ProtonVPN Features and Speeds 2023

ProtonVPN, part of the Proton AG product line that includes ProtonMail, ProtonDrive and now ProtonCalendar, have some great-looking apps. They all look fantastic; the VPN client is the most pleasing to the eyes. Usability-wise, at first look, it seems very simple; all options are clearly indicated, easy to find and work well during some quick testing.

ProtonVPN doesn’t have as many servers as some, but it offers ten devices or ten simultaneous connections, as you would call it, meaning you can connect up to 10 devices simultaneously at the same time. Do speeds hold up, though? We will find out.

ProtonVPN Features:

Network Speeds:

For each location, we test 12 times over three different protocols, servers, and providers in the same region. Each test is an average based on those. We test over a 1Gbit line from within the UK on a reasonably powerful system. We report the fastest protocol in the chart below.

Tested using a 1 Gbps line:

ProtonVPN is a fast VPN, it may be slower than some we have tested so far, but it is not far away – it is still up there with the top VPNs on the market. We found that when testing, we barely ran into servers we couldn’t connect to; the only locations where we had slight connection issues were South Korea and Japan, and a quick disconnect/reconnect resolved this problem. This may be nothing or some temporary issue with the specific server I connected with.

The connection process for 90 % of locations is almost instant. Some locations further away would take a second or longer, which is understandable. Overall we barely experienced any real issues and were one of the smoothest clients we have tested.

We also tested secure core servers optimised for routing traffic through privacy-friendly countries. We found these servers very fast, sometimes faster than the main servers.

Additionally, some locations have a server option to connect over the TOR network. Understandably these servers are much slower than the main network but still usable for browsing purposes.

SOFTWARE:

In this review, we tested the Mac OS desktop software – it’s a great-looking app with some excellent features and does what it says on the tin.

Some of the features the desktop app provides are extremely useful and provide everything you need from a VPN provider; the only caveat on the Mac OS app is that it does not yet offer Split Tunneling, same goes for iOS. This is only on offer on the Windows and Android apps.

Here are some of the more notable features we tested:

Kill Switch is one of those features that almost all VPN providers must now offer in the modern VPN era to protect you against any unintended disconnects; it’s an absolute necessity to have, making it such an essential aspect of the VPN software. The ProtonVPN Kill Switch is one of the most reliable we have tested.

NetShield is ProtonVPN’s feature to block Ads and Malware – on testing, filtering was very effective; you can choose to block malware only or Malware ads and trackers.

Secure Core claims to redirect your sensitive data through servers in privacy-friendly countries – it’s a bit like a double VPN, and it may reduce your speeds. On testing, we saw very little speed difference.

VPN Accelerator is a feature that claims to increase your VPN speeds, on testing we didn’t notice much of a difference, but it may be that we maxed out the b/w available at the time of testing.

Allow Alternative Routing is a feature that helps get round blocks towards the proton websites and servers, handy when behind strict firewalls or in countries that try to block access to VPN services.

SECURITY:

Strong Encryption:

ProtonVPN uses the highest encryption standards available today – ProtonVPN encrypts all network traffic using either AES-256 or ChaCha20, both of which are incredibly secure. OpenVPN and IKEv2 are secured by AES-256 and Wireguard with ChaCha20.

Logging Policy:

ProtonVPN is based in Switzerland, which has some of the strongest data protection and digital privacy laws in the world. They claim not to log any of the following:

• We don’t log your traffic or the content of any communications
• We don’t log your IP address
• We don’t log your session lengths
• We don’t log or track any location-based information
• We don’t log which websites you visit

They do keep some data related to maintenance and are encrypted with full disk encryption. What that data may be we don’t know, but if it’s required to encrypt it, then we can only assume it contains sensitive information.

However, what’s reassuring is that their strict no-log policy was tested in a legal case in 2019 where ProtonVPN had been ordered to turn over logs to help identify a user but could not comply because such logs did not exist. ProtonVPN’s no-logs policy has also been verified by external independent experts.

Multifactor Authentication:

ProtonVPN offers the ability to enable two-factor authentication to protect your online account using an authenticator app such as Google Authenticator, Authy, FreeOTP etc. This is essential for VPN providers because most providers are attacked through brute force attacks to try to guess users’ passwords. With this option enabled and your password is compromised, they cannot log in to your account unless they also have access to your mobile phone.

TORRENTS AND STREAMING:

Streaming and downloading with ProtonVPN is seamless; however, you need either the VPN Plus or Proton Unlimited plans for streaming to work; it will not work on the free plan. We only tested within the US and the UK and never had one problem with any services we tested. Mainstream US and UK streaming services worked on the first attempt. We found the streaming to be fast without any noticeable buffering.

Torrent-wise, ProtonVPN worked just as seamlessly as its streaming; we found that torrents worked best when enabling the Moderate NAT option; this slightly reduces security due to the fact they are no longer changing your local IP as often, but if no logs are kept, then this shouldn’t be a problem.