Proton VPN vs Mullvad: Which Privacy VPN Is Worth Your Money?

Proton VPN and Mullvad are the two VPNs privacy enthusiasts actually argue about — and they argue about them because the choice is genuinely hard. Both are open-source, independently audited, and built by companies that treat your data as a liability rather than an asset. Neither one sells your browsing history, and neither one runs the discount-then-renewal pricing games the big consumer VPN brands are famous for.

The same ecosystem question applies to your vault: our Proton Pass vs Bitwarden comparison checks whether Proton Pass’s aliases and bundle pricing beat Bitwarden’s cheaper Premium plan and self-hosting.

The short answer: pick Proton VPN if you want one VPN that does everything well — streaming, 10 devices, a no-cost plan with no data cap, and servers in 140+ countries. Pick Mullvad if your top priority is leaving the smallest possible trace: no email at sign-up, cash payments, and a flat €5 a month with no renewal surprise, ever. The rest of this comparison is about which of those two profiles matches how you actually use the internet.

How I compared them

I checked both companies’ official pricing pages and Mullvad’s live server list before writing, and I treated third-party comparison pages with suspicion where they disagreed with those primary sources. That matters here more than usual: rival comparison sites currently disagree wildly on Proton VPN’s network size, quoting 8,600, 15,800, and 20,000+ servers in the same month. Proton VPN’s own pricing page — the number the company itself stands behind — says 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries, and that is the figure used in this article. Where I could not verify a claim on an official page, I say so rather than dressing it up as a test result.

Proton VPN vs Mullvad at a glance

Which VPN is cheaper, Proton VPN or Mullvad?

It depends on how you pay, and the honest answer is less obvious than the headline prices suggest. Mullvad charges a flat €5 per month — about $5.60 — whether you pay for one month, one year, or one decade, as its pricing page shows. There are no sales, no introductory rates, and no renewal jump; the price has not changed since the service launched in 2009, and cryptocurrency payments get a 10% discount. Proton VPN’s Plus plan costs $9.99 month to month, but drops to $3.49 a month on a two-year plan — cheaper than Mullvad per month, at the cost of a two-year commitment and a renewal price you should check before it bills.

Proton VPN also has something Mullvad deliberately refuses to offer: a no-cost plan with no data cap. It is limited to a smaller set of locations and leaves out the streaming servers and advanced features, but for basic private browsing it costs nothing, indefinitely. Mullvad’s answer to that is a 14-day money-back guarantee (cash payments excluded) versus Proton VPN’s 30 days. Verdict on price: Mullvad wins for anyone who hates subscriptions and renewal traps; Proton VPN wins for anyone willing to commit for two years or start at no cost.

Which VPN is more private, Proton VPN or Mullvad?

Both providers run open-source apps and RAM-based infrastructure thinking, and both have independent audits behind their no-logs claims. Proton VPN has now passed a fifth annual independent audit of its no-logs policy, and it publishes transparency reports on legal requests. Mullvad’s audits come from firms including Cure53 and Radically Open Security, and its no-logs policy survived the strongest possible real-world test: in April 2023, Swedish police arrived at Mullvad’s Gothenburg office with a search warrant for customer data and left without seizing anything, because there was nothing to seize.

The real difference is structural, not rhetorical. Mullvad never collects your email, so a breach or a legal order cannot expose an identity it never held — you are a random account number, and you can even pay with cash in an envelope. Proton VPN requires an email address, which means it holds at least one identifier tied to your account, though it is based in Switzerland, outside the intelligence-sharing alliances that include Sweden. If you want to read more about how Proton thinks about privacy across its products, our Proton Mail vs Tuta comparison covers the same philosophy on the email side. Verdict on privacy: Mullvad for the smallest possible footprint; Proton VPN for audited assurance in a stronger jurisdiction.

Proton VPN vs Mullvad: which has more servers?

Proton VPN, by an order of magnitude. Its pricing page lists 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries, which means you are far more likely to find a fast, nearby server wherever you travel — including in regions where Mullvad has no presence at all. Mullvad’s own live server page showed 542 servers online at my last check, spread across about 50 countries, concentrated in Europe and North America.

