Proton VPN vs. NordVPN: Which Is Best for Protecting Your Privacy?

PCMag editors select and review products independently. If you buy through affiliate links, we may earn commissions, which help support our testing.

Price

Perhaps the most tangible way to pit these two titans of the privacy industry head-to-head is on price. We track the prices of all the VPNs we review in a live chart that's updated as VPNs get tested:

As of this writing, you can get a monthly subscription to Proton VPN starting at $9.99, which can be upgraded to a Proton Unlimited plan for $12.99. Where the base subscription only covers access to the VPN product, Proton Unlimited includes 500GB of storage shared between Mail and Drive, up to 25 calendars, calendar sharing,15 email aliases, unlimited email messages per day, the Proton Pass authenticator app, 20 vaults in Proton Pass, and unlimited Proton Pass email aliases.

The company also offers a free subscription tier that only requires an email to sign up. The free plan has no monthly bandwidth limitations (as most others, such as Windscribe VPN, do), but you'll only be able to connect to five servers in total with a single device. This is a great way to try Proton before you buy, but also consider that it may not be representative of the full experience. Given how congested the free servers get during peak hours in your region, you may experience slowdowns in your internet speeds that don't reflect the full capabilities of the paid version.

Meanwhile, NordVPN skews toward the premium end of the market, starting at $12.99 per month for access to what the company calls NordVPN Basic. Like Proton's base plan, this includes access to just the VPN and nothing else, giving Proton the edge both on price and the number of devices you can add to each account. Proton allows for up to 10, while Nord limits you to just six (which is still one above the industry average of five).

Nord offers two more subscription tiers above NordVPN Basic, including NordVPN Plus for $13.99 per month and NordVPN Ultimate for $15.99 per month. NordVPN Plus gets you access to its anti-malware and ad/tracker blocker package, NordVPN Threat Protection Pro, plus a password manager. Moving up the chain, the NordVPN Ultimate plan includes 1TB of secure cloud storage and identity theft recovery services, as well as all the features listed for the other subscription tiers.

Overall, Proton's close adherence to the industry average monthly price ($10.30 per month) and free plan give it an edge over Nord.

Regarding annual plan pricing, NordVPN is facing a $100M class-action lawsuit in the US states of California and North Carolina over allegedly deceitful price increases that trigger once annual and two-year subscriptions renew. Given the state of the case, we won't comment on the differences between Nord and Proton's long-term subscription renewal practices or prices here. Our common guidance for any VPN is to try before you buy, either with a monthly plan that comes with at least a 30-day money-back guarantee or, in the case of Proton, by signing up for the free version first.

Winner: Proton VPN

App Design

While some elements of VPN app designs are subjective, we'll do our best to keep the evaluation in this section as objective as possible.

Proton's purple-on-black app is sleek, if a bit hard to make out the details in bright lighting situations at times. There could be slightly more contrast applied between different elements.

The Proton desktop app and mobile experience can also feel a bit cluttered, especially the mobile version of the location map. From a new user's perspective, a lot of information is thrown on the screen at once, and it's not organized in the most streamlined way possible.

Meanwhile, NordVPN's applications across all supported devices are simply a delight. Taking cues from a lighter, almost Apple-esque design school, Nord's look is as pleasing to the eye as it is user-friendly. Features and settings are clearly laid out across the different menus, and the app also features a first-timer walkthrough in case you're a VPN novice and need a hand to hold as you learn more about how the app works.

Winner: NordVPN

Server Count and Locations

As of this writing, Proton just edges out Nord on coverage by a (seemingly intentional) 112 countries to Nord's 111.

Meanwhile, the server counts are a bit more spread and make it simpler to give Proton the win in this category. Today, Proton claims a total of "over 8,000 servers"—we couldn't get more specificity from the company than that—while Nord's live counter sits at a respectable 6,475 servers.

While Proton ekes out a win here on pure figures, both it and Nord have sizable networks compared with the rest of the industry. Both are likely to provide a server location close enough to where you're connecting from to keep speeds high.

Winner: Proton VPN

Speed and Performance

We keep a running tally of download speeds, upload speeds, and latency for all the VPNs we test:

Above, you can see that of all the VPNs we've tested, Nord is the only one that actually managed to improve our download speeds rather than reduce them. We explain this phenomenon in our breakdown of the fastest VPNs, but for the purposes of this article, just know that it likely comes down to some clever caching behaviors on the back end of Nord's network.

Meanwhile, Proton VPN had its own moment, reducing our upload speeds by a mere 0.22% compared with NordVPN's 38.37%.

Finally, our latency evaluation didn't show a significant difference between Nord (a 29.26% increase) and Proton (30.30%).

With Nord leading in downloads and Proton taking the crown in uploads, plus an almost even split on latency, we call this one a tie.

Winner: Tie

Streaming

Which VPN unblocks Netflix better? Here at PCMag, we test whether or not a VPN can access Netflix's library of content from five regions across the globe, including Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US. The content available in these libraries often changes depending on where in the world you connect from (or where Netflix thinks you're from), so we qualify the results in three different categories: Open, Blocked, and Limited. You can read more about what those classifications mean in our chart below:

As one of the few VPN services that returned Open libraries across all five regions tested, NordVPN wins this one against Proton, which hit one Limited library when connecting from Canada.

Winner: NordVPN

The Verdict: VPN Users Win

Tallying up the scores, we've arrived at a tie! As both Proton VPN and NordVPN are already Editors' Choice winners with only minor differences separating them, it's not too surprising to see them end in a photo finish. While Proton offers a larger server network for a lower price, Nord lets you watch Netflix on more of its available servers. Nord is searingly quick on downloads, but Proton runs the field on uploads. Trade for trade, blow for blow, both Nord and Proton offer some of the best experiences you'll find in online privacy tools today, and you can't go wrong with either.