I am still fairly new to doing more for my digital privacy (VPNs were just a way for me to torrent in college) but I have been using ProtonVPN for almost a year now. I saw AdGuard mentioned over on r/privacy so I did some looking on their website and it seems like it does a lot that NetShield does but offers some other protections for iOS especially in Safari. Anyone use both? Is it redundant to run both of these? They also have apps for Windows and MacOS.
If you use the AdGuard extension, it isn’t redundant to use NetShield. Proton’s NetShield uses DNS blocking, which is good, but it can only cover 3rd party domains, and also can’t do any cosmetic filtering. Its best to use a combination of a good extension (AdGuard on iOS, uBlock Origin everywhere else) with a good DNS blocker (I just use NextDNS which is more customizable and covers a lot more than Proton’s NetShield). I don’t see any reason to use AdGuard’s desktop programs because that’ll also just do DNS blocking, so it should be redundant.
Why add in adguard as a middle man?
On IOS you can only run one or the other. At home you can run a VPN on you router for devices connected. And on the IOS device you run for example NextDNS or ControlD or any other DNS blocker you prefer.
I don’t think you can use NextDNS, or any other dns blocking tool in tandem with Netshield. It seems to be one or the other
ProtonVPN in iOS used to support Ikev2, which allowed using the Adguard DNS filter configuration along with the Proton VPN app at the same time. Now that Ikev2 has been dropped for ProtonVPN, is there any other way to keep both running instead of only just either one standalone?
You can on Android and Linux (I do myself on Android with Android’s “Private DNS” feature), not sure about other platforms though