Is there any reason NOT to switch to ProtonVPN from Mullvad?
Use cases: privacy, torrenting without getting a DMCA letter.
OSs: Linux, Mac.
I know there was a reason I didn’t pick up Proton years ago when PIA got bought by Kape but I don’t remember what it was. I’d read something on /r/VPNTorrents but that place has since been banned so I can’t refer to it again.
I switched from Proton to Mullvad and I would highly recommend switching in that direction, not vice versa. Proton was unreliable for me for starters. And Mullvad requires no personal info—not even an email address—and you can pay in cash. Mullvad “just works” for me, whereas I had connectivity issues with Proton semi-regularly. You may also have more privacy/political concerns with Proton e.g. them handing over a French climate activist to the police, or some people take issue with the CEO’s comments on Trump. Mullvad has no such incidents like the former, and I’m not aware of Mullvad involving itself in politics beyond privacy politics.
But for piracy specifically, you may want port forwarding. I’ve heard AirVPN recommended for that reason, so if you’re looking to switch, you might want to look into that instead of Mullvad.
I have both and I use both.
The big benefit from mullvad is that you can get anonymous much easier, it’s easier to ditch an account and it’s harder for you to screw it up. People get mad about proton turning over metadata to authorities or suspending account access but they’re required to do that by law if they can identify the accounts. The structure of what proton offers requires that they have some way of verifying who a user is, so if you’re okay with being able to be identified if someone really tries (or doesn’t really try that hard if you give them payment information or something) then proton is fine for you.
Air is a good cheap vpn for piracy. If you wanna take the maybe smarter route of using separate services for your own privacy and for piracy that’s what I’d do.
Recently I tried Mullvad, proton and Windscribe. For all I created anonymous accounts and paid by crypto. Proton VPNs speeds are consistently higher.
Proton is way better for our use cases since it offers Port forwarding which Mullvad stopped supporting.
Mullvad has good marketing that’s why people think it’s more secure, in reality, both are almost the same in terms of privacy and security for your average joe.
I’ve been using ProtonVPN with port forwarding for quite a while now specifically on Linux by downloading Wireguard config and running it via terminal. Works great for my purposes.
