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 Skeptic
Has seen "zero trust" on a VPN that still drops every user into the whole office network, "no logs" from a vendor that keeps every connection for a year, and a remote access tool that locked out the whole company when its own control plane went down. Asks who can see the traffic and the metadata, what keeps working when the vendor is offline, whether the audit was published or only announced — and whether the network could be moved to a self-hosted server.
Cloudflare Zero Trust
This judge's pick
Proton VPN for Business
Criterion by criterion
Access model & connectivity
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Per-application zero trust access with agentless browser entry for people without a managed device, a device client over MASQUE with TLS 1.3 and hybrid ML-KEM, IPsec on-ramps for site-to-site, and a tunnel connector off-ramp that needs no inbound ports — the protocols and even the post-quantum key exchange are documented. I found no public information on named gateway regions, always-on or auto-connect behaviour, split DNS, gateway failover and throughput figures, or any path to run this network on self-hosted components.
Proton VPN for Business
This is a managed-gateway VPN: shared servers across 140+ countries plus dedicated gateways and static IPs leased per address, on WireGuard or OpenVPN, with split tunnelling, always-on, a kill switch, time-limited role-based contractor access and custom DNS — though the captured pages give different figures for the size of the server network. Clients are evidenced for Windows (with a step-by-step Intune deployment), Android and iOS; we found no public information on site-to-site links, connectors into AWS, Azure or Kubernetes, peer-to-peer paths, or gateway failover. The zero trust page describes per-user policy steps, but the mechanism evidenced is IP whitelisting and gateway assignment rather than per-application access.
Identity, access policy & device posture
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Single sign-on with Entra ID, Google, Okta and GitHub, SCIM deprovisioning that forces attribute re-attestation when a user is revoked, deny-by-default policies with Include/Require/Exclude logic, and device posture signals polled continuously with each request — identity-first access is documented in depth. The third-party posture integrations are named only generically, no just-in-time approval workflow is described, and enforcement on SaaS applications stops at initial sign-on and session reissue.
Proton VPN for Business
Identity is genuine: SSO with Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, Google Workspace or any SAML 2.0 provider, SCIM that mirrors IdP groups automatically so a leaver loses access, organization-wide two-factor enforcement with reporting, groups whose gateway and server access can be tuned separately, and instant revocation. We found no public information on device posture checks from EDR or MDM tools, just-in-time approval workflows, or session re-authentication; the only device line is a marketing phrase about "identity, device, and network conditions".
Logs, audit trail & incident response
Cloudflare Zero Trust
Access, DNS, HTTP, network and device-posture logs with retention spelled out per plan, admin logs kept 18 months on every plan, Logpush to a SIEM or cloud storage, an audit-log API and webhook or PagerDuty alerting — a genuine trail. But access logs top out at 180 days even on Enterprise, the documentation states plainly that requests matching a Bypass policy are not logged at all, and I found no statement that logs are signed or tamper-evident.
Proton VPN for Business
The activity monitor is opt-in and off by default, and when off no event data is collected — decent for privacy, but the audit trail exists only if someone turned it on before the incident. When enabled it logs user, event with timestamp, device name and app version, and the VPN server's IP, searchable and exportable as CSV; a gateway monitor logs sign-in attempts and server connections per user, and a SIEM connector is offered without any SIEM named. We found no public information on retention periods, alerting, or an admin configuration-change audit log, though the vendor is explicit that browsing history, IP addresses and session lengths are never recorded.
Deployment, API & administration
Cloudflare Zero Trust
A central dashboard that Super Administrators can lock read-only so every change flows through the API or Terraform, scoped API tokens, a deep public REST API, and support channels stated per plan. I found no public information on deploying the client through MDM, on a multi-tenant console for service providers, on granular admin roles beyond the Super Administrator, or on any self-hosted edition.
Proton VPN for Business
Day-to-day running is covered: a central admin dashboard, admin roles a group can inherit, a documented Intune deployment for the Windows client with always-on enforcement, a command-line interface on the higher plan, and 24/7 support with live chat on all plans and phone at six or more users. "API integrations" appears in one enterprise sentence with no documented REST API behind it; we found no public information on Terraform, webhooks or centrally managed client updates. An MSP portal exists, but the pilot evidence covers Proton Pass subscriptions, not this product.
Architecture, reliability & security assurance
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The encryption story is documented better than most — TLS 1.3 with hybrid ML-KEM on every on-ramp and off-ramp, IPsec ESP keyed over a TLS-secured control channel, a public test site — and the pages are honest that traffic transits Cloudflare's own network with gateway HTTPS inspection. But the certifications are announced rather than published, with documents on request or behind a dashboard login, and I found no bug bounty, no public status page or incident history, no documented behaviour of existing connections when the control plane is down, and no self-hosted exit.
Proton VPN for Business
More assurance substance than most: open-source apps in public repositories, a bug bounty with legal safe harbor, a published disclosure policy with five-business-day acknowledgement and a 120-day embargo, named ciphers with forward secrecy, ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II. But the audits are announced rather than published — no report or auditor summary is evidenced — and we found no public information on an architecture document showing what the coordination servers and gateways can see, a status page, or control-plane failover and whether existing connections survive a Proton outage. The SLA section of the terms explicitly excludes the Dedicated IP feature of the Business and Enterprise subscriptions — the part a business actually buys.
European sovereignty
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The contracting party is Cloudflare, Inc. of San Francisco under California law, with primary storage in the United States and the European Economic Area — an American chain at the top. Credit where due: the data processing agreement is published with standard contractual clauses as fallback, the subprocessor list is public with named locations and thirty days' notice of changes, and the Data Localization Suite can pin this product's data to a region including the EU. The entity, the governing law and the default storage remain non-EU even with logs localised, so this lands between middling and strong.
Proton VPN for Business
Proton AG in Geneva under the non-profit Proton Foundation, an EU representative in Luxembourg, a published data processing agreement, ISO 27001 and SOC 2, disclosure only on a binding request from Swiss authorities, and a subprocessor list with locations and transfer guarantees: support through Zendesk and Atlassian in the United States, payments through Chargebee, Stripe and PayPal, each with stated safeguards. What no captured page answers is where the control plane, account data and logs are hosted; we found no public information on hosting location or any self-hosted edition. The chain is named end to end — the vault's address is not.
Pricing transparency
Cloudflare Zero Trust
The Free Plan is "$0 forever" with a fifty-user limit and the inclusions per tier are unusually detailed — retention, CASB integrations, DLP, support channels — but the Contract Plan is an "Annual custom price per user", and no public figure appears for the pay-as-you-go tier or for add-ons like Remote Browser Isolation, Log Explorer or email security. With taxes excluded and fees nonrefundable, a buyer cannot compute a real annual cost from these pages alone.
Proton VPN for Business
Four tiers are public with per-user prices and minimum seats — VPN Essentials at €6.99/user per month from 2 users, VPN Professional at €9.99/user per month, VPN and Pass Professional at €10.99/user per month from 3, Workspace Standard at €12.99/user per month — plus dedicated IPs at +€39.99/month per IP, 22% off yearly, a 30-day money-back guarantee, reverse-charge VAT handling for business plans, 30-day cancellation notice and early-termination terms. Unpriced: the Lumo AI add-on ("Add-on with free trial"), Enterprise ("Let's talk"), and MSP program fees outside the pilot where they are waived. A buyer can compute most of the annual cost from public pages alone — not all of it.
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.