Surfshark vs Proton VPN

Surfshark is the cheaper of these and covers more devices. Proton VPN is the one that behaves the way a privacy tool is supposed to behave when something goes wrong. Which matters more depends on whether you are protecting a household or protecting yourself.

Amsterdam and Geneva are not the same address

Surfshark is registered in the Netherlands, which is inside the fourteen-country intelligence-sharing agreement. Proton VPN is in Switzerland, which is in none of them. Jurisdiction is not the whole picture and a company can behave well in a bad one, but it sets what a government can compel without the company's cooperation, and it is the sort of thing worth deciding on before you need it.

Both have been audited recently. Proton's servers have been inspected five years running, most recently in June 2026; Surfshark's were assessed by Deloitte in June 2025 with a separate network test that December.

The features that are missing rather than weak

Surfshark's kill switch allowed traffic through after a restart under testing. A kill switch that fails is worse than none, because you stop watching for the thing it was supposed to catch. Surfshark also does not support IPv6, and the guidance is to disable IPv6 on your network rather than have the VPN handle it.

Proton VPN's kill switch works, its clients are open source so the behaviour can be checked by somebody outside the company, and it offers port forwarding, which Surfshark lacks. Proton's free plan carries no data cap and no expiry, so you can find out how it performs before paying.

Surfshark's real advantages are unlimited simultaneous devices, ad blocking and multi-hop. Proton is also slow to start loading a page, which shows on video calls, and Surfshark is not.

Which should you choose?

Choose Proton VPN if you want the protective features to hold, if you want software an outsider can audit, or if port forwarding is on your list. Pick Surfshark if you need to cover more devices than a per-seat product allows and you will verify the kill switch after a reboot yourself.

Test Proton's free tier first either way. It costs nothing, it does not expire, and the speed question is one you can settle in an evening rather than argue about.