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 MSP Technician
Senior technician at an IT service provider in Hamburg that looks after thirty clients, from tax advisers to a dental chain. Each client has its own remote access, set up by whoever was on site that year. Wants one console with a tenant per client, gateways and users added in minutes, access logs a client can be shown after an incident, billing per tenant, and prices per user that can be quoted without calling the vendor first.
Cloudflare Zero Trust
This judge's pick
Proton VPN for Business
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Access is per application with deny-by-default policies, three on-ramps including agentless browser access and the device client, a tunnel off-ramp needing no inbound ports, and protocols documented down to MASQUE over TLS 1.3 with hybrid ML-KEM and IPsec with IKEv2. Site-to-site arrives via Cloudflare WAN with layer 3/4 firewalling. We found no public information on always-on behaviour, split DNS or the client platforms.
Proton VPN for Business
WireGuard, OpenVPN, AES-256 and ChaCha20 are documented, with split tunnelling, always-on enforced per organisation, kill switch and dedicated IPs in 20+ countries that teams use as gateways to whitelist company resources, plus a shared network of 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries. The model is exit-based rather than a gateway on the client's own network: we found no public information on site-to-site links to cloud networks, connectors behind a customer firewall, peer-to-peer connectivity or clientless browser access for contractors.
Identity, access policy & device posture
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Single sign-on with Entra ID, Google, Okta and GitHub is documented, SCIM revocation forces re-attestation of a user's attributes, policies are deny-by-default per application with Include, Require and Exclude rules, and device posture from the client or a third-party provider is polled continuously during the session, manageable as code with Terraform. The third-party posture providers are not named on the captured pages, and we found no public information on just-in-time access with approval.
Proton VPN for Business
SSO with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace and any SAML 2.0 provider, SCIM provisioning from Okta and Entra mirrored automatically, enforced two-factor authentication with uptake reporting, and groups with access customised per gateway cover most of what I need when a client phones about a leaver. Time-limited, role-based contractor access is claimed, but we found no public information on device posture checks such as disk encryption or EDR status gating a connection.
Logs, audit trail & incident response
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Access, DNS, HTTP, network, session and admin logs are retained per plan with the periods stated — access logs up to 180 days and admin logs 18 months — queryable in Log Explorer, storable in an R2 bucket, and streamed to a SIEM or cloud storage on the contract plan, with webhook and PagerDuty alerting available. The pages also state what is not logged (Bypass requests) and which personal data the logs contain. That is what I need to show a client after an incident.
Proton VPN for Business
The gateway monitor records sign-in attempts, timestamps, devices and server connections per user, the activity monitor logs device name, app version and IP with CSV export, and a real-time connection view with instant revocation exists alongside a clear no-logs statement. Activity monitoring is opt-in and off by default with no data collected when off, retention periods are not published, and SIEM integration is named without naming any SIEM tool — so what I can show a client after an incident depends on having switched logging on first.
Deployment, API & administration
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The entire Zero Trust configuration is manageable through a documented REST API and a Terraform provider, with scoped API tokens, a dashboard read-only lock forcing changes through code, and support channels stated per plan. For a service provider the gaps matter: we found no public information on a multi-tenant console, per-tenant billing, or MDM deployment of the client.
Proton VPN for Business
A central admin dashboard, deployment via MDM, Group Policy or direct download with a detailed Intune always-on walkthrough, admin roles assignable to groups, and 24/7 support with phone from six users are all documented. The multi-tenant MSP portal is what I want, but the pilot we can see covers Proton Pass only and is reached through the sales team, and the API appears only as an unexplained 'API integrations' phrase with no documentation we could quote.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The encryption architecture is unusually well documented — on-ramps, off-ramps, hops between the vendor's data centres, and post-quantum key agreement end to end — and the assurance stack is broad: ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, FedRAMP High and the German BSI's C5 catalogue, with compliance documentation downloadable from the dashboard, an independent auditor report no older than thirteen months under the data processing agreement, and a 100% uptime SLA. We found no public information on a status page, a bug bounty, control-plane failover or open-source components.
Proton VPN for Business
Open-source apps with public repositories, independent audits stated, ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, a published vulnerability disclosure policy with safe harbor, a bug bounty, and named encryption including WireGuard, ChaCha20, Curve25519 with forward secrecy give a solid assurance story. We found no public information on control-plane high availability, behaviour during outages or a published audit report, and the SLA surfaces only through its exclusions, which carve out the dedicated IP feature of the Business and Enterprise plans.
European sovereignty
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The contracting entity is Cloudflare, Inc. of San Francisco under California law with AAA arbitration, primary storage is the United States and the EEA, and support runs through US subprocessors such as Salesforce and Slack. Offsetting that, the Data Localization Suite can restrict storage to an EU region, the subprocessor list is published with locations including EEA entries, and a versioned data processing agreement with SCC fallback and Data Privacy Framework certification is available — a documented chain, but not a European one.
Proton VPN for Business
Proton AG in Geneva under the supervision of the non-profit Proton Foundation, an EU representative in Luxembourg, a published data processing agreement, disclosure only on a binding Swiss authority request, and a subprocessor list with locations and transfer safeguards put this ahead of a typical US vendor. Where the control plane and connection logs are actually hosted is not stated, and payment and support subprocessors run through the United States, Singapore, Taiwan and Macedonia.
Pricing transparency
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The free tier is priced at $0 forever for up to 50 users, and VAT treatment, billing cadence (monthly, annual or pay-as-you-go by credit card) and the no-refund rule are public. But the contract plan is an annual custom price per user, every add-on (email security, remote browser isolation, full DLP, Log Explorer) is unpriced, and the pay-as-you-go plan carries no per-user figure on the captured pages — so I cannot quote a client without contacting the vendor.
Proton VPN for Business
Every VPN tier carries a public per-user price with minimum users, dedicated IPs are priced at '+€39.99/month per IP', and the yearly discount, trial, 30-day money-back, cancellation notice and business reverse-charge VAT treatment are all public — enough to quote a client without calling the vendor. Only the Enterprise plan and MSP pricing, defined per agreement as a program fee plus a price per admin seat and per managed licence, stay behind the sales team.
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.