I keep hearing bad stuff about proton, but I don’t really get most of it. Could someone please explain all of the controversy to me. Lastly, what are the best alternatives to all of their services?
Andy Yen
Known for: Proton founder (ProtonMail, Proton VPN, etc)
Proton claims to be politically neutral, but in early 2025 Andy praised the Republican party on X, and Proton issued an “official response” on Mastodon and Reddit (later deleted as “not actually official”) re-enforcing that Proton and/or Andy threw their hat in with Trump and the Republican party.
Current best alternative if you want to stay in the cloud: Tuta
Did Drew DeVault include himself on this list? He’s definitely worse than many of the people listed there.
I would being using tuta if they didnt delete 3 of my accounts for 6 months of activity lol
Were they free accounts? They are pretty strict with free accounts. They’re not some google that can just provide a free service to everyone and not care about the cost. You can get a paid account that shouldn’t be deleted for extremely cheap like 2-3$ a month I think, and then you get multiple email aliases and stuff too. I get not wanting to pay for email, but if it’s free you’ve just got to accept you are probably the product.
I’ll keep it short, but provide links for further reading. First off, I don’t think proton is “bad”, or anyone is trash-talking them legitimately. Both their jurisdiction (Switzerland), dedication to FOSS and good audit results make them a solid choice.
Diversification is my main reason why I’d never go all-in on Proton. Over the years, they’ve grown an ever more complete suite of apps (e-mail, calendar, VPN, password manager, docs, AI) that does share some similarity with the Google app suite in that you’re essentially putting all eggs in one company’s basket - and a lot of trust with that. If Proton got hacked, got subverted by a three-letter agency, or just got taken advantage of by a rogue employee, the effects would be much more impactful than if it had just been your e-mail provider, just your VPN service, just your…
Also, Proton’s official social media account echoing CEO Andy Yen’s private statements on U.S. politics haven’t helped convince people that the company is, indeed, politically neutral and solely focused on privacy.
This sums it up well. Their products are fine, but putting everything into one company isn’t a good idea, and the political statements leave little faith.
I use their free Drive for sharing files, but I’ve moved to Tuta for email and just about everything else selfhosted. I’m still running out a mullvad subscription but I’ll be switching that to IVPN when it expires.
I’m still running out a mullvad subscription but I’ll be switching that to IVPN when it expires.
I’m in the same boat: still on Mullvad, but eager to switch due to… things. May I ask what your main reason is to consider IVPN above all others? I’m still stuck choosing between IVPN, Proton and Nym.
If you don’t need to switch from mullvad I recommend you do not.
If the CEO of a privacy company supports political forces that are deeply anti-liberty and anti-privacy, that does constitute a “need” to switch, don’t you think?
I don’t see how a ceo’s opinion matters if it does not impact the product. mullvad has the best privacy track record or any VPN I’ve looked into and is a better deal overall the ivpn in cost for what you get.
No.
You are not donating to a cause when you purchase goods or services. You are not liable for what someone else does with their money.
Boycotts are only effective when paired with direct action. There is no direct action in this case.
Boycotts that involve not using some necessary service are paired with replication of service through the group organizing the boycott. There is no replication of service in this case.
So you aren’t responsible for the actions of the mullvad owner and not using it isn’t an effective method of changing his behavior (there is no direct action or service replication to accompany an organized boycott, which I would also argue there isn’t since people who made the decision to switch didn’t do so in a unified way or with any demands).
But does it protect you to leave mullvad?
No.
You’re leaving the most straightforward, private and secure vpn with if not the best apps, certainly best in class apps, and a history of literally functioning as a brick wall against investigations by the authorities. No other provider has done what mullvad has done when the screws were put to them because no other provider has had that happen.
So it accomplishes nothing and makes you less safe.
Mail - Tuta Mail
VPN - IVPN or AirVPN (Never been independently audited but cheaper and has port forwarding)
Drive - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Drive
Calendar - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Calendar
Docs/Sheets - Selfhost Nextcloud or LibreOffice (offline)
Pass - Bitwarden or KeePassXC (offline)
Authenticator - 2FA or Aegis (both are offline but that’s a good thing with 2FA)
Meet - Jitsi
Lumo - Local AI or Kagi Assistant (paid, comes with privacy-focused search engine) or Duck.ai (free)
Wallet - Cake Wallet
What happened to mullvad? It used to be protonvpn and them as default recommendations, now it’s another two.
One of two Mullvad CEOs personally donated 5,000,000 SEK (~500K USD) to the Swedish Örebro party, who support ethnic cleansing. “Sweden is for the Swedes”.
Mullvad’s response was just fence-sitting on the issue.
By paying for Mullvad, you are funding the man who donated to the far-right Örebro party, and likely will again.
