I made a spreadsheet comparing different open source VPN providers.
Part 2 here
Providers
Notes
- Please do not start a flame war about Proton.
- Please do not start a flame war about cryptocurrencies. Monero is the only cryptocurrency listed because of its privacy.
- The very left column is the category for each row, the middle section is the various VPN providers, and the right section is which VPNs are the best in each category.
- IVPN has two differing plans, which is why “Standard” and “Pro” are sometimes differentiated.
- For accounts, “Generated” means a random identifier is created for you to act as your account, “Required” means you must sign up yourself. Proton VPN allows guest use under specific conditions (e.g. installed from the Google Play Store), but otherwise requires an account.
- Switzerland is seen as more private than Sweden. Gibraltar is seen as privacy neutral.
- All prices are in United States Dollars. Tax is not included.
- Pricing is based on the price combination to achieve the exact time frame. For example, Proton VPN does not have a 3 year plan but you can achieve 3 years by combining a 2 year plan with a 1 year plan.
- The availability section is security based. Availability is framed around a GrapheneOS and secureblue setup.
- The Proton VPN Flatpak is unofficial, but based on the official code.
- Availability on secureblue is based on the
ujust install-vpncommand. Security features must be disabled on secureblue in order to use the GUI for IVPN and Mullvad VPN, but not for Proton VPN. Mozilla VPN and NymVPN are available as Flatpaks, which are safer than layering packages. - I wanted to include more categories, such as which programming languages they are written in, connection speed, and security, but that became far too difficult and complex, so I decided to omit those categories.
Takeaways
- NymVPN is very very new, but it’s off to a strong start. It wins in almost every category. I actually hadn’t heard of it until I started this project.
- If you want a free VPN, Proton VPN is the only one here that meets that requirement.
- If you want to pay week-by-week, IVPN is the only one that allows that.
- If you’re paying month-by-month on a budget, Mullvad VPN is the cheapest option.
- NymVPN is the cheapest plan for anything past 1 month.
- If you want to use Accrescent as your main app store, IVPN is the only VPN available there for now.
- If you want to pay for a bundle of apps, including a VPN, Proton sells more than just a VPN.
- Mozilla VPN is terrible. The only thing it has going for it is a verified Flatpak, but NymVPN also has that so it doesn’t even matter.
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VPN on VPS (easy to do with gluetun)
Basically you use a container that’s a VPN connection and connect other containers to it.
Thank you for clarifying. Does using a VPN on a VPS offer the same level of privacy as connecting a VPN container to a torrent container from a home connection? I’m curious about the advantages of using a VPS in this context.
No advantages privacy-wise, but it’s like a seedbox! I keep the torrent client running. Also I’m on a limited mobile data plan on my router at home, so this helps.
When I found out you could get a free 200GB VPS (look up free tier vps) - and because I had another paid VPS already anyway - I decided to make a seedbox. It’s not a ton of storage but it works really well, very happy with it.
Gotcha, thanks for explaining this! I’m glad you’re happy with your VPS.
Exactly this, the commenter above even mentioned they have a VPS already, what’s stopping them from (this is just an option) slapping tailscale on there, enabling it as an exit node and being done with it? Would literally take 5 minutes and suddenly your traffic is coming from a datacenter and not your home IP
Both comments are me. Configuring Tailscale (or Headscale?) is on my to-do.
To be clear, connecting to the VPS is not what I use for the anonymizing part, it’s the gluetun container that connects to ProtonVPN servers. This way I can still access my VPS with its real IP. Not sure if there was a confusion there.
Simply using my VPS as relay would still attach my browsing to a single IP I’m the sole user of… or not? I do not know how that works.