldn’t let go of my extremely-low priced grandfathered subscription. I contemplated about it and getting both mullvad and tuta but it ads up more than what I pay proton.
Also, I believe proton ceo apologized or something like that
The apology kind of felt like a “sorry you’re offended”.
I don’t fault anyone for staying but I definitely don’t champion them anymore. I did move to Tuta as well and it is far from as seamless of an experience - it does everything I need (including domain aliases), but it was much less intuitive to configure. The system is way slower with search (it doesn’t index anything for privacy reasons) and in similar vein the mobile app only syncs something when opened. So you’ll get a notification for a new email but when you open it doesn’t load for 2-8 seconds.
I get it all somewhat because they’re only syncing what’s needed at any point in time and decrypting it or whatever, but it does feel janky.
I read this article and it certainly is something to consider.
It talks about how Andy Yen was just pointing out how under Trump’s first admin, they started to actually attack big tech when dems haven’t done anything. Which is true. He praises Gail Slater and Lina Khan (but Lina Khan was recently fired…sooooo).
They clarified how the andy1011000 (andy88) username probably is more about how Andy’s birthday was in 1988 and 88 is a lucky number in Taiwan, unlikely that he’s a white supremacist.
They also traced the money of Proton’s donations and none of the organizations were republican, and pretty much all of the donations align with the practices of Democrat donors.
Andy has a history of posting online supporting Ukraine, being against xenophobia, against racism, supporting women in tech, supporting refugees receive education in Switzerland.
When the Democrat party had proposals for regulatory efforts, Andy supported them.
https://proton.me/blog/congress-antitrust-report
He even made a tweet and blog post talking about the tech surveillance underneath the Trump administration and how people should fear it.
So it seems to be that Andy is more liberal when donating money and publicly acknowledge whoever is in support of anti-trust and anti-surveillance to me.
If it’s the goal of Proton to seem neutral, then they maybe did it a little too well. They convinced people that Andy is a full on fascist when in reality, he seems better than democrat politicians we have nowadays.
Then why did they take the comments to double and triple and quadruple down after the initial issue?
Unlike Ladybird, which is undeniably shit - I won’t judge someone for using Proton. I realize people’s takeaways from the situation are different. I’ve been fine without it.
Why are you hating on Ladybird when its not even in alpha stage?
Yeah, all the Proton hate we’re seeing are overreactions. But life is easier when you can see everything as black and white when things are actually more nuanced.
From what I gather these are about the IP Logging, deanonymizing user, and having accounts on temporary suspension.
You could search it why on your own or even read the articles you just cited but basically.
- Apparently the user broke swiss law and “Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended”. However, if the user used VPN, they could’ve gotten away with this tbh. Emails are encrypted so the only thing they got going for them was the IP address, and that was the weak point.
- For the deanonymized user, their recovery email was an iCloud email. You don’t need to use a recovery email, it’s an option that the user chose.
- Proton received an alert from CERT, saying that these users were linked to a North Korean APT group. But they couldn’t verify (as they can’t read encrypted emails), so they did the safe thing and temporary suspended them until they receiver further confirmation.
It seems everything they did was to comply with the laws and 2 of these situations could’ve been easily avoided by the user. The third case just put their accounts in suspension for some further review.
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.
Any reason Private Internet Access (PIA) isn’t in the running? I’ve been using it for years now with no complaints or issues.
Owned by an ad-targetting company, which itself is owned by an Israeli billionaire with ties to the military.
Oof, seriously? I had no idea. Fuck.
Edit - just looked it up, Kape Technologies via parent company owned by Ted Sagi.
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.
t’s like Tor but a decentralized one.
…so is Tor?
Sorry, you are right. But what I meant was it is very hard to deanonymize and monitor users of NymVPN. Tor network can be however monitored by NSA although chances are small that you will be deanonymized. And unlike Tor, NymVPN can offer 5 relays, which makes the chances that nodes can collaborate to deanonymize you to almost zero. Correct me if I’m wrong.
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.
Not your problem.
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.
The main difference I see between the two is that Mullvad no longer offers port forwarding services and ProtonVPn does offer port forwarding services.
This can make a big difference based on your use-case scenarios. If you are gaming and need port forwarding or are torrenting and need port forwarding Protonvpn is the better choice.
PIA is also a good option if port forwarding is important to you.
I use PIA and it’s cheaper than both of the other options.
You won’t fit in with the losers on these forums, but you’re probably better off for it.
Heads up PIA got acquired by an ad company a bit ago
When was that, apparently I missed that. Apparently a few people know about it because at least 3 people downvoted for it haha.
When was that, apparently I missed that.
A quick search says November 2019.
An ad company owned by an Israeli billionaire.
They still don’t have any history of providing logs to LE because they don’t keep logs.
What do the downvoters recommend if port forwarding is important?
I’ve been using them for years, it’s been good for all of my uses. Their prices are cheaper than what I see from other companies. I haven’t used their dedicated IP service yet, but if it is as decent as the rest of their services it should be good.
“On 29 May 2023, Mullvad announced that they would be removing support for port forwarding, effective on 1 July 2023.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mullvad
https://mullvad.net/en/blog/removing-the-support-for-forwarded-ports
I use Mullvad and game. Split tunneling lets you bypass the VPN to game. Port forwarding is useful for torrenting. Probably a few other things too.
