One of these publishes who owns it, opens its source, and has been examined every year for five years. The other is better at getting a television to play something. That is a blunt summary and it holds up.
Five years of inspections against one day
Proton VPN's servers have been inspected by outside auditors five years running, most recently in June 2026. CyberGhost's Deloitte report is limited assurance covering the servers as they stood on 31 October 2025 — one date rather than a period, which tells you the state of things on the day somebody looked.
CyberGhost has also been owned by Kape Technologies since 2017 and its site never says so, while Kape sells two other VPNs as independent brands. Proton VPN is owned by Proton AG in Geneva and says as much. Switzerland and Romania both sit outside the intelligence-sharing agreements, so jurisdiction does not separate these two.
Proton's clients are open source, so the behaviour of the software can be checked by somebody who does not work there. CyberGhost's are not.
Watching television against reading the source
CyberGhost is built around streaming: servers chosen for particular services, a Smart DNS for devices that cannot run an app, and IPv6 protection. Proton VPN does not sell streaming servers, and if a television is the device you care about, CyberGhost does that job more directly.
Proton answers with port forwarding, which CyberGhost lacks, multi-hop, which it also lacks, obfuscation for filtered networks, which it has none of, and a free plan with no data cap and no expiry date. Proton is slow to start loading a page, which is its real weakness and shows on calls. CyberGhost is not notably quick either: its speed has not been measured on the bench used for most entries here, and the independent figure that does exist puts it around the middle of the field rather than ahead of it.
Which should you choose?
Choose Proton VPN if you want a company whose ownership, source code and audit history are all things you can check, and you can live with a slower first load. Choose CyberGhost if streaming to a television is the actual job and the ownership question does not trouble you.
Proton's free tier settles the speed question without a refund request, so try it before deciding the slowness is disqualifying.
Proton VPN
A free tier with no data cap, no expiry and no card required.
CyberGhost
Long terms, a Deloitte report, and a parent company it never mentions.
Specs
Ratings
Speed
Not measured on the bench used for most entries here; AllAboutCookies recorded an 18% average loss across four regions in January 2026, which ranks it alongside the middle of the field
Privacy
Ease of use
Value
Features
Pricing
Proton VPN
CyberGhost
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