That gap matters less than it looks for everyday browsing in the US or Europe, where both networks are dense. It matters a lot if you travel widely, need a server in a specific smaller country, or rely on streaming catalogs tied to particular regions. Mullvad compensates with ownership: many of its servers are owned rather than rented, which is a genuine privacy advantage, but ownership does not close a 20,000-to-540 gap in coverage. Verdict on servers: Proton VPN, decisively, for coverage; Mullvad is fine if your countries are on its list.

Which is better for streaming?

Proton VPN. Streaming is a headline feature of its paid plans, with servers tuned for major services and a VPN Accelerator feature designed to keep speeds up over long distances. Mullvad is upfront that streaming is not its design goal, and in practice unblocking is hit or miss: a service may work on one server and fail on the next, and there is no support channel that will help you find a working one. If your VPN has to unblock video, buy Proton VPN and do not look back.

Which is better for torrenting?

This one flips on a single feature. Proton VPN’s paid plans still offer port forwarding, which matters if you run a torrent client or a home server that needs an incoming connection. Mullvad removed port forwarding in July 2023 after abuse got its IP addresses blacklisted and hosting providers cancelled its services — a principled decision that makes it a poor fit for that one job. Both services permit torrenting on their networks, but for seeding and remote access, Proton VPN is the practical choice. For everything else in this category, Mullvad’s always-on kill switch and Lockdown mode — which keeps your device offline even after you deliberately disconnect — are the stronger safety net.

What about DAITA and Secure Core?

Each provider has one advanced feature the other cannot match, and each tells you who the product is really for. Mullvad’s DAITA (Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis), developed with Karlstad University, pads every packet to a constant size and injects dummy traffic so that AI systems cannot fingerprint which sites you visit from encrypted traffic patterns alone. It costs speed and battery life, and it only runs on select servers, but nothing else in this price range offers it. Proton VPN’s Secure Core routes your traffic through two servers — for example, through Switzerland or Iceland first — so that even a compromised exit server cannot see your real IP address. If you are comparing privacy browsers too, our Brave vs Firefox comparison uses the same kind of threat-model thinking. Verdict on advanced features: DAITA for traffic-analysis defense, Secure Core for server-compromise defense — pick the threat you actually worry about.

Which app is easier to use?

Proton VPN feels like a mainstream product: polished apps, guided setup, preset profiles for streaming and torrenting, and extras like NetShield ad-blocking built in. Mullvad feels deliberately sparse — a clean, fast app with the essentials and little else, plus a browser built with the Tor Project for fingerprint resistance and DNS content blockers for ads, trackers, and malware. Mullvad’s support is email-only, which fits its no-tracking philosophy but frustrates anyone who wants instant help. If you want a VPN you never have to think about, Proton VPN is the easier daily driver; if you prefer a tool that stays out of your way and never nudges you, Mullvad’s minimalism is a feature, not a flaw.

The verdict: who should pick which?

Pick Proton VPN if: you stream video, you have more than 5 devices, you want a no-cost starting point, you travel to countries outside Mullvad’s 50, or you need port forwarding. You get the bigger network, the longer refund window, and the more polished apps — and the two-year price undercuts Mullvad.

Pick Mullvad if: you want the smallest possible data trail, you will pay cash or Monero, you hate renewal pricing games, or traffic-analysis defense matters to you. You give up streaming reliability and 90 countries of coverage, and you pay the same €5 forever — which, for a privacy tool, is arguably the most honest price in the industry.

If you are building a full privacy setup rather than buying one tool, pair your choice with an ad blocker that survives the browser extension crackdown — see our AdGuard vs uBlock Origin comparison — and a messenger that matches your threat model For the storage piece of that setup, our Proton Drive vs Google Drive comparison weighs encrypted storage against Google’s collaboration tools. in our Signal vs WhatsApp comparison. Either VPN here is a defensible choice; the wrong choice is picking on price alone and discovering later that the features you needed were the ones your pick deliberately left out.

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