Hi everyone, I am planning a move from Nord to Proton soon. I still have a while on my Nord plan, but it is what it is. I don’t know if the move will be a smart one, but I just can’t handle Nord anymore I really can’t.
A VPN for me is an everyday essential—I have Nord on auto-connect running on my phone 24/7 and it is a login item on my laptop that auto-connects on startup.
The two most important things to me are speed and privacy when it comes to VPNs. That is what now brought me to Proton. I like its jurisdiction, features, and apparent speed. I have had Nord for the past year and it has increasingly become incredibly inconsistent, especially in the last few months at a rapid pace. The reliability in speed is all over the place with its servers, and the auto-connect just turns on and off on its own as it pleases even if I have a stable connection. I feel like I have to cycle through a few recommended servers multiple times before I get to a decent speed one.
Maybe I am crazy. Maybe people here have a different experience with Nord from me, but that is currently what I have been experiencing.
So I am here to ask two questions:
(1) How is everyone’s experience here with Proton, and do you think I would enjoy it over my experience with Nord?
(2) Does anyone know if I were to buy a one month plan to test Proton and I happened to enjoy it, would the discounted 2-year plan be gone then?
Thank you very much!
Update 1: As a kind user pointed out, it would be helpful if I shared my OS with everyone. I run the current versions of iOS (iPhone 16) and MacOS (M2 Macbook Air).
My Nord 2yr plan ends in 2 days and I just pulled the trigger on 2 years with proton today. Biggest difference felt immediately is the speed, proton is maybe pushing 3x the speed over Nord for my regular use/speed tests and on p2p. P2p was a huge surprise for me, that download speed felt like it was on crack and made me regret using Nord before cuz now I think Nord ,might’ve been throttled.
It has kill switch, secure core(double VPN), split tunnelling which is pretty much all I use every once in a while even back on Nord.
For everything else I have no idea as I’m day 1 right now and not sure if they’re just buffing my speeds for the first month, but it’s eye opening how much faster download speeds are using VPN as Nord was my standard.
Switched off Nord after 3 months. Constant disconnects and I felt proton had a better vision of their products. Havent been disappointed yet
Hello there. My experience with proton VPN specifically in regards to your query is as follows.
Security and no log policy
Proton VPN is excellent and has a strict no log policy- probably one of the best in the industry.
Speed
In my experience, all VPN’s speeds depend how congested a particular regions server is at any given time. Sometimes it is super fast and sometimes not so much.
When a particular server is not so fast, I have to change the location and connect to a faster server. At times this will require trial and error going through 2 or 3 locations. I have not come across any VPN that gives a fantastic speed 24/7 every day in a particular server.
So speed experience is relative and varies for each user depending on where they are located and the region they choose to connect.
Plan
Yes. You can get the 2 month plan to try. If you like it, you can get the 2 year plan deal. No one can say if a deal will be available all the time.
For VPN, after 2 years, Proton becomes expensive as it renews only at 79.95 every 1 year. That is 6.69 per month. At that price, you can get the Proton unlimited 2 year deal which is 7.99 per month but gives you a lot more value.
I moved to proton about 6 months ago. Mainly because of their ability to support wireguard config files that can be loaded directly on my router. Most of the others only supported openvpn at the time. I’ve had the same vpn connection pinned up for over 6 months and has been rock solid. On the router I just specified what devices I want to pass through the vpn. The setup has been perfect. I would not hesitate to go with proton.
I use my vpn for Jellyfin server - speeds can be on the lower side but browsing and watching movies it works great.
Oh okay I didn’t know if you meant you moved to Proton yet. How do you like it?
What OS? I don’t know if that makes a difference or not, but it’s a useful bit of information.
I’ve moved from Nord to Proton and don’t regret it. I have the Proton wireguard setup running on my router and it’s been consistently faster than Nord with openvpn previously.
As my sub with Nord was about to end, I tried Surfshark and half the streaming didn’t work. Then I tried 1month of Proton and all worked great and better speeds for the whole household. Ended up signing for 2 year plan even before my 1st month ended
I have both. Proton works very well and it is my primary. NordVPN I use it sometimes if Proton is slow on streaming (particularly on South American servers to see live soccer games). In my experience, now are pretty much the same (both have issues in that regard in those servers or perhaps the streaming service is throttling connections via VPN).
Either way, I am happier with Proton VPN - it does lack still split tunneling on Mac and iOS and with for a couple of additional features, however it is imho a better choice than NordVPN and faster at least for me (I do have a fast internet connection and I don’t experience slowdowns except for streaming as mentioned). Also Proton has improved speeds a lot and I’d say it is now even faster than NordVPN.
When it comes to speed on Nord there is a slight chance I find that it lands on a server that is good but most of the time it doesn’t recently. How consistent has Proton been for you?
Okay great, yeah I have that experience currently—it’s just constantly disconnecting even on auto-connect. it’s really frustrating. How have the speeds been on Proton?
To your point about flipping through servers to find the best one, that is my experience with Nord every hour of the day currently. That’s the difference unfortunately. I feel like it is always just severely bottlenecked and it’s been frustrating because it wasn’t always like that. Besides flipping through here and there, had Proton been consistent for you speed-wise?
Awesome, I think I am going to test out the 1 month and see if I like it. Then if I do, end up getting the two year.
Have you moved to Proton yet or are you in the process?
Okay sounds good. Have you used other VPNs as well? Where does Proton rank? I have heard Express is pretty decent too
You are totally right, I will update my post with that information as well for future comments. But I am on the current iOS / MacOS versions. Macbook Air M2 + iPhone 16.
I has surfshark before nord but realized they were in 14 eyes jurisdiction and switched to nord. When it comes to my second question on my post your experience matches it — when you subscribed to one month and then two years, were you able to get the two years at the discounted price or was it the full price?
Do you still feel this way?
So far what I said still holds up, I’m getting more consistent and faster speeds in general on proton. Another thing is you can see a estimate of the server load of wherever you’re connected so you can just switch to a less congested server (of the same country) if you find it slower but I haven’t had to do that yet.
No reason for a refund or anything like that yet.