ProtonVPN vs Mullvad: Privacy VPN Compared

ProtonVPN vs Mullvad

Both are among the small number of consumer VPNs worth recommending, and they optimise for different things. Mullvad optimises for anonymity from its own service; Proton VPN optimises for capability and accessibility.

Account Model, The Sharpest Difference

Mullvad issues a random account number and asks for nothing else. No email address, no username, no password. You can pay by card, by cryptocurrency, or by posting cash with the account number written on a note, and the service holds no identity to correlate with your traffic even in principle. This is the strongest account design in the industry and it is the main reason to choose Mullvad.

Proton VPN uses a Proton account, which can be created with minimal information but is the same identity as your Proton Mail if you have one. Convenient, and a link that Mullvad's model does not create.

Pricing

Mullvad charges one flat monthly rate with no tiers, no annual discount and no upsell, which is an unusual and deliberate stance: no pressure to lock in, no cheaper price for a longer commitment. Proton VPN offers tiers including a genuinely usable free plan with unlimited data on a limited set of countries, which is the only free VPN worth using, because it is funded by paid subscriptions rather than by monetising free users' traffic.

Technology

Both run RAM-only or diskless servers, publish open-source clients, and commission independent audits. Mullvad has developed a defence against traffic-analysis attacks that adds cover traffic and padding to obscure packet timing and size patterns, which addresses a threat most providers ignore entirely. It also collaborated with the Tor Project to produce a hardened browser applying Tor Browser's fingerprinting resistance to ordinary connections.

Proton VPN offers multi-hop routing through hardened entry servers in privacy-friendly jurisdictions before exiting elsewhere, a protocol designed to disguise VPN traffic as ordinary encrypted web traffic for use in censored networks, per-application routing, and Tor-over-VPN exit nodes. Its feature set is broader.

Practical Differences

Mullvad removed port forwarding, which matters if you seed or self-host through the tunnel; Proton VPN retains it on paid plans. Proton has more servers and countries. Mullvad's client is deliberately spare. Proton's ecosystem bundling means one subscription can cover mail, storage, password management and VPN, which is convenient and also concentrates several services with one provider.

Jurisdiction

Mullvad is Swedish and Proton is Swiss. Both are within legal systems that impose process requirements, and neither is offshore. Mullvad's premises have been searched by police, and the search produced nothing because there was nothing to produce, which is exactly the demonstration you want. Treat jurisdiction as secondary to architecture in both cases.

Choosing

Take Mullvad if anonymity from the provider itself is the point, if you want the simplest possible relationship, or if traffic-analysis resistance matters to you. Take Proton VPN if you need a free tier, censorship circumvention, multi-hop, port forwarding, or want one account across several privacy tools. Both are honest operators, which is the harder thing to find, and either beats the heavily-marketed alternatives on the structural measures that count.