Proton VPN vs Mullvad: Price, Speed and Privacy Compared

Proton VPN and Mullvad are both audited, no-logs VPNs built for privacy rather than Netflix-unblocking marketing, but they differ sharply on price structure, server network size and how anonymous you can stay while paying. Proton VPN costs $3.49–$7.99 a month on its discounted two-year plan and runs 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries; Mullvad charges a flat €5 a month no matter what, runs about 566 servers in 50 countries, and lets you sign up with no email at all using a numbered account. Mullvad has also just finished retiring OpenVPN entirely in favor of WireGuard-only connections. Here is what the two companies' own pricing, protocol and audit pages say, side by side.

Proton VPN vs Mullvad: The Short Answer

Both companies publish their no-logs claims and third-party audit results on their own sites, and neither requires you to hand over real-world identity to use the service. The split comes down to scale versus anonymity-by-design:

• Proton VPN is the bigger network: 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries on paid plans, plus a genuinely usable free tier, four protocol options, and apps for TVs and streaming boxes.
• Mullvad is the more radically private sign-up: no email or username ever required, a flat price regardless of term length, a 10% discount for paying in cryptocurrency, and a smaller but WireGuard-only network it has run since pioneering WireGuard support in 2017.

If you're still getting familiar with the basics, our explainer on what a VPN actually does and whether you need one covers that groundwork; both Proton VPN and Mullvad do that core job, so the rest of this comparison is about which trade-offs fit you.

Pricing: Flat Rate vs Tiered Discounts

Mullvad's pricing is deliberately boring: it is €5 per month, flat, whether you pay monthly or prepay a year, and whether you've been a customer for a week or a decade. There are no tiers, no feature gates and no "renews at a higher price" catch — the only discount is a flat 10% off if you pay with cryptocurrency, including Monero, which Mullvad has accepted since May 2022.

Proton VPN uses a conventional multi-tier, multi-term structure instead:

• Proton Free — $0/month, 1 device, servers in 10 countries.
• VPN Plus — $3.49/month on the 2-year plan (billed $83.76 for the first 24 months, renewing at $83.88/year after), 10 devices, full 20,000+ server network.
• Proton Unlimited — $7.99/month on the 2-year plan (billed $191.76 for the first 24 months, renewing at $119.88/year after), which bundles VPN Plus with Proton Mail, Drive, Calendar and Pass.

Proton's shorter 1-month and 1-year terms are offered too, at higher monthly rates than the 2-year price shown above; check Proton's own pricing page for the exact current short-term figures before you buy, since discount percentages shown on promotional banners change from visit to visit.

In practice this means Mullvad is usually the cheaper option for a single device on a short commitment, while Proton VPN's 2-year VPN Plus rate undercuts Mullvad's flat fee per month but asks you to prepay two years upfront to get there. Neither company runs lifetime deals or hidden renewal price hikes beyond what's listed on their own pricing pages, which is worth checking given how common bait-and-switch renewal pricing is elsewhere in the VPN industry.

Servers, Countries and Protocol Speed

Proton VPN's network is simply much larger on paper: 20,000+ servers across 140+ countries for paid subscribers. Mullvad's own server list page currently counts 566 servers in 50 countries and 91 cities. Neither company publishes independent, apples-to-apples speed benchmarks on their own sites, and this article does not run or cite hands-on speed tests — both services default to the WireGuard protocol, which both describe as a lightweight, modern tunnel designed to be faster than older protocols like OpenVPN.

A bigger server count generally means more nearby server choices and less crowding per server, which matters more for everyday speed than raw protocol choice. If having many location options (or getting into the 10 free countries) matters to you, Proton's network is the larger one.

Protocols: WireGuard, OpenVPN and Stealth

This is one of the sharpest recent differences between the two services. Proton VPN's protocol page lists four options: OpenVPN (UDP or TCP, AES-256 with RSA-4096 key exchange), WireGuard (lightweight, uses the ChaCha20 cipher), Stealth (Proton's own proprietary protocol built to disguise VPN traffic and get past censorship/VPN blocks, available even on the free plan), and a "Smart Protocol" auto-selection mode that picks whichever of the above works best on your network.

Mullvad has gone the opposite direction: it removed the ability to select OpenVPN in its desktop app starting with version 2025.14 in December 2025, and took its remaining OpenVPN servers offline entirely by January 15, 2026. Mullvad's own blog post framed this as the conclusion of a WireGuard-first strategy it has pursued since 2017, with any existing OpenVPN configurations automatically switched over to WireGuard with no action needed from most users. For networks that block plain WireGuard, Mullvad now offers UDP-over-TCP on port 443 and Shadowsocks as obfuscation layers instead of keeping a second full protocol around.

