Twenty gigabytes versus five. That is the blunt arithmetic separating MEGA and Proton Drive on their free tiers, and it tells only part of the story. Both services encrypt files on the user's own device before anything touches a server, which already puts them ahead of mainstream storage providers that can, in principle, read what you upload. The real choice is not about space alone but about what kind of digital life each company is asking you to trust it with.
Encryption quality matters as much as encryption presence. End-to-end encryption means the provider never holds the key to decrypt your files, so a breach of their servers yields only scrambled data. That is a meaningful privacy guarantee, but it is not the only variable worth weighing. People who already run a privacy-conscious setup, including a VPN for network traffic, should remember that storage encryption and connection encryption solve different problems; if you want to confirm your network layer is doing its job, a periodic check using resources on how to test whether your VPN is leaking is a sensible habit alongside choosing an encrypted cloud. The two protections are complementary, not interchangeable.
A Troubled History, and What Came After It
MEGA's cryptography has not had a clean record. In 2022, researchers at ETH Zurich published a paper titled "MEGA: Malleable Encryption Goes Awry," detailing five attacks against the platform's design, including one that could recover a user's private key after several hundred login attempts. MEGA acknowledged the flaws, patched its clients, and paid the researchers through a bug bounty program. A subsequent paper presented at Eurocrypt 2023, "Caveat Implementor!," found that the initial fixes were themselves vulnerable, prompting MEGA to make more substantial architectural changes. It is worth stressing that every one of these attacks required an attacker to control MEGA's infrastructure or intercept an encrypted connection; none described a method an ordinary outside party could use against a typical account. Still, a public record of repeated cryptographic repair is different from no public record at all, and Proton Drive has no comparable history of disclosed breaks.
Two Philosophies, Two Business Models
MEGA's pitch is generosity: the largest free allowance in the category, apps for every major platform including Linux, and paid tiers that emphasize raw storage alongside chat and meeting tools. Proton Drive's pitch is coherence: a smaller free allocation, but membership in an ecosystem built around Proton Mail and Proton VPN, operating under Swiss jurisdiction with a reputation built deliberately around privacy as an institutional mission rather than a feature. Proton's apps are open source and have been externally audited by the security firm Securitum, and every shared link, even on the free plan, can carry both a password and an expiry date. MEGA's standard share link, by contrast, embeds the decryption key in the URL itself, which means anyone holding that link can open the file without ever logging in. Copying the file link and key separately is possible and safer, but it is not the default behavior.
Practical Guidance for Real Decisions
Neither company can recover your files if you lose your password, because neither one holds the key. That is not a flaw; it is what end-to-end encryption means. Both offer a recovery credential at sign-up, a Recovery Key for MEGA and a recovery phrase or file for Proton, and saving that credential offline is the single most effective safeguard against losing access. For a simple, free place to park a documents folder, MEGA's extra storage is hard to argue against. For sharing sensitive material such as private photographs, Proton Drive's password-and-expiry link controls give it a narrow but genuine edge. For building a broader privacy-centered routine that includes email and network traffic, Proton's ecosystem approach offers more coherence than MEGA's storage-first model.