proxy vs vpn - Which is better ? (Explained with a real life example) [2021]

ever since i made videos on vpn and proxies one common question which which i've been getting from you guys is what is the difference between vpn and proxy when to use proxy when to use vpn and which is better so in this video i will try to settle this debate i'll try to explain these two technologies to you in a very simple terms and then you would i hope you would be able to make that judgment yourself hello friends welcome to itk fun day your own channel where we make it interesting for everyone and without

further ado let's understand what is the difference between a vpn and a proxy thank you friends if you're new to iit fronted channel we make it interesting for everyone be it i.t or non-iit we discuss all the latest tools and technologies products productivity hacks and career tips on this channel so if you are new and if you like the content do consider subscribing thank you so friends uh let's take a real life example uh to understand this difference and then we'll go about understanding the unique capabilities of a proxy and a vpn so suppose there

is this country a and there is the secret services within this country and an agent from that secret service wants to get some information from country b and uh you know a specific department one zero eight but obviously country a cannot directly access country b because uh this is uh banned this is uh restrictive information uh for example so what agent x does is it creates a proxy within his own country and that proxy is nothing but a national of country b and then this particular proxy uses his uh you know his credential to login

to that particular department where he was a part of that department and tries to get that particular information and in this particular situation although all the information is requested by this particular agent or secret service it seems as if you know this information is being requested by a national of country b so this is where the identity of this particular agent is getting hidden and the message is being passed but the important thing is that message in itself is open so the message could be that they want to get some information from this particular department

uh suppose that they want to understand uh get some information about the personal uh addresses of personal addresses of all the employees of this department something like that okay so that kind of information is being uh you know trying to be fast and using this particular proxy uh person who's uh actually sitting in the middle will you know try to get this so this is a kind of a proxy example now in the case of vpn if you take the similar example suppose there is a country a and agent x and they want to access

some information from department and that particular country what they can do is there could be a third country sitting in the middle which is country z and there could be one person from that particular country sitting with this particular agency and one person sitting within that particular country so when the agent passes on the request which they want this particular agent transform this into a a number or a cryptographic uh you know code which only this particular person sitting here can recognize so when this information is sent over to this particular person in country z

from z1 to z2 it is hidden the meaning of the message is hidden so while the identity is also hidden the message in itself is also hidden so here what we are hiding we are not only hiding the user identity we are also hiding the privacy of what data is being uh is being asked for so that no one can uh you know do some spoofing or look into this particular information and then this particular age you know this particular guy would then connect with this particular country and try to get uh this information now

uh this might sound like a detective movie or something but it's just for explanation purpose guys don't take it too seriously but uh yes this is what a proxy versus a vpn does so proxy hides your identity where in here you not only hide your identity you are also hiding the data which is which is in transit so now we will talk about the specific architecture and further features of a proxy and a vpn so suppose we are logged in to our office machine and trying to access the internet then in that case your office

machine will go through a proxy server which will be within your premises and then that particular proxy server will go and try to connect to the internet okay so this is within the office network a good example to understand how proxy works now on the flip side suppose like in kovitz situation everyone is now working from home and from home you want to connect to your office network so what will happen is that your machine will have a vpn client installed okay this particular vpn client which i said country zed and uh you know z1

agent which i explained in the real life example so that is the z1 agent vpn client installed on your laptop and then it will pass on the message through a vpn tunnel encrypted message which no one can understand only z1 and z2 z2 is nothing but your vpn server can understand so it will connect to this vpn server and then this particular vpn server will eventually connect to the backend web application server and then the communication will happen so this is in context with an office but uh again uh in a normal situation also you

can use proxies to access you know websites which are outside into a restrictive geography through a proxy and also we through vpn server you can access certain information which are restricted so now let's go through some basic differences between proxy and a vpn so first and the foremost as we discussed uh proxy protects user identity wherein a vpn protects user identity and privacy that is encrypting the message itself encrypting the data in transit the second difference is again very obvious a proxy server hides your ip and protects you through ip masking where in a vpn

hides your ip as well as encrypt the data in transit so what does that imply that implies that vpn can do both the things what proxy can do vpn can do but it can also do further encryption of your data a proxy is used for mostly for web traffic http or https protocols uh wherein vpn can be used for all kind of traffic http tcp udp uh because it works at os os level wherein you know a proxy works at an application layer it is less secured obviously proxies are prone to risk it could be

very easily broken and could be very easily played around with so that's why proxies are not very reliable and secure wherein if you compare vpns and now with some paid good vpns if you take a good vpn then definitely uh you know you will get a good security i i talked about this before so it works proxy work at an application level wherein uh you know a vpn works at os level less reliable more reliable easier to maintain complex to maintain now obviously proxies are much much easier to set up and uh you know maintain

wherein for vpn you need to set up the vpn server you need to set up the vpn client on your machine and then these are also memory intensive so vpn consumes a lot of memory lot of cpu on your client as well because you are installing it on the client uh it is cheaper than vpn uh obviously and uh vpns are you know are always costlier than proxy so whenever you want to buy if you want to invest money uh vpns would always be costlier than proxies and both one similarity which is there is both

can face performance issues but because of different reasons so proxy can face a performance issue if you're supposed if you're using a shared proxy so there's a shared proxy and you're trying to use all the send all the requests to that shared proxy server then you it could face performance issues wherein you can also face performance issue on vpn and that depends on the proximity or the distance of your vpn client from your vpn server if it is too much then obviously going to the vpn server and then vpn server routing it to actual web

server might take a lot of time so in totality if you have to choose either of one then if you can spend some money and you want more security uh and you know you want more features as far as the encryption is concerned then obviously vpn should be your go-to choice proxy could be done for very lightweight surfing you know maybe you want to access some websites which are blocked or something for that kind of work you can use proxy but if you are suppose if you are trying to log into your office environment you

want more security so in all those cases vpns are very very good so when it comes to choosing a specific product a vpn product or a proxy service then obviously there are a lot of documentation available online i'll put some links in the description which will talk about some good products around proxy and vpns but i would suggest you can spend some money and get a good vpn server or vpn service and also specifically which commits to uh no logs retention so that there is no data retained for whatever activity you are doing uh via

that vpn server so that would be very very good option you can try so friends i hope this was a useful video and added some value to your knowledge if it did please consider subscribing hitting the like button and commenting how you like this video and what is your feedback on the same also suggest some topics on which i could make my future videos and yes until next time please keep learning keep sharing all your knowledge and yes keep hustling bye for now