Proton VPN review: the one to choose when you want to stop thinking about who owns your VPN

Ownership: the exception

Proton was founded in 2014 by scientists from CERN, first as Proton Mail. In June 2024 control of Proton AG passed to the Proton Foundation, a Swiss non-profit whose charter obliges it to hold a majority of voting shares in perpetuity and to use them in the interest of Proton’s mission. The foundation’s board includes founder Andy Yen and Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Every other ownership change in this market has moved a provider toward a conglomerate or a private-equity buyer; this is the one that moved the other way.

Proton runs a modest affiliate programme. It is not why the company appears at the top of this site’s privacy list; it is why it appears less often at the top of others’.

Jurisdiction and audits

Swiss company, Swiss servers for Secure Core, outside the Five, Nine and Fourteen Eyes. Switzerland’s surveillance law does not apply data retention obligations to VPN providers, a point Proton has litigated and won. All apps are open source and audited by Securitum, with the reports published in full — the standard against which this site measures other providers’ “audited” claims. Proton publishes transparency reports listing legal requests received and how it responded.

Protocols, network and features

WireGuard by default, OpenVPN and IKEv2 available, and Stealth — a WireGuard-over-TLS transport designed to look like ordinary web traffic, built for Iran and Russia. Alternative routing fetches server lists through disguised channels when the API is blocked. Around 12,000 IPs across 117 countries. Secure Core routes traffic through hardened servers in Switzerland, Iceland and Sweden before the exit, at a cost in speed. Port forwarding on P2P servers (Plus plan). NetShield DNS-level ad and tracker blocking. Tor over VPN. Ten devices. A permanent kill switch on desktop.

What it costs, honestly

The renewal is higher than the intro, following the industry pattern, but by a smaller multiple than most. The free tier is the tiebreaker: a real product that costs nothing, with no data cap and no ads. A 30-day money-back guarantee applies.

Streaming and censorship

On the Plus plan, user reports have Netflix (US, UK, Japan), BBC iPlayer, Disney+ and Prime Video working; Hulu is inconsistent. The free tier does not unblock streaming by design. In Iran and Russia, Proton is the provider that has treated availability as a mission, and its usage spikes during each shutdown are documented in its own reports. In China it works with Stealth, less consistently than ExpressVPN. India is served by a virtual location after the 2022 withdrawal, which Proton explained publicly. Proton was among the apps removed from the Indian App Store in 2025 for refusing to log.

The iPhone app

This month’s App Store analysis of 2,100 recent reviews places the app in the upper tier, with a positive 90-day sentiment trend — rarer than it should be in this category — and no billing flag. iOS integration and connection reliability are the main complaint themes. Full breakdown.

What we have not tested

Speed and leaks. Published tests put Proton’s WireGuard a little behind NordLynx and Lightway, with Secure Core slower by design. Our own tests are pending; the speed dimension is excluded from the score until they land.