Proton VPN vs Windscribe 2026: Free Plan and Upgrade

Windscribe is the free VPN when a phone and a laptop both need the tunnel, or when you must pick the country. Proton VPN Free is the free VPN when one device needs no data cap. Paid, Proton VPN Plus is $83.76 for 24 months, against $138 for two years of Windscribe Pro, and the $69 yearly renewal is lower after that intro term.

Our analysis: follow the printed renewal, and the cheaper full-network plan changes in year six. Six years on Proton VPN Plus comes to $419.28. Six years of Windscribe Pro, billed yearly, comes to $414. Through year five, Proton is still ahead. Prices below were read on October 30, 2026.

A free VPN here means a permanent $0 plan from the company that also sells the paid tunnel, with a published cap on data, devices or countries. Both of these companies offer that. They cut different things to pay for it.

Proton VPN vs Windscribe at a glance

Question	Proton VPN	Windscribe
Free data	No data cap	2 GB a month, or 10 GB with a confirmed email
Free devices	1 device at a time	Unlimited connections on one account; sharing the login is prohibited
Free countries	10, next server chosen at random	10 you can pick
Cheapest full paid plan	VPN Plus, $3.49/mo for 24 months ($83.76)	Pro, $5.75/mo billed at $69 every 12 months
Renewal of that plan	$83.88 every 12 months	$69 every 12 months, same as the first year
Month-to-month full plan	$9.99	$9
Refund on the first paid bill	30-day money-back guarantee	7 business days, under 10 GB, and only if support cannot fix a technical issue
Company	Proton AG, Geneva, Switzerland	Windscribe Limited, Ontario, Canada

Sources: Proton's pricing page and Windscribe's upgrade page, read on October 30, 2026. Multi-year totals later in this page are our arithmetic on those printed bills.

Which free plan should you keep?

Proton Free wins when the tunnel is a daily connection and you only have one screen. Proton's pricing page prices Free at $0, allows one device at a time, and sends you to servers in 10 countries that it selects. The plan table marks speed as Medium, against Highest on VPN Plus, and it leaves streaming, P2P and the malware and ads blocker off the free column. The FAQ on that page says the free plan has no data limits and no artificial speed limits. Medium is Proton's label, not a rate we measured.

The free-account guide names those ten countries: the Netherlands, Japan, Romania, Poland, Norway, Switzerland, Singapore, Mexico, Canada and the United States. You do not pick among them. The free server guide says Proton chooses the next server at random, with a cooldown of 45 seconds on the first change and 10 minutes after that. Signup uses a non-Proton email as the username. The free plan page says every user, including free, gets a kill switch and the Stealth protocol, and that the free plan shows no ads.

Windscribe Free wins when you need two devices, or a country you choose, and 10 GB a month is enough. The free plan page says a confirmed email raises the cap from 2 GB to 10 GB, on 10 countries, with unlimited connections on one account and no card. Those countries are the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Romania, and the setup steps tell you to pick a server. R.O.B.E.R.T., the ad, tracker and malware blocker, runs on the free plan. Desktop apps are open source.

Six countries sit in both free pools: the United States, Canada, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Romania. Proton adds Japan, Poland, Singapore and Mexico. Windscribe adds the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, France and Germany. If the country you need is on neither list, the free tier is the wrong product and the paid map is the decision.

The gigabyte cap moves if you touch the mailbox. Windscribe's cost article, dated May 1, 2026, says skipping the email, or unsubscribing from promo mail, puts the account back on 2 GB. The free signup article, dated January 6, 2026, says one X post can add 5 GB to the monthly cap after the email is confirmed. The free plan page adds that the account needs at least three followers for that post.

Free-plan verdict: Proton wins on data, Windscribe wins on devices and on choosing the country. A laptop and a phone cannot both sit on Proton Free. They can both sit on Windscribe until the gigabytes run out. Our best free VPNs ranking looks at a wider field. The VPN free trial page covers brands that sell a short trial instead of a plan you can keep.

Cyberpresso data: the brief reaches 29,000+ security readers at a 31% open rate, from the audience file dated November 8, 2026. Plan changes on these two products are the sort of item that brief is for. Join at cyberpresso.com.

