Proton VPN review (2025): The best VPN for most people

On average, the Proton dropped about 15 percent of my unprotected speed, but that number needs some context. And in a place like Atlanta, Georgia, at midday on Thursday, it saw a decline of just 3 percent. In Columbus, Ohio, on Friday evening, that had risen to a 25 percent decline. This kind of difference is normal. Providers like Surfshark and NordVPN see similar differences and have similar speed drops on average.

The difference for Proton is that I have yet to find a smelly server. I’m sure it exists – with over 15,000 servers, you’re bound to find one at some point – but I haven’t seen it after weeks of use. Windscribe and ExpressVPN compete with Proton on average, but they also have some sites that saw speed drops of 40 to 60 percent. These results don’t indicate overall speed (you just switch to a different server), but Proton gets you there faster.

This feature is likely due to Proton’s VPN Accelerator. I’ll admit, it sounded like bullshit. In the Proton VPN app, you’ll find a toggle for VPN Accelerator, which boldly claims to increase speed by up to 400 percent; Not likely. Despite the acceleration, I don’t think VPN Accelerator will reach anywhere near that number, at least in the vast majority of cases.

However, there are still some advantages, most notably BBR. Bandwidth throttling and round-trip propagation time, or BBR, is a congestion control algorithm developed by Google and deployed on YouTube and Google itself. Instead of limiting packet transmission when packets are lost, as most congestion control algorithms do, BBR models the network and estimates the available bandwidth. You don’t need to see missing packages to get started.

The Proton’s speeds aren’t entirely attributable to BBR, but I suspect it helps when connecting to servers over long distances. For example, while calling in the UK, I saw an average speed loss of about 20 percent, which is much closer to my US results than it has any right to be.