How reliable is ProtonVPN in terms of speed and dropouts?

VPN
1

I’m from Germany so got the Swiss servers next door. I’ve read about a lot of people having connectivity issues and issues with various bugs.

I’ve been using Mullvad for the last 2-3 years and have never had one complaint, until now. 5 devices isn’t enough for me anymore. I am also pretty interested in ProtonMail since I’ve been having massive issues with Yahoo for a long time now but all the other free mail providers seem to be equally ass and I don’t wanna pay just for mails. But the unlimited package for 8 €/month over 2 years is actually a great price.

So how are the speeds generally? How is the reliability? Would I have endless issues with dropouts and what not or does it really just work and I just found a few random people complaining? Mullvad has been nothing but flawless so my expectations are pretty high.

​

/edit: Thanks for the replies guys, I’ll try it out for a month, good call!

​

/edit2: I got a month of Proton Unlimited and ran some speedtests to compare to Mullvad. Unfortunately it is quite a lot slower and I only used servers somewhat near me. The preset “fastest server” is complete dog water. Just for giggles I ran a speedtest connected to Argentina, basically the other side of the world and it came out with 82 MBit/s compared to the 89.5 from the “”“fastest server”“”.

Here the results in my insanely professional Paint collage

For reference without a VPN I have a connection with 15 Ping, 252 MBit/s download, 42,5 MBit/s upload on the same speedtest site

2

Also in Germany and also trying to decide between mullvad and protonvpn rn.

Am trying it out because I bought proton unlimited for the 3 email domains.

Speeds are about the same as mullvad for me.
Both very stable and reliable.

But I noticed that, while I encountered a few captchas here and there with both. With protonvpn there are quite a few sites that outright block the protonvpn server-ip’s, mostly because of too much traffic(yes, on servers with the “green” status)(example is nyaa, seems like too many protonvpn users in my region torrent anime lol).

And what’s the most annoying about that, is that while you can connect to the “fastest server” and to a “random server”, you can’t connect to a random server that is nearby like you can with mullvad.
That means that with mullvad, if the server is slow or blocked(rare), I can just reconnect to a different fast server nearby via the tray menu.
To do the same in protonvpn, I have to open the whole GUI, and select a different server in the list, because the two tray options “quick” and “random” just reconnect to the same server or some server in america respectively.

Also noticed that the protonvpn windows GUI can be pretty resource intensive and laggy, probably because of its fancy graph, that has gotten better lately tho(PC specs are def. not the limiting factor)

Both have features that the other one doesn’t have, so I’m quite torn in that regard.

Last rant: what also annoys me with port forwarding in protonvpn, every time you switch the server or reconnect, it assigns itself a different port which is very annoying if you have to manually set that in the torrent client.

Btw mullvad doesn’t have portforwarding anymore sadly but download/upload speeds are just as fast as protonvpn

yes, from my experience, mullvad is better but I’m currently still trying to get accustomed to protonvpn because it would be great if I could save the 5 bucks from the mullvad sub.

3

I have a 1gb fiber connection wired, and I get around 130-300 … and they won’t event search on the problem…

4

just did a speed test with my PRoton Plus VPN ON on my PC thru TMOBILE 5G ethernet…these speeds have been constant on my PC and my Android WIFI and my BUZZTV Box. switched to Proton from Nord in 2021 and couldn’t be happier!

https://i.gyazo.com/74a6cb1fa3dfcb9051746cabedae0a41.png

5

Excellent speeds here in Japan and no drops at all.

Ultimately though it’s going to depend on your network, devices and how you use them.

6

You should look at if the people complaining are free or paid users because the free servers are understandable slower than the paid ones and for reasons beyond my understanding many free users expect the same reliability and speed than the paid servers.

7

not everyone is going to have the same results/speeds as you…Best bet is to try a month out and see if it works for u

8

If you’re OK to deal with 10 Captchas per website, it’s OK.

That’s the paid version. Free version is probably even worse.

9

The free tier is good enough for mobile users when always on VPN mode for public WiFi or mobile data network.

If you have a heavier need, then yeah you want a better tier.

If you’re using something like BitTorrent a lot, seed boxes exist so you can get high ratios.