6 ms·

any competent opinions on protonvpn vs mullvad vpn?

salad-tycoon 3y ago
There is a pretty heavy bias against proton anything here, imo. They are seen as a marketing company is my interpretation of the sentiment.
- sdfzguf 3y ago
  If you experience something, it's already subjective. No need for the "imo" -escape. Same goes for sentiment. The sentiment is already what you observed, no need to further interprete that. Just share what you see. This is overly careful to a point where it almost lacks any content. Edit: To make this constructive, you could add why people think so and share a related link or something.
- stOneskull 3y ago
  they're a bit lazy on their linux software. you have to a little hacking for the vpn to work nicely, like just having a systray icon.
buzzy_hacker 3y ago
I think those two are the most reputable VPNs. I’ve used ProtonVPN for years just since I wasn’t aware of Mullvad at the time and can’t be bothered to switch. I believe ProtonVPN hasn’t had infrastructure audits, which Mullvad has had.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
sotix 3y ago
Both are fine for vpn performance. However, Mullvad has won me over with their business practices. Mullvad accepts my payment for a month of use at a time, and I manually renew it (after I receive a reminder) each month. If I don’t need a vpn the following month, I don’t pay for another month. I also find Mullvad works a bit better on Linux too. I just got hit with a 2 year auto renewal charge from proton for my old proton account (email, storage, vpn) for roughly $200 with no email reminder. I thought I had cancelled the auto renewal, but I apparently hadn’t. When I went to cancel it after receiving the charge, the process was full of dark patterns and offers to continue my service, ending with the inability downgrade because it required me to manually delete emails for 30 minutes to free up storage to downgrade to the free account. It feels like proton has shifted their focus to metrics and profit growth over user experience while Mullvad simply provides a great product with no trickery.
- protonmail 3y ago
  Please note that Proton subscriptions are automatically renewed, as well as that if you are using multiple services under the same Proton account, the access to all of them will be suspended if an invoice has not been cleared for longer than 14 days: https://proton.me/support/delinquency https://proton.me/support/delinquency. We cannot downgrade a subscription for you automatically, as only you can choose what data should be removed from your Proton account - it is impossible to downgrade the account to a Free subscription if it exceeds the limits of the Free subscription. However, as soon as you downgrade the account yourself and cancel the subscription, we will automatically refund you for the unused time. The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team: https://proton.me/support/contact https://proton.me/support/contact.
  - sotix 3y ago
    This entire situation would have been avoided if you had sent me an an email saying, “Hey, we wanted to let you know that you are subscribed to an auto renewing plan that is set to charge your payment on file in two weeks.” Instead you have taken my money, and I have to spend my free time asking for it back. > We cannot downgrade a subscription for you automatically, as only you can choose what data should be removed from your Proton account - it is impossible to downgrade the account to a Free subscription if it exceeds the limits of the Free subscription. Add a button to delete all data in my account that appears when you tell me you can’t downgrade. > The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team What is a proton credit? You chose to issue an unauthorized payment on my card in USD. To summarize my experience, in order to cancel a subscription at the end of its period, one must: - Set a reminder to cancel the subscription potentially years out because they cannot disable auto renew Failing to cancel before being charged without a warning email, they must: - Discover how to manually delete all of their files across various proton services to get their storage below a free tier threshold - Email support to ask that their refund issued in proton credits be converted into their payment currency - Respond to support’s email asking if they are sure they want a refund
thenews 3y ago
mullvad if you want good support and good linux/mac/windows client, proton has a shitty linux client, they support dynamic port forwarding in their windows client
hammock 3y ago
Mullvad is THE ONLY mainstream VPN that doesn't have seriously questionable credibility. Proton VPN is very questionable - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN. But the trail is a rabbithole, and you might not be personally satisfied with the standard of evidence. Here is a start for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 And since the link to [2] in what I linked above is broken, here is the archived version: https://archive.is/iZ2l2 https://archive.is/iZ2l2
- bscphil 3y ago
  I don't find this credible whatsoever, and I think you should stop making this claim. The only piece of evidence in your linked comment is the now defunct blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn-protonmail-protonvpn/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.c... In addition to reading like it was written by an angry 12 year old, it makes some enormous logical leaps. The facts given are that Proton has an official legal entity in Lithuania called PROTONVPN LT, UAB, and another company called Tesonet shared Lithuanian offices and apparently some business services with them. The article claims that Tesonet is a "data mining company" based on the following evidence: > Tesonet has its hands in “Machine Learning Solution, cybersecurity, and collection of business intelligence data” in efforts to create algorithms, that best suit their client business needs. If you read their about page, the company openly states it employs many different technologies to structure data, which is run on various services like MySQL, Anisble, collectd, StatsD, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Influx DB, Python, and Couchbase. > ALL of these names rely on HEAVY USER INFORMATION, which makes sense, considering that Tesonet is a DATA MINING company. Now, let us not forget that Lithuania itself is a NATO member that regularly holds NAZI marches. Let's just say that I'm not immediately convinced that Tesonet is in the business of selling user data. The article also claims that in one online Lithuanian business services directory, the CEO of Tesonet was listed as the head of PROTONVPN LT, UAB. I have no idea of the legitimacy of this claim, but it stretches plausibility to claim that Proton is secretly not a Swiss company and secretly has a Lithuanian data mining company CEO as its head. The article then goes on to make some completely unsupported allegations: "the real question is not whether ProtonVPN is working with Tesonet, but if the provider is owned by the data mining company" and "Under the name of a FREE VPN service, they’ve been collecting USER DATA all along." Furthermore, the original source of most of this information actually comes from a Hacker News comment. The article links to a comment by the head of Private Internet Access! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 Unfortunately this gives the game away, because the comment is "retracted and removed by author's request". Dang comments: > In addition to the redacting the above comment, we deleted several comments below by request of their authors. My understanding is that the dispute has been resolved and that the allegations are retracted. In other words, it appears to me that the true source of these rumors has retracted them and no longer believes that Proton has the claimed ties to Tesonet. Ironically, as a result of looking into this, I feel slightly more confident about ProtonVPN than I did previously. Edited to add: you're also stretching even the blog post's unsupported allegations in your comment, when you say that ProtonVPN is "white-labeled" Nord. The article makes the unsupported insinuation that ProtonVPN and Nord are both owned by Tesonet, but this is different from the claim that ProtonVPN is just Nord repackaged as a different product, as you claim here.

