Proton VPN review

The short answer

Proton VPN comes from Proton AG, the Geneva company behind Proton Mail. On the public record it is one of the better-documented VPNs. An outside firm, Securitum, has checked its no-logs claim five years in a row. Its apps are open source. Since 2024 its largest voting shareholder has been a non-profit foundation. Its free plan is limited, but it has no data cap, which is rare.

Nobody at Tunnelcheck has tested Proton VPN. This review is based on Proton's own documents, the published audit reports and press coverage, all listed under Sources. Our methodology page explains what that kind of review can and can't tell you.

Who owns Proton VPN and where is it based?

Proton VPN is run by Proton AG, a Swiss company based in Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva. Proton says it was founded in 2014 by researchers who met at CERN, the European physics lab.

On June 17, 2024, Proton announced that its founder Andy Yen, co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu had given shares to the Proton Foundation, a Swiss non-profit with no shareholders. The foundation is now Proton's primary shareholder. Proton says it can block any change of control. For a privacy company, that matters: a sale to a data-hungry buyer would need the foundation's consent. Our VPN ownership page compares this with other providers.

Switzerland is outside the EU, and its surveillance laws are its own. Proton argues that Switzerland is both its legal home and where its headquarters, main data center and most staff are. It also points to an October 2021 ruling by the Swiss Federal Administrative Court that email companies are not telecom providers, which Proton says keeps it out of telecom data-retention duties.

Does Proton VPN keep logs? What the audits say

Proton says it keeps no logs of VPN activity. A no-logs audit is a check by an outside firm that a provider's servers aren't set up to record what users do. Proton has commissioned one from Securitum, a European security firm, every year from 2022 to 2026, and it links all five reports on its audit page.

According to Proton, Securitum spends several days on site each year. It reviews VPN and server configuration files, checks operating procedures and interviews staff. The checks cover whether user activity, DNS queries (the lookups that turn site names into addresses), session times or traffic contents are logged, and whether logging settings can change without a second person approving. Proton quotes the 2026 report as saying the evidence did not indicate that the examined servers log users' browsing.

Proton also says Securitum audited all of its apps for security and found no significant issues. The page we read doesn't give that audit's year, so we don't list it in the table below.

An audit is a snapshot of how the servers were set up while the auditor looked. It can't prove what happens on other days. Five years of checks by the same firm are stronger evidence than a single report, though. Our audit tracker explains the different audit types, and our guide to no-logs policies explains what the claim covers.

Security features and protocols

A protocol is the set of rules a VPN uses to build its encrypted tunnel. Proton names WireGuard and OpenVPN as its main protocols. It also offers Stealth, its own obfuscation protocol, which wraps WireGuard inside TLS, the encryption used by ordinary HTTPS sites, so the connection is harder to spot and block. See WireGuard vs OpenVPN for the differences.

• Kill switch in all apps. A kill switch blocks your internet if the VPN drops, so your real IP address isn't exposed. More in our kill switch guide.
• Secure Core, Proton's double-hop option. Traffic passes first through a server in Switzerland, Iceland or Sweden, then out through a second country.
• Open-source apps on every platform, which lets anyone inspect the code.
• Proton says it runs more than 20,000 servers in more than 140 countries.

Proton's track record: the 2021 Proton Mail case

We found no reported breach of Proton VPN's servers. The case people bring up involves Proton Mail. In 2021, Swiss authorities ordered Proton to log the IP address used to reach a French climate activist's email account, after a French police request passed through Europol. TechCrunch reported on September 6, 2021, that the IP address was given to French investigators.

Proton said it had to obey Swiss law. Its CEO said there was no legal basis under Swiss law for logging VPN users, and Proton's updated privacy policy said the logging duty did not extend to Proton VPN. Two lessons follow. First, a Swiss company still answers to Swiss courts. Second, the VPN and email services sit under different rules. Using a VPN or Tor would have shown investigators a server address instead of the user's own.

Streaming and torrenting with Proton VPN

Proton's pricing page lists streaming as a paid-plan feature and excludes it from the free plan. Watching another country's catalog usually breaks the streaming service's terms, and services block VPN addresses. What works one month can stop the next, so treat any VPN's streaming claims as unproven. Our guide to why streaming services block VPNs explains how this works.

For torrenting, Proton allows P2P only on paid plans and only on dedicated P2P servers. Connections from other servers are rejected for P2P traffic. Port forwarding, which can help a torrent client accept incoming connections, is on all paid plans for Windows and Linux, and in early access on macOS. It only works on P2P servers.

A VPN hides your torrent traffic from your internet provider. It doesn't make copyright infringement legal. Read is torrenting illegal? and our list of legal torrent sources before you start.

Apps and devices

Proton lists apps for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, Android TV, Apple TV, iOS and iPadOS, Chromebook, and browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox. Paid plans allow 10 devices at once. The free plan allows one.

What you get on the free plan

Proton Free costs nothing and needs no credit card. Its pricing page lists these limits:

• One device at a time.
• Servers in 10 countries, chosen for you at random.
• Medium speed, with no streaming, no P2P and no ad or malware blocker.
• No data limit and no artificial speed cap, according to Proton's FAQ.

Proton's business is paid subscriptions, which is how it pays for the free tier. That's a clearer model than many free VPNs, which our guide on whether free VPNs are safe looks at in detail.

Price and refund

On 2026-11-13, Proton's pricing page showed VPN Plus at $2.99 a month on the 1-year plan, billed $35.88 for the first 12 months and then $83.88 a year. The month-to-month price was $9.99. Proton Unlimited, which adds Mail, Drive, Pass and other apps, was $6.49 a month for the first year ($77.88), renewing at $119.88. The page also offers 2-year terms, CHF and EUR pricing and regional variation, so check the official pricing page before you buy.

Proton offers a 30-day money-back guarantee on all subscriptions. Our VPN prices page lists checked prices across providers.

Who Proton VPN suits, and who should look elsewhere

• Suits: people who want a long, public audit record, open-source apps and an owner structure built to resist a sale.
• Suits: anyone who wants a free VPN with no data cap for occasional use on one device.
• Look elsewhere: if you torrent on a free plan, or want a low price that stays low at renewal. Mullvad charges the same flat rate on every term.
• Look elsewhere: if you need a provider outside the reach of any court. No such provider exists, and the 2021 Mail case is a reminder.

Comparing the two most-audited privacy picks? See Proton VPN vs Mullvad and Proton VPN vs NordVPN.