Proton VPN vs IVPN

These two are unusual in the same direction: both publish open-source clients, both refuse the upsell tactics the category runs on, and both would rather explain a limitation than hide it. Choosing between them comes down to which kind of evidence you weigh more.

An audit habit against an account that does not exist

Outside auditors have inspected Proton VPN's servers five years running, most recently June 2026. That is the most consistent inspection record on this site.

IVPN's is not comparable. Cure53's May 2025 audit covered the email and DNS side services; the VPN gateways were last examined in February 2023, and the no-logs claim itself was last looked at by an outside firm in 2019. What IVPN offers instead is structural: an account is a random number with no email address and no password, it takes cash, and every client is open source.

Gibraltar is an odd jurisdiction to reason about. It is inside the five-country arrangement through Britain, but has no interception law and no intelligence service of its own. Proton VPN sits in Geneva, outside every agreement, which is the simpler answer.

What each one includes without charging extra

IVPN puts multi-hop on its cheapest plan and never raises the price at renewal, and it sells by the week if you want a VPN for a trip rather than a year. It has no port forwarding on any plan, caps the entry plan at five devices, has no Apple TV app, and its Android build does not run on Amazon's fork of Android.

Proton VPN includes port forwarding, allows ten devices, and has a free plan with no data cap and no expiry, so you can test it without paying. Its weakness is speed: it is the slowest service measured here to start loading a page, and on calls that shows.

Which should you choose?

Choose Proton VPN if a current, repeated audit is the thing you are buying, or if you want port forwarding, more devices, or a free tier to try first. Choose IVPN if signing up without an identity matters more than audit currency, or if a weekly plan suits how you actually travel.

If you want both the anonymous signup and the recent evidence, Mullvad has the stronger audit record of the two anonymous options here.