Mullvad or Proton VPN?

If you don't need proton's whole suite of tools I say go for mullvad.

You can also just test them both out for yourself. Try mullvad for one month, proton another. The nice thing with mullvad I believe is that it's way more anonymous in terms of various forms of payment and I believe it has a fixed price.

I prefer Mullvad. I've found it a lot more reliable. I was a paying Proton customer but still had connectivity issues a non-negligible number of times, whereas I've literally never had Mullvad be the cause of connection issues in my years of using it. It's great that they take cash and have literally only an account hash associated with your account.

I've also found that Mullvad customer support are responsive, helpful, and know what they're talking about. I've had experiences with Proton's customer support that were ok, but occasionally had the typical customer service hiccups along the lines of being assigned a new support agent who doesn't read back all the conversation (understandable—I had one bug I was dealing with for months) and you have to explain again what the original issue was and what has been done since.

I think both options are perfectly fine, but I definitely prefer Mullvad, and it's what I recommend to people if they ask me to recommend a VPN service.

I like that you don't have to provide an email address to mullvad.

I love that Proton bots/fanboys always get pretty nervous when someone just points out the facts 🤣

I like Mullvad better

Mullvad is much friendlier to privacy, but their proxies get blocked by A LOT of stuff, they also have a very small number of proxies. Mullvad collects literally nothing about you, but that's a double edged sword. not having any way to verify exactly who paid money into which account number means they can't help you if someone steals your account. I also have it on good authority that mullvad isn't very reliable at getting past more aggressive censorship firewalls. the one in china for example won't allow you to use mullvad unless the sim you're connecting from is a US one.

Proton doesn't record anything you're doing with their VPN and they've had to prove that many times and their "sentinel" program and the 2FA and double password you can enable make it very hard if not impossible for someone to mootch off your account. I very rarely get blocked by anything when I use proton VPN, if I ever do get blocked I just have to change the proxy I'm on. I don't even have to change the location most of the time because proton VPN has a huge number of proxies at each location.

Proton also gives you the ability to save recovery phrases and recovery files if you lose your password(s) or your 2FA

ente auth and ageis auth are great for storing your 2FAs and they allow you to back them up to a file if your account with ente fails in some way or if you forget the password to get into your ageis

as for those recovery files and phrases I talked about. save them in text files on a small capacity flash drive that you don't use for anything else

I prefer Mullvad. Regularly audited, can pay with cash if preferred, everything runs on RAM, and hasn’t had any controversies so far. The only issue for some is no port forwarding. I also like the multi-hop and DAITA features.

Mullvad. It's cheaper than Proton. But Proton has more servers. Like Proton even provies Indian IPs, but the servers are hosted in Singapore, which may be something people need, as Mullvad do not have any servers with Indian IPs.

You can also try IVPN, it is almost same like Mullvad, no email for account, pay using Monero etc, but you can get a one week subscription for $2.

100% Mullvad

IVPN imo, just because it offers reverse split tunneling, if you prefer having more countries to choose from you can use Proton.

They still see source of email and meta data.

I am not sure why they would ban account for getting links tho