Drive: Filen, Jottacloud
VPN: NymVPN
NymVPN is too new for me to feel comfortable using personally. Also it seems that they worked with Brave which I’m certainly not a fan of.
I wouldn’t recommend Jottacloud as their privacy policy seems iffy and they don’t have e2ee.
Filen’s privacy policy seems better, although they do say they do analytics. They do have e2ee though. Definitely much closer to Tuta than Jottacloud.
Harry Halpin is the CEO of Nym and is at least a CEO who’s politically on the good side. And Chelsea Manning works for Nym.
Yeah, the Brave Ad-block and no WireGuard Configs are not so good, but so far I enjoy NymVPN.
People who use Jottacloud should encrypt their data before sending it over.
From what I understand, Proton’s CEO has polarizing opinions to put it lightly. There’s other controversies than that, but that seems to be the main point of contention now in days.
As for alternatives, you have 3. Tutanota, Mailbox.org, or using mainstream options and manually using OpenGPG encryption yourself.
Yes. There is controversy about the CEO. But mostly for me: is security theater. And in don’t trust them. Email will never work as a secure communication layer. Stop pretending it will. There a reasons which is tied to the protocol level, that make pgp non sufficient. There are also the pgp technology it self (no forward secrecy, no deniability, key management etc). Then there is the obvious fact about an email from proton to gmail, and 99% of other email providers, simply not being secure/encrypted. So you buy a privacy tool, which neglects to tell you: we actually don’t provide privacy at all - unless you treat proton emails as proton chat - strictly proton to proton… at which point youd be better of with e g signal.
If you insist: mailfence.org allows you to upload and control you own pgp keys. That’s interoprational with proton. Simarly priced i think, also Schweiz, and a bit more honest and strict imap (no bridge). But honestly… stop treating email as secure.
Proton’s CEO loves republicans and supports fascist influencers.
Murena (Mail, Cloud, Workspace, Vault, Galery, Office suite, Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Phones (FairPhone), e/OS, e/Os for kids), OpenSource, encrypted, made in the EU (France)
It would be nice if their home page showed anything about anyhting, like about what they do and who they are instead of redirecting to a completely sterile login page.
This is their Homepage, there you find all info. The other I posted was the Page for the workspace. Murena is a whole infrastructure of services, hard- and software. all privacy centred, green energy, collaborations from third party in Murena are NextCloud (Germany), for the Cloud service and FairPhone (Netherland). All services are OpenSource, nothing shady in it.
They don’t let you delete the map, which is closed.source. I’ve not had an issue with it though. I didn’t delete it because it shows traffic congestion. I’m about to replace with CoMaps since I don’t turn location on anyways.
My only other complaint is tye browser they also will not let you remove. I’m getting rid of it soon. They never update it, so I do not trust it.
“429 Too Many Requests You have sent too many requests in a given amount of time.”
? Unaccessible.
First and foremost any for-profit organization on a long enough trend line tends to inshitify, and proton is a for-profit organization masquerading as a not-for-profit one ( it has an NPO in its Advisory Board).
So I don’t want to rely on any one platform vendor or Cloud host or point of failure for my privacy and my productivity, not after Google, never again. Even if I allow a few components of proton into my text act, I wouldn’t want to be locked into the ecosystem.
Second, it’s leadership has said permissive things about fascists in my country in the past few years. They have donated to political organizations I do not want to align with their values and interests are not necessarily mine.
For those reasons, I use one vendor with European hosting for my password manager, a different one for my email and calendar, (Tutanota) and I am actively evaluating what office and productivity Suite I will use going forward , but currently just use Libra office wherever I need it and cryptpad when I need to quickly share something in a table or document with people over the internet.
VPN and privacy apps come from DuckDuckGo for great about not retaining my info.
Myself host my photos (Immich) and files using free open source software projects , along with my media library through Jellyfin.
Nothing, people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics, which was said in early 2025, which is almost 2 years ago at this point.
Tldr: emotion-driven incels making a scene for a non-issue, but i can understand why bcuz USA republicans are a cancer to the world like Israel.
which is almost 2 years ago at this point
The last time I thought this was a long duration my mom made my lunches for me
Valid for certain things, but holding on to things of lesser importance doesnt make you an adult, it makes you resentful
How about holding on to the insult ‘incel’ for people who don’t want to feed fascists their dollar
Ok, but you realize that 2025 was already post-election, and Trump started doing horrible shit from day 1. So if someone supported him in 2025, odds are their opinion hasn’t changed much. Which makes them garbage.
people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics
…echoed and reinforced by Proton’s business account. That’s not a nothingburger. Trust is a privacy company’s greatest asset - and an asset easily destroyed if the company is found to have political leanings that are inherently adverse to privacy and freedom.