There is a pretty heavy bias against proton anything here, imo. They are seen as a marketing company is my interpretation of the sentiment.

sdfzguf 3y ago
If you experience something, it's already subjective. No need for the "imo" -escape. Same goes for sentiment. The sentiment is already what you observed, no need to further interprete that. Just share what you see. This is overly careful to a point where it almost lacks any content. Edit: To make this constructive, you could add why people think so and share a related link or something.
stOneskull 3y ago
they're a bit lazy on their linux software. you have to a little hacking for the vpn to work nicely, like just having a systray icon.

buzzy_hacker 3y ago

I think those two are the most reputable VPNs. I’ve used ProtonVPN for years just since I wasn’t aware of Mullvad at the time and can’t be bothered to switch. I believe ProtonVPN hasn’t had infrastructure audits, which Mullvad has had.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

sotix 3y ago

Both are fine for vpn performance. However, Mullvad has won me over with their business practices. Mullvad accepts my payment for a month of use at a time, and I manually renew it (after I receive a reminder) each month. If I don’t need a vpn the following month, I don’t pay for another month. I also find Mullvad works a bit better on Linux too. I just got hit with a 2 year auto renewal charge from proton for my old proton account (email, storage, vpn) for roughly $200 with no email reminder. I thought I had cancelled the auto renewal, but I apparently hadn’t. When I went to cancel it after receiving the charge, the process was full of dark patterns and offers to continue my service, ending with the inability downgrade because it required me to manually delete emails for 30 minutes to free up storage to downgrade to the free account. It feels like proton has shifted their focus to metrics and profit growth over user experience while Mullvad simply provides a great product with no trickery.