What does the paid upgrade buy?

On Proton, you are buying country choice, nine more devices and the features the free column leaves blank. VPN Plus covers 10 devices and, on the pricing page, 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries, plus streaming, P2P and the malware and ads blocker. The free server guide also ties Secure Core to Plus. Proton Unlimited adds paid mail, drive and a password manager, at $12.99 a month or $191.76 for the first 24 months and then $119.88 a year. Take Unlimited only if you would pay for those other apps anyway. Term-by-term Proton bills are on our Proton VPN pricing page, and the product write-up is the Proton VPN review.

On Windscribe, you are buying data and the rest of the map. Pro is unlimited data and, on the upgrade page, 69+ countries and 112 cities. The cost article says Pro also includes port forwarding and custom configs, and that a static IP is sold separately, with no list price on that page. The free page already claimed unlimited personal connections. The terms prohibit account sharing, and the privacy policy, updated July 30, 2024, says Windscribe keeps a live count of parallel connections to stop shared logins. Your own phone and laptop fit the free-page claim. A team passing one password around does not.

Build a Plan sits between Free and Pro. On the upgrade page, each location is $1 a month and adds 10 GB, a separate Unlimited Data plus R.O.B.E.R.T. option adds $1 a month, the minimum charge is $3, and the picker stops at 7 locations. Two locations plus unlimited data is the $3 package the cost article describes. Three locations without that option is also $3, but the allowance is 30 GB, not an open tunnel. Past 7 locations, the page says monthly Pro is the cheaper buy.

Plan	First charge	What you are paying for	After the first term
Proton VPN Free	$0	1 device, 10 random countries, no data cap	Stays $0
Proton VPN Plus, 1 year	$53.88	10 devices and the full server list for 12 months	The printed renewal line is on the 2-year card
Proton VPN Plus, 2 years	$83.76	Same Plus features for 24 months, at $3.49/mo	$83.88 every 12 months
Proton Unlimited, 2 years	$191.76	Plus, plus paid mail, storage and a password manager	$119.88 every 12 months
Windscribe Free	$0	2 GB, or 10 GB with email, 10 countries, many devices	Stays $0
Windscribe Build a Plan	$3 minimum	$1 per location per month, plus $1 for unlimited data	Same monthly rate; changes limited to twice in 30 days
Windscribe Pro, monthly	$9	Full map, unlimited data	$9 every month
Windscribe Pro, yearly	$69	Same Pro features, at $5.75/mo	$69 every 12 months

The Proton rows are the public tabs on Proton's pricing page. The Windscribe rows are on the upgrade page. A wider set of long VPN deals is in our VPN pricing index.

How much does the paid plan cost over six years?

Proton Plus is cheaper for a two-year stay. Windscribe Pro yearly is cheaper if you are still paying in year six. The like-for-like pair is Proton's 2-year VPN Plus against Windscribe Pro billed every 12 months. Both are the full consumer VPN, not the mail bundle and not the two-country package.

Years covered	Proton VPN Plus, starting on the 2-year plan	Windscribe Pro, billed yearly
1	Not this plan; the 1-year tab is $53.88	$69
2	$83.76	$138
3	$167.64	$207
5	$335.40	$345
6	$419.28	$414

Proton's year-three total is the opening 24 months plus one renewal, and each later year adds another $83.88. Windscribe adds its yearly rate from the start, with no intro cut and no later jump. Spread over 12 months, Proton's renewal is $6.99 a month against Windscribe's $5.75. The opening term is what keeps Proton ahead: two years costs $54.24 less on Proton, and five years still costs $9.60 less ($335.40 against $345). Year six is the crossover, by $5.28.

Month-to-month, Windscribe wins from the first invoice. Proton VPN Plus is $9.99 with no term discount. Twelve of those months come to $119.88, against $108 at $9. The gap is $11.88, and it does not flip, because neither monthly price is an introduction. A single prepaid year goes the other way: Proton's 1-year tab is $53.88, which is $15.12 under one Windscribe Pro year. Use that tab only if you will stop at twelve months. Its renewal amount is not the sentence printed on the 2-year card, so do not treat year two of a 1-year purchase as settled by that card.

