As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates Cloudflare Zero Trust 3.5/5 and Proton VPN for Business 3/5 in Business VPN & Zero Trust Access. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Cloudflare Zero Trust and 0 pick Proton VPN for Business. Cloudflare Zero Trust scores higher on 5 of 7 criteria (Logs, audit trail & incident response, Identity, access policy & device posture, Access model & connectivity, plus 2 more). Proton VPN for Business scores higher on 2 of 7 criteria (Pricing transparency and European sovereignty). Provenance — Cloudflare Zero Trust: Rest of world; Proton VPN for Business: UK / wider Europe. Ratings are the AI panel’s opinion, formed from public evidence: how scores are made.
Five criteria lean Cloudflare Zero Trust and two lean Proton VPN for Business — that split is the answer here. Four criteria go to Cloudflare by six judges to zero — access and connectivity 7.3 to 5.7, identity and policy 7.7 to 6.0, visibility and audit 7.2 to 5.0, deployment and administration 6.7 to 5.2 — and architecture and assurance runs 6.5 to 5.7 with three judges leaning Cloudflare and three ties. Proton takes pricing transparency 7.3 to 4.0, six judges to zero, on four public tiers from VPN Essentials at €6.99/user per month to Workspace Standard at €12.99/user per month against Cloudflare's "Annual custom price per user" Contract Plan. Sovereignty goes Proton's way 6.2 to 5.7, with three judges leaning Proton, one Cloudflare, two tying. Weighted totals span 6.1 to 7.0 for Cloudflare and 5.3 to 5.9 for Proton. No overall winner: the benches lean differently by criterion.
Choose Cloudflare Zero Trust if
You need deny-by-default, per-application access into your own network rather than whitelisting a dedicated exit IP at the perimeter — access and connectivity leans Cloudflare Zero Trust six judges to zero, 7.3 to 5.7.
Your auditors ask what is retained and for how long: Cloudflare Zero Trust states admin logs kept eighteen months on every plan and access logs up to 180 days on Enterprise — though requests matching a Bypass policy are not logged — while the Proton verdict reports opt-in monitoring with retention periods that are not published; visibility and audit is 7.2 to 5.0, six judges to zero.
Your identity stack runs on Microsoft Entra ID, Google, Okta or GitHub and you need SCIM revocation that forces re-attestation — identity and policy is 7.7 to 6.0, six judges to zero.
You require documented encryption — the verdict credits MASQUE over TLS 1.3 with hybrid ML-KEM — and a published subprocessor list; architecture and assurance is 6.5 to 5.7 with three judges leaning Cloudflare, three ties, and zero leaning Proton.
Your users should reach internal apps from a browser without installing VPN clients — the bench credits agentless browser access, and deployment and administration leans Cloudflare Zero Trust 6.7 to 5.2, six judges to zero.
Choose Proton VPN for Business if
You need a per-user price on the page before committing: four public tiers from VPN Essentials at €6.99/user per month, minimum 2 users, to Workspace Standard at €12.99/user per month — pricing transparency leans Proton VPN for Business six judges to zero, 7.3 to 4.0.
Your procurement must compare vendors on published numbers; Cloudflare Zero Trust's Contract Plan is an 'Annual custom price per user', and its verdict reports we found no public per-user price for paid tiers or add-ons.
You lease dedicated IPs for partners to whitelist and want the cost stated in advance — Proton publishes dedicated IPs at +€39.99/month per IP.
Sovereignty is your deciding criterion and the Geneva entity weighs in your favor: three judges lean Proton on sovereignty, 6.2 to 5.7, with Proton AG in Geneva; note the verdict leaves where account data and logs are hosted an unanswered question, and the captured sovereignty attributes read 'unknown' for both products.
Read this comparison as one judge. Each weighs the same scores by what they care about.
The DevOps Engineer
Platform engineer at a sixty-person software company with servers at Hetzner, a Kubernetes cluster on AWS and a bastion host everyone shares a key for. Wants a mesh that reaches every server and cluster without inbound ports, access policies kept in Git and applied with Terraform, SSH access tied to the identity provider, connectors that run as containers, and a published architecture that says what the vendor's relays can see.
Cloudflare Zero Trust
This judge's pick
Proton VPN for Business
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
Cloudflare Zero Trust
This is per-application access rather than whole-network VPN: identity-first ZTNA to private apps and infrastructure, with cloudflared tunnel off-ramps carrying any protocol, a device client connecting over MASQUE with hybrid ML-KEM, agentless browser access for contractors, and split tunnelling in the device management API. SSH policies can even pin allowed UNIX usernames per policy. We found no public information on client platform lists, always-on behaviour, or connectors specific to Kubernetes, so it sits below the very top.
Proton VPN for Business
Clients egress through shared servers or dedicated IPs across many named countries, with WireGuard, split tunnelling, always-on, a kill switch and an Intune-scripted Windows rollout. The gateway model works by whitelisting a dedicated IP at the company perimeter, and we found no public information on connectors reaching servers without inbound firewall rules, site-to-site links into cloud networks, or per-application access — so I would be opening ports on every Hetzner box instead of running a mesh.
Identity, access policy & device posture
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Deny-by-default per-app policies with Include/Require/Exclude logic, single sign-on against Entra ID, Google, Okta and SCIM-provisioning providers, and device posture checked continuously from the client or a third-party service — the policy model is documented in enough depth to actually run least privilege. Policies are manageable as code through API and Terraform, non-identity attributes are re-evaluated on every request, and revoking a user in the identity provider forces attribute re-attestation over SCIM. We found no public information on just-in-time approval flows or named EDR and MDM integrations.
