NordVPN vs Proton VPN

NordVPN sells reassurance: six audits, a jurisdiction outside every intelligence-sharing agreement, and a feature list long enough that nothing is obviously missing. Proton VPN sells a different thing, which is that you can find out whether you like it before any money changes hands.

What you can use without paying anything

Proton VPN's free plan has no data limit and no expiry date, and it does not ask for a card. That is unusual enough to be the main reason to look at it: most free VPN tiers are trials wearing a different word, and this one is not. You get one device and ten countries, which is a real constraint rather than a hidden one.

NordVPN has no free tier. The advertised rate covers twenty-seven months and then renews at more than three times what you agreed to, so the cheap number you see is a number you pay once.

Apps you can read against apps you cannot

Proton VPN's clients are open source, so the claim that the software does what it says can be checked by somebody other than the company making it. Proton also offers port forwarding, which matters if you seed or self-host anything, and has been inspected by outside auditors five years running.

NordVPN's apps are closed, and it has no port forwarding at all. What it has instead is reach: obfuscation for networks that block VPNs, a route into Tor without a separate browser, multi-hop and a SOCKS5 proxy. Proton has obfuscation and multi-hop but neither of the other two.

The one place NordVPN clearly leads is responsiveness. Proton VPN is the slowest here to start loading a page, and on video calls that shows.

Which should you choose?

Choose Proton VPN if you want to try a VPN properly before paying for one, if you want clients somebody outside the company can audit, or if port forwarding is on your list. Choose NordVPN if you need to reach Tor or get through a network that actively blocks VPN traffic, and you are willing to pay a renewal price that is triple the joining price.

If the slow first load is what worries you about Proton and the renewal is what worries you about NordVPN, Mullvad avoids both and costs five euros a month at any term.