Build a Plan wins when two countries are enough. Two locations plus unlimited data is $36 a year, $33 under a year of Pro and far under Proton Plus. Seven locations plus unlimited data is $96 a year, already more than a year of Pro. If you need the whole map, Pro or Proton Plus is the bill that matters. Our cheapest VPN page sets both against other brands. Proton VPN vs ExpressVPN is the other Proton matchup, and Mullvad vs Proton VPN is the one if a flat monthly rate with no email at signup is the question.

Price verdict: Proton wins for two to five years on the full network. Windscribe wins on monthly billing, on a stay past five years, and on a two-country unlimited tunnel at $3 a month.

What does each privacy record actually show?

Proton has the newer no-logs infrastructure audit. Windscribe has the more specific retention list, and older code audits. A vendor post is not a court finding, and neither record describes a server that has not been built yet.

Proton's no-logs audit post, updated June 16, 2026, says Securitum has completed a fifth consecutive annual review of the VPN infrastructure. Proton quotes the 2026 report as finding no technical evidence, on the servers examined, of logs of browsing, DNS queries, destination services, traffic contents or user-identifiable connection metadata, and no persistent record tying a user to activity on a reviewed server. The same post says current Swiss law does not impose a logging duty on a VPN, that the apps are open source, and that Proton has been ordered to produce logs and could not, because none existed. The line about 400-plus legal cases is Proton's count, from that post.

Windscribe's privacy policy says it stores a 30-day byte total, a last-activity timestamp, and, while you are connected, the OpenVPN or IKEv2 username, connection time and data transferred in server memory, discarded on disconnect. It says it does not store a history of VPN sessions, your source IP or the sites you visited. That policy was updated July 30, 2024, so it is not a 2026 document. The audit article, dated October 17, 2025, points to a Packetlabs review of the FreshScribe server stack in June 2024, a Leviathan desktop review in September 2021, and a Leviathan review of the Android and iOS apps in March 2022, with the issues found then marked fixed. Those are code and stack reviews. They are not a yearly inspection of whether production VPN servers are logging.

The Athens account should stay labeled as the company's. On April 24, 2025, Yegor Sak wrote that a case against him was dismissed on April 11, 2025, after Greek authorities followed a Finland server IP to the hosting account rather than to a customer. He writes that Windscribe could not hand over connection logs because it did not have them. We did not read the judgment. A dismissal is not, on its own, an audit of the logging design. What a buyer can use is the pressure the company describes, set next to the fields the privacy policy says it actually keeps.

Privacy verdict: split. A 2026 third-party review aimed at the no-logs claim is Proton's. A short list of retained fields, plus a free account that can exist with no email, is Windscribe's. Jurisdiction splits the same way. Proton AG is in Geneva. Windscribe Limited is registered in Ontario, and its terms put disputes in the courts in Toronto.

We publish no speed ranking. Proton calls free speed Medium and paid speed Highest, its free FAQ says there is no artificial speed limit, and Windscribe's free page says the free tier is not throttled. Your line and the server you land on decide throughput. Server counts are the figures above: 20,000+ in 140+ countries on Proton Plus, and 69+ countries and 112 cities on Windscribe Pro.

Refunds, and who should pay

Proton's 30-day money-back guarantee is the window that can test Plus-only features. The pricing cards state it, and the free-account guide says a Plus or Unlimited purchase can be refunded inside 30 days. Country choice, the streaming mark and the jump from 1 device to 10 are absent from Free, so the free plan cannot answer those questions.

Windscribe's refund is for a technical failure, not for a tour of the paid map. The terms say to judge the product on the free plan, because paid differs mainly in bandwidth and locations. A refund of the first payment needs a request within 7 business days, usage still under 10 GB, and a technical issue support cannot fix in a reasonable time. Later renewals are excluded. Approved refunds are processed within 30 days. A normal week on the paid tunnel can burn that 10 GB condition. The upgrade page also limits subscription changes to twice in a 30-day period, with a partial refund of unused days on the old plan.

A company network is a different purchase. The cost article prices ScribeForce at $5 a month per account for a team of at least five. That is a shared-account discount, not an admin console. Offboarding and a company policy belong on a business VPN, covered in our best VPN for small business guide. Phone and browser setups are in the best free VPN for Android, best VPN for iPhone and best VPN Chrome extensions pages.