Proton VPN for Business
Single sign-on with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace and SAML 2.0, SCIM mirroring IdP groups automatically, enforced two-factor with reporting, per-gateway and per-server group policies, admin roles on groups and instant revocation are all documented. We found no public information on device posture checks from EDR or MDM tools, just-in-time access with approval, or policies kept as code and applied with Terraform.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Retention is published per plan and per log type — 18 months for admin audit logs, up to 180 days for access logs on the enterprise plan — with Logpush to SIEM or cloud storage on contract plans, webhook and PagerDuty alerting APIs, and a Log Explorer spanning access requests, DNS, HTTP, network, session and device posture datasets. One caveat that matters to me: requests matching a Bypass policy are not logged. We found no public information on a live session view with the ability to terminate connections.
Proton VPN for Business
The activity and gateway monitors log who connected to which gateway, when and on what device, with a real-time connection view, instant revocation, CSV export and a strong statement of what is not logged. Monitoring is opt-in and off by default, retention is not stated, and the SIEM integration is named without tools, schema or streaming detail.
Deployment, API & administration
Cloudflare Zero Trust
A Terraform provider and a documented REST API cover applications, policies, tunnels, devices and identity providers, and the dashboard can be locked read-only so every change flows through API or Terraform — exactly the GitOps discipline I want for our shared bastion replacement. Scoped API tokens let automation touch only Zero Trust settings, and support channels are stated per plan. We found no public information on MDM client deployment, a multi-tenant console for service providers, or a self-hosted edition.
Proton VPN for Business
A central admin console, MDM and Group Policy deployment including a scripted always-on rollout, admin roles, 24/7 support with phone and screen sharing at six or more users, and an MSP pilot with per-seat pricing are evidenced. The API appears only as the phrase "API integrations", and we found no public information on a documented REST API, a Terraform provider or a self-hosted edition.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The post-quantum design is unusually well published — hybrid ML-KEM on the client on-ramp, post-quantum TLS 1.3 on hops between Cloudflare data centres, IPsec ESP off-ramps, and a public test site — and the pages state plainly that Gateway inspects DNS, network sessions and HTTP as traffic transits Cloudflare's own network, which answers much of my what-can-the-relays-see question. ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II and C5 are listed with compliance documentation downloadable from the dashboard, alongside a 100% uptime guarantee. We found no public information on open-source components, a bug bounty, control-plane failover behaviour or public incident history.
Proton VPN for Business
Open-source apps in public repositories, independent audits, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, a bug bounty with safe harbor and a disclosure policy with five-business-day acknowledgement are all published. We found no public information on an architecture describing what the vendor's servers can see, control-plane failover, what happens to connections when the service is down, or a public status page with incident history.
European sovereignty
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The contracting entity is Cloudflare, Inc. of San Francisco under California law, primary storage is the United States and the European Economic Area, and support subprocessors such as Salesforce and Slack are located in the US. On the European side, the Data Localization Suite can restrict storage and log destination to an EU region, the subprocessor list publishes names and locations with 30 days notice and objection rights, a data processing agreement is published, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 are stated. An EU storage option alongside a US entity and US governing law puts this mid-table for us.
Proton VPN for Business
Proton AG in Geneva under Swiss law with a Luxembourg EU representative, a published data processing agreement, subprocessors listed with purposes, locations and transfer guarantees, and ISO 27001 and SOC 2 stated. Payments run through US processors under standard contractual clauses, and the captured pages do not state where account data and logs are processed beyond the Swiss entity.
Pricing transparency
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The free tier is concrete — "$0 forever" with a 50-user limit — and plan inclusions, log retention and add-ons are tabulated, but the contract plan is quoted only as an "annual custom price per user". We found no public information on the pay-as-you-go per-user price or on figures for the add-ons such as Remote Browser Isolation, email security and Log Explorer. VAT treatment is stated (charges exclude taxes, the customer pays them) and monthly, annual and pay-as-you-go billing exist, but a real annual cost is not computable from these pages alone.
Proton VPN for Business
Four business plans are priced per user with minimum seats, dedicated IPs at "+€39.99/month per IP", a 22% yearly discount, reverse-charge VAT handling for business plans, a 30-day money-back guarantee and a 30-day cancellation notice, with SIEM and CLI gated to the higher plan. Enterprise is contact-sales and the MSP pilot's fee schedule is defined per agreement rather than a public rate card.
Sovereignty, side by side
Dimension
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Proton VPN for Business
Legal entity
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting location
Not determined
Not determined
Hosting options
Not determined
Not determined
Open source
Not determined
Not determined
Data processing agreement
Not determined
Not determined
Transfer impact assessment
Not determined
Not determined
Facts, side by side
Only facts both products carry under the same definition — anything else would not be a fair row.
Questions about Cloudflare Zero Trust and Proton VPN for Business
Which is better, Cloudflare Zero Trust or Proton VPN for Business?
As of 6 Nov 2026, the panel rates Cloudflare Zero Trust higher: 3.5/5 against 3/5. Weighted by what each judge cares about, 6 of the 6 judges pick Cloudflare Zero Trust and 0 pick Proton VPN for Business. Which one fits depends on the criteria that matter to you; the table on this page shows both side by side, and each judge’s reading has its own page. Both were scored by the same AI bench under the same rubric, from public evidence only, as the methodology describes.
Is Cloudflare Zero Trust or Proton VPN for Business European?
Cloudflare Zero Trust is not European by provenance (Rest of world). Proton VPN for Business is European (UK / wider Europe). Provenance is read from each company’s own legal pages: who builds it and who owns it.
Do Cloudflare Zero Trust and Proton VPN for Business have a free plan?
As of 6 Nov 2026, Cloudflare Zero Trust’s own pages state a free plan; Proton VPN for Business’s pages as captured do not. Each product page links the pricing page it was read from.