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
- For Mail, I’d recommend Tuta (which comes with 15-30 aliases depending on the plan) and a third-party aliasing service like Addy if you need more than that. If you want a different aliasing service and are searching around, and trying to avoid giving money to Proton, avoid SimpleLogin, since they are owned by Proton. I don’t believe Tuta has email scheduling, though.
- For Drive, either use Tresorit, or use Cryptomator if you’re okay with paying for OneDrive/Dropbox/Google Drive. (Cryptomator encrypts uploaded files & names so the cloud provider itself can’t view the contents)
- For Pass, I personally would recommend Bitwarden or Keepass simply depending on whichever one you prefer more. Both are good options.
- For VPN, definitely use Mullvad. Simple, unchanging monthly price, you can pay via numerous different ways if you want to keep your identity more private from them (e.g. paying with cash by mail, XMR, etc) and you’ll get an account number rather than needing to actually give them any information like an email to create an account. Do be aware it has much less locations than Proton, and most other VPN providers, although it’s still quite fast and usable for most cases.
- For Calendar, Tuta also has a calendar feature built-in.
I’d highly recommend checking out Privacy Guides by the way, since they tend to have good lists of alternatives for any other services you may want to switch from also.
Thank you for the detailed response!! I’ll study all the options ❤️
related to Proton’s recent political involvement
You should probably check the political leanings of the directors of each of the alternatives you are considering as well.
I will, but that’s not the most important point of this post
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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 + DAVx5 (Android)
- KeePass: KeePassXC (desktop), KeePassDX (Android), KeePassium (iOS)
I’ll just add:
- Proton drive => Seafile (selfhosted)
- protonpass => bitwarden
I stopped using Bitwarden. Unless I’m mistaken, they were about to start doing some closed-source stuff.
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
Ah, I see.
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.
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?
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.
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.
There was a recent post on !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
Fastmail.com has been great here.
- Mail and calendar: Tuta seems the only alternative for mail and calendar if you want custom domain support and encryption by default that Tuta (probably) can’t access even if legally compelled to. Doesn’t have a desktop bridge like Proton does, rather it has a full Linux app for both email and calendar. Which will be a pro for some people and a con for others. And I’m struggling to run it on my nixOS system, for the three people on earth that would matter for.
- Drive: I have a Synology NAS which handles this need very well for me, especially with my own managed wireguard VPN for access away from home
- Pass: Bitwarden
- VPN: Mullvad
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.
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.
how does this work?
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~%3Atext=Emergency+access+uses+public+key%2Cemergency+contact+(the+grantee).
Generally, I’d recommend having different services for everything anyway just for situations like this where if one’s bad, you don’t have to change everything else. Pick what services you really need the premium for and find free tiers that match your needs on others. For VPN, I still use PIA since their reputation is still holding up. I know you said you don’t want to hear it but Bitwarden for password manager and for the rare time I need cloud storage, I use Mega since they offer 20GB on their free tier. Oh, and Disroot for email bit that doesn’t have everything you’re looking for so I can’t recommend it even if it’s been great for my use case.
Yeah that’s something that hovered in my mind for a time, not putting all my eggs in the same basket
disroot, or autistici, depending on your politics
I was thinking about subbing to Proton and researched a few other alternatives but ended up coming to the conclusion that it is kinda useless for me and most people. Unless the other person(s) you email are also using Proton or a similar service then you’re still compromised. I guess it makes sense for some people like journalists or politicians, but only if you know your peers are also using it. I ended up moving everything to iCloud which does most of what you’re looking for.
Personally I switched to a private email just so it would be one less avenue to harvest my data and habits for advertisers.
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
Lucky me I didn’t use any of their services, good luck to you for finding alternatives tho