Who should pick which

• Pick Proton VPN Free if one device is enough, a random server in that ten-country pool is acceptable, and a data cap would interrupt the work.
• Pick Windscribe Free if a phone and a computer will connect, you need to choose among its ten countries, and 10 GB a month covers the traffic (2 GB if you will not add an email).
• Pick Proton VPN Plus on the 2-year plan if you want the full map and 10 devices for two to five years.
• Pick Windscribe Pro yearly if the renewal should equal the first bill, or if you expect to still be paying in year six.
• Pick Windscribe Pro monthly if you will not prepay. It is $9 against Proton's $9.99.
• Pick Build a Plan at $3 a month if two countries and unlimited data are the whole requirement.
• Skip Proton Unlimited unless encrypted mail, storage and a password manager are products you would buy on their own.

How we compared

This comparison addresses a personal VPN purchase rather than a company rollout. Prices, caps and renewal lines come from Proton's pricing page, Proton's free plan page, Proton's free-account guide, Proton's free server guide, Windscribe's upgrade page and Windscribe's free plan page, read on October 30, 2026. The privacy record comes from Proton's no-logs audit post, Windscribe's audit article, Windscribe's privacy policy, Windscribe's terms and Windscribe's account of the Athens case. Six-year totals, the $6.99 renewal equivalent and the year-six crossover are arithmetic on the printed bills. Cyberpresso has no lab, so this page has no speed test and no streaming test. The reader count is our own list. Editorial rules are on the Cyberpresso about page. The directory entries are Proton VPN on Toolradar and Windscribe on Toolradar.

FAQ

Is Proton VPN or Windscribe better in 2026?

It depends on the limit you cannot bend. Windscribe Free fits when you need more than one device or a country you choose, inside 2 GB or 10 GB a month. Proton VPN Free fits when one device needs a tunnel with no data cap. For a full paid network kept two to five years, the 24-month Proton VPN Plus bill is lower than two years of Windscribe Pro. From year six, Windscribe's yearly renewal is the lower one.

How much data does Proton VPN Free allow compared with Windscribe?

Proton's pricing page says the free plan has no data limits, on one device at a time. Windscribe's free plan is 2 GB a month without a confirmed email and 10 GB with one, and unsubscribing from promo mail returns the account to 2 GB. Windscribe's free page says connections are unlimited on one account. Its terms ban sharing that account.

How much is Windscribe Pro compared with Proton VPN Plus?

Windscribe Pro is $9 a month or $69 a year, renewing at the same yearly amount. Proton VPN Plus is $9.99 month to month, $53.88 for 12 months, or $3.49 a month on the 24-month plan and then $83.88 every 12 months. Two years on that Proton plan cost less than $138 of Windscribe Pro. Six years cost $419.28 on Proton and $414 on Windscribe.

Can you choose a country on Proton VPN Free?

No. Proton names ten free countries, then chooses the next server at random. The first change waits 45 seconds, and later changes wait 10 minutes. Windscribe's free plan also has ten countries, and its setup steps tell you to pick the server. The two lists share six countries and differ on four.

Does Windscribe refund a paid plan the way Proton VPN does?

Not in the same way. Proton states a 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans. Windscribe refunds the first payment only, and only if you ask within 7 business days, stay under 10 GB, and have a technical issue support cannot fix. The terms say to judge the service on the free plan before paying. Renewals are outside that refund.

Is Windscribe's no-logs claim audited like Proton VPN's?

No. Proton's audit post of June 16, 2026 describes a fifth annual Securitum review of whether the examined VPN servers log activity, and quotes the 2026 report as finding no such logging on those servers. Windscribe's audit article of October 17, 2025 cites a Packetlabs server-stack review from June 2024 and Leviathan app reviews from 2021 and 2022. Its privacy policy of July 30, 2024 lists the fields it stores. Those are different records.

Cite this: Cyberpresso, "Proton VPN vs Windscribe 2026: Free Plan and Upgrade", October 2026.

The Cyberpresso brief is where a later plan change on either VPN gets a second look. Subscribe at cyberpresso.com.

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