Acceptable

Proton VPN

Commercial VPNSwitzerlandRank 1 of 68

Paying monthly

$9.99 per month

Paying yearly

$53.88 billed once a year

Coverage

147 countries with an exit

Free tier

Yes limited free plan

70 out of 100

Security

78 out of 100

Usability

Visit site

Offered countries that sit under a logging mandateC09_mandate_countries

United Arab Emirates Belarus India Iraq Kazakhstan Russia Turkey Vietnam

Country of the ultimate beneficial ownerM11_owner_jurisdiction

Owner group cluster keyM15_owner_group

independent

Date the current owner took controlM16_control_since

2024-06

Role of this brand inside the groupM17_brand_role

principal

Infrastructure shared with cluster siblingsM18_shared_infrastructure

separate

Total published auditsV10_audit_count

Service class

Commercial VPN — security leads

Security score

70 of 100 · Acceptable

Usability score

78 of 100 · state known · 83% established · 88.2% of the weight read

Legal entity

Proton AG, Plan-les-Ouates, Geneva, Switzerland

Jurisdiction

Switzerland

Ultimate owner

Proton Foundation (Swiss non-profit, controlling shareholder since 06/2024); employees; FONGIT

Exposure

Medium · dominant channel: hygiene

Retention

Nothing that links traffic to a person

Latest audit

Securitum (Martin Matyja, Maciej Szymczak) · 27 May 2026 · An annual series · Yes, on the provider's word

Countries with exits

147

Protocols

WireGuard OpenVPN IKEv2 An obfuscated protocol

Works under active censorship

Claimed to work

Weakest protocol still offered

not applicable

Own DNS inside the tunnel

Yes, on the provider's word

Platforms

Android Android TV Apple TV Browser extension Fire TV iOS Linux macOS Windows

Simultaneous devices

Kill switch

On every platform

Split tunnelling

Available

Signing up

An email address only

Free tier

A free tier with limits

P2P allowed

unknown

Major streaming services reachable

unknown

Price, monthly

$9.99 per month

Price, yearly

$53.88 a year at renewal, billed once

Where the security score comes from

Eight channels, each asking one question of the published record and reading a named set of fields to answer it. They multiply rather than add — the factor beside a channel is what is left after the pressure it found, and open a channel to see every field it read, as it is stored. How the model works

Security fields

67 55 of them feed a channel

Established

58 6 left unknown, 3 not applicable

Completeness

89% the share the model could weigh

Citations

94 across 25 documents

Every value carries what it rests on, and the model weighs the four levels differently. Weight, then how many citations on this record sit at that level:

A weighs 1.00 · 7 hereB weighs 0.85 · 27 hereC weighs 0.70 · 57 hereD weighs 0.35 · 3 here

The weights are methodology.json’s own; a claim seen in the artefact itself counts for more than the same claim reported second-hand. The date at the end of a row is the day that value was last read.

A channel does not price every field it reads. The ones it did are marked along their edge and carry what they added; everything else was read and cost nothing. Only a channel that composes field by field can mark a field at all — the rest price themselves by the parameters printed above their rows.

Still open on this record.

What the audit actually checked. The no-logs finding is strong and narrow at once. Securitum inspected production servers in person in August 2025 and has done so annually since 2022.

The limits the report states itself. It is a point-in-time check, a guided review of systems demonstrated by Proton's engineers rather than an unsupervised forensic examination, and a representative sample rather than the whole fleet. CI/CD, source code and the account-management systems were explicitly out of scope, so nothing here speaks to what the billing side holds.

The appeal, and what it does not settle. The 22 October 2021 appeal is cited here with a caveat worth stating plainly: the Federal Administrative Court ruled that email services are not telecommunications providers, and neither the judgment coverage nor Proton's own account of it mentions the VPN.

the rest of what is open — 125 more words

What actually settles the two fields. What settles C10 and C11 is that Switzerland carries no mandate basis in the catalogue's own country list; the appeal corroborates how Swiss authorities treat Proton and is not by itself a finding about Proton VPN. A ruling on a sibling service is thinner ground than the citation makes it look.

The single largest open item. Proton offers exit locations in eight countries that impose a logging mandate. Whether hardware actually sits in any of them is not established: Proton withdrew physical servers from India in 2022 and documents Smart Routing for locations it serves from elsewhere, which points to virtual, but that was verified for India alone. Establishing C09b_mandate_hosting is the single largest open item on this record.

On the record as a whole.

The 2021 Swiss order that compelled prospective logging targeted Proton Mail, not the VPN, and is deliberately absent from P12: charging the VPN for a sibling product's order would be a fact about Proton AG, not about this service.

U08 is all_platforms because the support document gives enabling steps for Windows, macOS, Linux (GUI and CLI), Android and iOS/iPadOS — every platform with an app. The same document states two limitations that the value cannot carry and this note can: on macOS the real IP may be exposed briefly while switching servers, and on iOS some Apple service DNS requests can bypass the tunnel with the kill switch on.

U04b_price_yearly records the first-term charge on the 1-year VPN Plus plan: $53.88 for the first 12 months ($4.49/month), stated on the pricing page beside its own renewal line — "then renews at $83.88 every 12 months" ($6.99/month) — which is not the field's value.

HygieneWhat identifying material is collected in passing, and can the client be checked at all?12 fields read · 2 left unknown · 1 not applicable · 8.8 points of pressure×0.912

A capped sum — the one channel that adds: 0.088 of a possible 0.28, from the fields marked below.

RAM-only diskless serversC02_ram_only

no+0.040

Cprotonvpn.com12 Aug 2026

Report a problem with C02_ram_only

IP allocation modelC03_ip_sharing

shared

Cprotonvpn.com12 Aug 2026

Report a problem with C03_ip_sharing

Signup without emailC04_signup_no_email

yes_declared+0.005

Cprotonvpn.com12 Aug 2026

Report a problem with C04_signup_no_email

Anonymous payment optionsC05_payment_anonymous

cashcrypto_processor

Computed

×0.704 of a clean record completeness 89%

Where the drop comes from: Hygiene. It is the channel this record's risk is concentrated in — on its own it takes a clean record to ×0.912, and its bar above is filled to that.

Exposure is recorded as medium and the integrity status as clean.

This record sits above the register's average on all 8 channels. The narrowest margin is Disclosure, ×1.000 against ×0.970.

Published score

Every row above is one field of the published record, and every one of them can be challenged: every row carries Report, or raise something about the record as a whole. A correction with a source behind it is made the same day, and if it moves the score it moves the rank.

Specification

Carried, never scored

Countries with an exit

Compared with

What changed

If this one is not right

Proton VPN

Mullvad VPN

IVPN

AirVPN

Where the security score comes from