How Many Devices Proton VPN Allows

This page is part of the Proton VPN FAQ Hub.

How many devices can you connect on each plan?

How many devices Proton VPN allows depends only on which plan you hold, and the numbers are refreshingly simple. There is no per-platform quirk, no separate mobile allowance and no upsell for additional seats on the consumer plans.

Worth noting that the paid tiers share the same figure. Proton Unlimited does not buy you more connections than VPN Plus, so anyone upgrading purely for extra devices is spending money for nothing, and the only step that changes the number is the move from the free plan to Plus. The only plan where the count works differently is the business product, where connections attach to user seats.

• Proton VPN Free: 1 device at a time, servers in a small randomly assigned set of countries, no NetShield or Secure Core
• Proton VPN Plus: 10 devices at a time, 20,000+ servers in 140+ countries, full feature set
• Proton Unlimited: the same 10 device connections, bundled with Mail, Calendar, Drive, Pass and Wallet
• Proton VPN Business: connections allocated per user seat rather than per account, so the maths differs entirely

Is 10 connections actually enough?

For one or two people, comfortably. A phone, a laptop, a work machine, a tablet and a television still leaves headroom. For a shared house or a family of four, 10 disappears faster than you would think once everybody has a phone and a laptop and somebody has plugged in a streaming stick.

Some providers advertise unlimited simultaneous connections and Proton does not match that. It is a genuine trade-off worth naming rather than glossing over, as the full Proton VPN review does at length: if you are equipping a large household on one subscription, count your hardware against how many devices Proton VPN allows before buying. The router approach below solves it for most people, though it is a workaround rather than a raised limit.

Does a router count towards how many devices Proton VPN allows?

Yes. Configure Proton VPN on a compatible router and the entire network behind it travels through a single virtual private network connection as far as Proton is concerned. Twenty devices on your wifi, one slot used. This is why router setup keeps getting recommended to anyone with a lot of hardware, alongside the ordinary way to use Proton VPN on each device, and it is also the only practical way to cover devices that have no VPN app of their own.

There are costs. Throughput is capped by your router’s processor, and cheap consumer hardware struggles badly with encryption overhead, so a gigabit line can end up delivering a fraction of that. You also lose per-device control: everything behind the router uses the same server in the same country, so putting one laptop somewhere else means running the desktop app over the top anyway. Which features apply depends on the configuration file you downloaded rather than an in-app switch.

Which platforms and devices are supported?

Proton VPN ships native apps for the mainstream operating systems and covers the rest through router configuration. The support is wide but not total, and the gaps are worth knowing before you buy rather than after, as is whether a Plus plan includes email.

The notable absence is a native app for the smart TV operating systems used by Samsung and LG. If your television runs Tizen or webOS, your options are a router configuration, a Fire TV Stick running the Android TV app, or casting from a device that is already protected.

• Windows, macOS, Linux (Debian, Ubuntu, Mint and Fedora) and ChromeOS
• iOS and iPadOS, Android and Android TV
• Amazon Fire TV Stick and Fire TV, via the Android TV build
• Apple TV, Nvidia Shield, Xiaomi Mi Box and Kodi
• Chrome and Firefox browser extensions on paid plans
• Routers running OpenWRT, AsusWRT, DD-WRT, pfSense, Tomato, FreshTomato, Vilfo or InvizBox
• Games consoles, Chromecast and Tizen or webOS televisions, covered only through a configured router

What happens when you hit the limit?

The connection attempt fails with a message telling you the maximum number of sessions is already in use. Nothing gets kicked off behind your back, which is the correct behaviour, though it does mean hunting down whichever forgotten device is holding the slot. The usual suspects are a desktop left running with the kill switch on, a streaming stick that reconnects at boot, and an old phone in a drawer.

Disconnecting in the app on any device frees the slot straight away. If you cannot physically reach the offending device, changing your Proton account password terminates existing sessions, which is heavy-handed but reliable. Choosing Proton VPN Plus with 10 device connections rather than the single-device free tier is what makes any of this manageable in the first place, and a subscription bought through BAIZAAR carries exactly the same allowance.

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