protonmail 3y ago
Please note that Proton subscriptions are automatically renewed, as well as that if you are using multiple services under the same Proton account, the access to all of them will be suspended if an invoice has not been cleared for longer than 14 days: https://proton.me/support/delinquency https://proton.me/support/delinquency. We cannot downgrade a subscription for you automatically, as only you can choose what data should be removed from your Proton account - it is impossible to downgrade the account to a Free subscription if it exceeds the limits of the Free subscription. However, as soon as you downgrade the account yourself and cancel the subscription, we will automatically refund you for the unused time. The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team: https://proton.me/support/contact https://proton.me/support/contact.
- sotix 3y ago
  This entire situation would have been avoided if you had sent me an an email saying, “Hey, we wanted to let you know that you are subscribed to an auto renewing plan that is set to charge your payment on file in two weeks.” Instead you have taken my money, and I have to spend my free time asking for it back. > We cannot downgrade a subscription for you automatically, as only you can choose what data should be removed from your Proton account - it is impossible to downgrade the account to a Free subscription if it exceeds the limits of the Free subscription. Add a button to delete all data in my account that appears when you tell me you can’t downgrade. > The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team What is a proton credit? You chose to issue an unauthorized payment on my card in USD. To summarize my experience, in order to cancel a subscription at the end of its period, one must: - Set a reminder to cancel the subscription potentially years out because they cannot disable auto renew Failing to cancel before being charged without a warning email, they must: - Discover how to manually delete all of their files across various proton services to get their storage below a free tier threshold - Email support to ask that their refund issued in proton credits be converted into their payment currency - Respond to support’s email asking if they are sure they want a refund

thenews 3y ago

mullvad if you want good support and good linux/mac/windows client, proton has a shitty linux client, they support dynamic port forwarding in their windows client

hammock 3y ago

Mullvad is THE ONLY mainstream VPN that doesn't have seriously questionable credibility. Proton VPN is very questionable - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN. But the trail is a rabbithole, and you might not be personally satisfied with the standard of evidence. Here is a start for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653 And since the link to [2] in what I linked above is broken, here is the archived version: https://archive.is/iZ2l2 https://archive.is/iZ2l2

bscphil 3y ago
I don't find this credible whatsoever, and I think you should stop making this claim. The only piece of evidence in your linked comment is the now defunct blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.com/tesonet-data-mining-company-owns-nordvpn-protonmail-protonvpn/ https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.c... In addition to reading like it was written by an angry 12 year old, it makes some enormous logical leaps. The facts given are that Proton has an official legal entity in Lithuania called PROTONVPN LT, UAB, and another company called Tesonet shared Lithuanian offices and apparently some business services with them. The article claims that Tesonet is a "data mining company" based on the following evidence: > Tesonet has its hands in “Machine Learning Solution, cybersecurity, and collection of business intelligence data” in efforts to create algorithms, that best suit their client business needs. If you read their about page, the company openly states it employs many different technologies to structure data, which is run on various services like MySQL, Anisble, collectd, StatsD, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Influx DB, Python, and Couchbase. > ALL of these names rely on HEAVY USER INFORMATION, which makes sense, considering that Tesonet is a DATA MINING company. Now, let us not forget that Lithuania itself is a NATO member that regularly holds NAZI marches. Let's just say that I'm not immediately convinced that Tesonet is in the business of selling user data. The article also claims that in one online Lithuanian business services directory, the CEO of Tesonet was listed as the head of PROTONVPN LT, UAB. I have no idea of the legitimacy of this claim, but it stretches plausibility to claim that Proton is secretly not a Swiss company and secretly has a Lithuanian data mining company CEO as its head. The article then goes on to make some completely unsupported allegations: "the real question is not whether ProtonVPN is working with Tesonet, but if the provider is owned by the data mining company" and "Under the name of a FREE VPN service, they’ve been collecting USER DATA all along." Furthermore, the original source of most of this information actually comes from a Hacker News comment. The article links to a comment by the head of Private Internet Access! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203 Unfortunately this gives the game away, because the comment is "retracted and removed by author's request". Dang comments: > In addition to the redacting the above comment, we deleted several comments below by request of their authors. My understanding is that the dispute has been resolved and that the allegations are retracted. In other words, it appears to me that the true source of these rumors has retracted them and no longer believes that Proton has the claimed ties to Tesonet. Ironically, as a result of looking into this, I feel slightly more confident about ProtonVPN than I did previously. Edited to add: you're also stretching even the blog post's unsupported allegations in your comment, when you say that ProtonVPN is "white-labeled" Nord. The article makes the unsupported insinuation that ProtonVPN and Nord are both owned by Tesonet, but this is different from the claim that ProtonVPN is just Nord repackaged as a different product, as you claim here.