Proton VPN vs Mullvad: Which is better in 2026?

Both are the privacy-serious choices; Proton is the one you can also live with day to day. Mullvad is the purer implementation — an anonymous account number instead of an email, cash accepted by post, one flat €5 with no introductory pricing and no renewal increase ever. If your threat model is genuine, the fact that Mullvad structurally cannot link a subscription to a person is worth more than any feature list. Proton matches it on the things that can be verified — Swiss jurisdiction, open-source clients, published audits — and adds what Mullvad deliberately does not: reliable streaming, a much larger network, a trustworthy free tier and a bundle with encrypted mail and storage. The practical split from our reviewers is clean. Journalists, researchers and anyone with a real adversary lean Mullvad and accept that Netflix will not work. Everyone else whose privacy interest is principled rather than acute is better served by Proton, which gives most of the same guarantees without asking you to give up watching television.