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Alternatives for each of Proton's tools? (jlai.lu)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Mostly out of curiosity, but also somewhat related to Proton's recent political involvement, I'm curious about alternatives to using their services, open to suggestions for:

Proton Mail: anything that can support custom domain, email aliases, and email scheduling?
Proton Drive: not the most important, but interested in privacy first, encrypted hosting services
Proton Pass: anything I should take a look at besides Bitwarden and Keepass?
Proton VPN: that one's the hardest, it was really good, I think Mullvlad is the one most often recommended?
Proton Calendar: didn't really care about that one, but it was nice that it connected to Mail

My Unlimited plan renewed in December so I'll probably keep it for a year, it was nice having only one subsctiption to keep in mind, but I'm thinking of exploring other options

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 days ago

Tutanota, infomaniak, onion mail, forward email, i2p mail

set up your own hosting solution. it is not hard, i did it too. if you need a preset one, nextcloud, filen, cryptpad, cozy, puter, internxt, cloudreve, denet

not really, Bitwarden and KeepassXC are the most established ones. for the best security and privacy, i recommend (selhosted) Bitwarden, since if your computer with KeepassXC, or even just the drive you installed it on stops working, you lose all your passwords, which really sucks. This is not an issue with Bitwarden, the passwords are stored with zero knowledge encryption, you will have all your passwords until you know the master password, and can log into the same vault from almost any device (windows, mac, linux, android, ios, bsd)

Mullvad, yes. But there are some others like Riseup, Calyx, nym vpn

For calendars, there are a shit ton of them: My favorite is Foossify Calendar, but there are some others like: Tuta calendar, etar, kalendar, calindori

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

I’m probably gonna get yelled at for this, but for my use case it works, since I’m not actually trying to hide from the law, just avoiding being tracked by marketing companies… Icloud+ offers encrypted cloud storage, a proxy IP relay, and more importantly an email service that gives you unlimited aliases.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Lots of Mullvan ppl in here, I thought Private Internet Access was supposed to be the king? What happened?

I don't use any VPN, FWIW.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 week ago

Lucky me I didn't use any of their services, good luck to you for finding alternatives tho

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago

Mullvad VPN

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago (4 children)

Why does everyone just say use Mullvad now, I always got taught if they are advertising, you should not use them, has this stance changed?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

they won't advertise much until you download theur browser. that's intrusive af

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Mullvad has amazing privacy credentials that are third party audited.

In terms of anonymity, you can literally send them cash via post to protect your identity.

I recommend them to everyone.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 week ago

Mullvad still advertises less than the others.

Nord has like the highest advertising budget I've ever seen.

And a lot of the major providers have been caught making fake recommendation websites.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

How would a company (even a good one) let people know they exist without some sort of advertising?

Just start a company and sit there hoping people accidentally find you, then tell their friends?

Advertising has to happen on some level.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Fair enough, that's on me for not thinking it all the way through.

On the flipside why is mullavad as trusted as it is now?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 week ago (1 children)

good track record, anon accounts+payments, no logs, swedish privacy laws and 3rd party security audits. mullvad was also chosen as the backend of Mozilla's vpn

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Hmmm, I guess, besides the the proton ceo's statements, how does that compare to proton VPN?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 days ago

haven't used proton vpn so can't compare directly. i would assume similar performance wise.

on mullvad side you get apps to easily change locations on pretty much all platforms but also option for downloading openvpn and wireguard configs directly. only complaint I've had is you can only configure 5 devices at a time even if they're not using them at the same time which kind of sucks.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Mail and calendar: i think mailbox and posteo should work well, they both support IMAP for mail and CalDAV for calendar, just get a nice client(surprisingly not many for calendar standard protocol. thunderbird on desktop and etar/fossify calendar on android. stock one on ios)

VPN: MullVAD is the best

Drive: Check filen, it's cheaper and better, and has powerful CLI tools

Pass: Maybe unofficial self hosted version of bitwarden. It's called vaultwarden, and don't be afraid of selfhost, basically all you need to do is docker compose.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 week ago (5 children)

If you must:

Proton Mail/Calendar ➡️ Posteo, Tutanota, Mailbox.org
Proton Drive ➡️ Tresorit, Nextcloud, Filen, Syncthing, MEGA
Proton Pass ➡️ KeePass
Proton VPN ➡️ Mullvad VPN, IVPN, Windscribe
Proton Wallet ➡️ Cake Wallet, Electrum

Some of these don't have first-party mobile or desktop clients, so here are some apps to use them with:

Posteo & Mailbox.org - Thunderbird (desktop, Android), FairEmail (Android), Evolution (Unix-like), Geary (Unix-like), Claws Mail (desktop), Fossify Calendar + DAVx^5^ (Android)
KeePass: KeePassXC (desktop), KeePassDX (Android), KeePassium (iOS)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I wouldn't touch MEGA with a ten foot pole.

I'd also argue BitWarden shits on Keepass for UX.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

Yes. I use KeePass every day but it's not similar to Bitwarden and Proton Pass which are very similar to each other.

I will ask, although this is a question for everyone I suppose. Why not use MEGA if your also using Cryptomator?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

If you're (sensibly) encrypting your data before sending it off site, then yes it likely makes little difference where you send it. The parent comment didn't mention adding your own crypto however.

Further, I just personally wouldn't trust my data to a personality like "Kim dot com".

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

One really nice advantage for Posteo is even if you stop paying, they'll never delete your account unless you specifically delete it yourself(preventing address recycling, unlike mailbox.org) and you can still access your account and recieve emails, you just can't send any until you pay again. They won't even delete it from inactivity.

That's a rather unique feature in the email world now.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago

Seconding Tutanota. Started using it this week and it is so...simple! There are 2 apps on Android, but actually only the Tutamail one is needed.

I also use Nextcloud through a private cloud implementation, and it is not refined in the UI, but good enough.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I'll just add:

Proton drive => Seafile (selfhosted)
protonpass => bitwarden

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I stopped using Bitwarden. Unless I'm mistaken, they were about to start doing some closed-source stuff.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

That's not exactly what happened, they pushed more of their code into their own library that was not permissively licensed but then they open sourced it so the issue was resolved. https://github.com/bitwarden/clients/issues/11611#issuecomment-2436287977

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 week ago

Ah, I see.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I agree with many recommendations

but as someone who has tried many VPN providers I can say Windscribe is really bad (for servers in the EU at least).
Slow, few servers, unreliable, and blocked on many websites

surprisingly I see it recommended all the time

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 days ago

An assessment of windscribes European performance is helpful because I had no idea.

I'm in Canada (windscribe is Canadian), and find windscribe to be pretty good. So maybe it depends on location.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago

Fastmail.com has been great here.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I just moved to Proton before this while debacle and it definitely put me properly back on edge about who to trust in tech!

I'll probably stick with their email and calendar for now. (Though I'm curious what hosted calendars might be out there I could use alternatives for arranging events with friends.)

I had started on Keepass before, briefly tried Proton Pass, and now have completed moving to Keepass. I keep my database in my syncthing folder and have it on all my devices. With browser plug-ins and the KeepassDX app on Android, the experience is basically identical, except entirely private and self-hosted. A win all around, I'm real happy with this.

For VPN I'm using surfshark right now and haven't had any real issues. Not sure what the prevailing sentiment about them is though. I do sometimes find their endpoints blocked by various sites (catbox.moe is oddly very picky about this).

For drive, I'll probably end up getting a seedbox and a lot more hardrives in the near future anyway, so that'll be a problem/solution for me then.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 week ago (1 children)

For password management I moved to bitwarden as proton pass was not there yet. I like bitwardens's zero knowledge emergency access. I can have emergency contacts access my account in the event I am no longer able to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago (1 children)

how does this work?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 week ago

Emergency access uses public key exchange and encryption/decryption to allow users to give a trusted emergency contact permission to access vault data in a zero knowledge encryption environment:

See documentation here: https://bitwarden.com/help/emergency-access/#%3A%7E%3Atext=Emergency+access+uses+public+key%2Cemergency+contact+%28the+grantee%29.

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