Proton VPN vs hide.me

Both of these let you stay protected indefinitely without paying, which puts them in a very small group. The free plans differ in a way that decides most of this comparison before the paid products are even considered.

Two free tiers, and one asks for nothing

hide.me's free plan takes no account, no email address and no card, and does not expire. That is the least friction of anything here, and it is why hide.me scores 5 for ease.

Proton VPN's free plan also has no data cap and no expiry, and covers one device across ten countries, but it does require an email address to sign up. If you want to be protected without registering at all, that difference is the answer.

Both are registered outside every intelligence-sharing agreement — Proton AG in Geneva, eVenture Limited in Labuan, Malaysia.

How recently each was examined

Proton VPN's servers have been inspected by outside auditors five years running, most recently June 2026. hide.me was examined by Securitum with a report dated 7 June 2024, which is past the two-year line this directory draws, and first checked by DefenseCode back in 2015.

Proton VPN's clients are open source, which is a continuous form of assurance hide.me does not offer, and whether hide.me's servers run without disks cannot be established either way.

What hide.me does well beyond the free tier is honesty about renewal: its published guarantee is that renewal matches the signup price and duration, where Proton VPN's advertised rate roughly doubles when the first term ends. hide.me also carries IPv6 inside the tunnel on every location rather than blocking it.

The catch is that hide.me's ad blocker, proxy, streaming and port forwarding are all paid-tier only. Proton VPN includes port forwarding and adds multi-hop, and is slower — it is the slowest service measured here to start loading a page, where hide.me is not.

Which should you choose?

Choose hide.me if you want protection without an account at all, or a renewal price guaranteed to match what you first paid. Choose Proton VPN if a current, repeated audit and open-source clients are what you are paying for, and you can live with the slower first load.

Both free tiers cost nothing and neither expires, so running both for a week settles this better than any argument here.