Hoodik vs Proton Drive: A Proton Drive Alternative You Can Try for 14 Days

Proton Drive and Hoodik share the same core principle: your files are encrypted before they leave your device, and the server never sees plaintext data. Both are "zero-knowledge" in the meaningful sense: the service operator cannot read your files even if compelled to. But they deliver on that promise in completely different ways.

Managed Service vs Self-Hosted Infrastructure

Proton Drive is a managed service. You sign up, you get storage, it works. Proton AG runs the servers in Switzerland, handles the infrastructure, applies updates, manages backups, and deals with hardware failures. You trust Proton (the company, their code, their operational security) and in exchange you get a polished product with no operational burden.

Hoodik Cloud is the same shape of product. You start a 14-day trial, we run the instance, and you do not touch a server. Files are still encrypted on your device before upload. The server code is public, and if you leave you can export the instance and run it yourself. New trials are placed in the EU. The US region is there only if the files have to stay in the US.

Storage is the plan: 100 GB for €9 a month, 500 GB for €19, 2 TB for €49, 10 TB for €149. Annual is ten times the monthly price. Nothing is charged until day 15.

The Trust Model

With Proton Drive, you're trusting Proton's client-side code (which is open source and audited) to perform encryption correctly, and trusting that their server doesn't do anything malicious with metadata or with future app updates. Proton has a strong track record here and Swiss jurisdiction provides meaningful legal protections. Their apps have been independently audited.

With Hoodik, the trust surface is different. The server code is published, so you can read it, modify it, compile it yourself. You control the deployment, so there's no possibility of a silent server-side update that weakens security. But you're trusting yourself to keep the system secure and updated, and the project is younger with a smaller security audit history.

Proton is the right choice if you want a known company running the servers and you are fine trusting their closed server. Hoodik Cloud is the choice if you want us to run it and you want the server code public. You do not have to become the operator to get that.

Where Proton Drive Wins

Create a Proton account and you're storing encrypted files. The web interface is clean and responsive, the mobile apps are well-built, and the desktop client exists. There's no Docker, no server provisioning, no DNS configuration. For the vast majority of people who want encrypted storage, this is the correct answer.

Drive doesn't exist in isolation either. It's part of a suite that includes Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, and Proton Pass. If you're already in the Proton ecosystem, everything integrates naturally under one account with a unified security model. That convenience is worth something.

Proton has been building encrypted services since 2014. They've weathered legal challenges, published transparency reports, and undergone multiple security audits. When you tell someone "my files are on Proton Drive," they probably know what that means. That established reputation has real value, especially when explaining your setup to less technical collaborators.

Swiss jurisdiction provides strong data protection laws and keeps them outside the Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. End-to-end encryption means the jurisdiction matters less for file contents (the server can't decrypt them either way), but it's still meaningful for metadata protection and legal requests.

Where Hoodik Wins

On Hoodik Cloud the instance sits in the EU unless you ask for the US. We run it. We still cannot read the files, because the key never reaches us. If you leave, you export the instance. That is the part you own, not a server you have to babysit from day one.

Storage on Hoodik Cloud is the plan you pick, from 100 GB at €9 a month up to 10 TB at €149. That is not unlimited, and it is not priced to beat Proton per gigabyte. You are paying for a private instance whose server code you can read.

Proton's apps are open source, but the server code is proprietary. You trust that their server does what they say. Hoodik's server is source-available, so you can read the Rust code, verify the security model, compile from source, or fork it. For organizations that want to inspect what's actually running, this matters.

The reverse is true on the client side and worth stating: Proton publishes all of its apps, and Hoodik does not. Hoodik's web client is public, along with the cryptfns and transfer crates that perform the encryption in every client (the mobile apps call into them over Rust FFI rather than reimplementing anything), but the Flutter app wrapped around them is closed. So Proton is more open where you use it and Hoodik is more open where your ciphertext lands.

On price per gigabyte, a shared service wins. Hoodik Cloud costs more per gigabyte because the subscription is your own instance, not a folder in someone else's.

The cryptography is a generation apart. Proton Drive encrypts with OpenPGP, which uses classical elliptic curves for key exchange. Hoodik wraps every file key with a hybrid of X25519 and ML-KEM-768, the key exchange NIST standardized for the post-quantum era. If someone records your encrypted traffic today hoping to decrypt it when quantum computers arrive, that plan works against classical key exchange and fails against Hoodik's hybrid wrap. Login is different too: Hoodik uses OPAQUE, so your password never leaves your device in any form. A password the server never receives is a password it can't leak in a breach.

Search deserves a mention here. Hoodik uses a BERT tokenizer to break search terms into tokens, hashes each token with SHA256, and only sends hashes to the server for matching. You can search across all your files from any device without the server ever learning what you searched for. Proton Drive's search is device-local, so it only works on files that have been synced to that device.

Hoodik also adapts to your infrastructure: run it behind your own reverse proxy, integrate it with other self-hosted services via the HTTP API, swap object storage backends. Proton Drive's infrastructure is fixed by design.

Who Should Use Which

If you want encrypted cloud storage that works out of the box, especially if you're already using other Proton services, Proton Drive is an excellent choice. It's a well-executed product from a company with genuine privacy principles.

If you want that guarantee without running a server, start the Hoodik Cloud trial. It is the same code, run by us, in the EU unless you ask for the US. Export is there if you later want the instance on your own machine. It is the way out, not the thing you sign up for.

Both deliver the core guarantee: the server cannot read your files. Hoodik adds a post-quantum key exchange on top. Beyond that, the difference is everything around it: who manages the infrastructure, where it runs, and what it costs.