Practically: if you need OpenVPN specifically (some older routers or corporate firewalls expect it), Proton VPN still offers it; Mullvad no longer does.

Privacy, No-Logs Policies and Independent Audits

Both companies back their no-logs claims with outside audits rather than asking you to just trust a privacy-policy page, which is the baseline privacy-conscious users should look for in any anonymity tool.

Proton VPN's "No logs, no ads, open source and independently audited" claim is backed by annual audits from the European security firm Securitum; Proton's own blog states 2026 was the fifth consecutive year of this audit (2022–2026), and the latest report found no evidence of logging of users' browsing activity, DNS queries, destination services or traffic contents on the servers Securitum examined, and no persistent records tying a specific user to activity on a reviewed server.

Mullvad publishes a steadier stream of narrower, more frequent third-party audits rather than one annual report. Its own audit-tag blog archive lists, among others: a VPN infrastructure audit by Cure53 (June 2024, the fourth such infrastructure audit), a full desktop app audit (December 2024), an Android app MASA assessment by NCC Group (March 2025), a web-app security assessment by Assured (October 2025, with no critical, high or medium-severity issues found), a white-box audit of its account and payment API by X41 D-Sec (January 2026), an audit of its GotaTun WireGuard implementation by Assured Security Consultants (March 2026), and a second Android MASA pass by Leviathan Security Group (June 2026). Mullvad also states it keeps only an account number and expiry date on file — no browsing logs, DNS requests, timestamps, IP addresses or bandwidth totals — and that support emails are permanently deleted 70 days after being sent.

Payment Privacy: Cash, Crypto and Anonymous Sign-Up

This is where Mullvad is structurally more private. Mullvad never asks for an email address, username or password — your account is just a randomly generated number, and you can fund it with cash mailed to their office or with cryptocurrency (Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash or Monero), the last of which also gets you a 10% discount. According to Mullvad's own 2022 announcement, the company runs its own Monero wallet and node rather than outsourcing that to a third-party payment processor, and Monero payments are excluded from refunds and account recovery because they leave no identifying trail Mullvad can match back to a purchase.

Proton VPN requires an account (and therefore typically an email address) and accepts card payments, PayPal, or Proton credits, which can themselves be purchased with cash, bank transfer or Bitcoin. That gives Proton a path to pay without a card, but the account layer itself isn't anonymous by default the way Mullvad's numbered-account system is.

Platform and App Support

Proton VPN covers more ground: native apps for Windows, macOS, Linux and ChromeOS, mobile apps for Android and iOS/iPadOS, browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and dedicated apps for Android TV, Apple TV and Fire TV Stick. Mullvad's official download page lists Windows, macOS, Linux, Android and iOS — no smart TV or streaming-stick app, and no browser extension listed alongside the main apps.

If you want to run the VPN on a streaming box or router out of the box, Proton VPN's broader platform list makes that easier. If you only need desktop and phone coverage, both cover the essentials, and our three-way comparison of ExpressVPN, Surfshark and Proton VPN has more detail on how Proton's own app set stacks up against other mainstream providers.

Which One Should You Choose?

Choose Mullvad if: you want the simplest possible privacy story (no email ever, flat pricing, cash/Monero payment), you're comfortable with a WireGuard-only, roughly 50-country server list, and you don't need TV-app support.

Choose Proton VPN if: you want a much bigger server network for better location choice and nearby-server speed, you want OpenVPN or the censorship-resistant Stealth protocol as options, you want a genuinely free tier to try first, or you'd like to bundle your VPN with Proton's encrypted email, drive and calendar apps under Proton Unlimited.

Both are reasonable choices if your main worry is a VPN provider's own logging — the real differentiator is how much you value network size and protocol flexibility versus a radically anonymous sign-up and flat pricing.

What's Next

If your main goal with either provider is maximum traffic protection rather than just hiding your IP from one site, it's worth checking that whichever app you pick has a working kill switch so a dropped connection doesn't leak your real IP before the tunnel reconnects. Pricing, server counts and protocol support on both sides can change, so always check protonvpn.com and mullvad.net directly before subscribing.

Written bySana Qureshi

Sana Qureshi runs the security and privacy desk. She reports on actively exploited vulnerabilities, vendor patches and data breaches, and covers the password managers, VPNs and authentication tools readers use to protect themselves. Her alerts cite vendor advisories, CISA and the CVE record directly.

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