You're travelling, or visiting family in a country where Telegram is restricted, and it's stuck on "Connecting…" again, with pictures in channels loading every other time. People give you different advice: some say get a VPN, others send you a proxy link and swear it's simpler. Searching doesn't help much either. You get app stores, unofficial Telegram clients and comparisons where every other word is "tunnel" or "protocol".
Whether a proxy and a VPN are even the same thing, nobody really explains, even though what you need first of all is Telegram, not your whole phone. Let me say up front that we sell Telegram proxies, so on the subject of VPNs I'm an interested party, and you should keep that in mind. But our part comes only at the very end.
What goes through the middleman
Telegram's help explains the difference without any mystery. Both a proxy and a VPN send your traffic through a separate server. But a proxy usually reroutes the traffic of individual apps, Telegram for example, and doesn't add any extra encryption by itself, while a VPN usually encrypts and reroutes all of your device's traffic: the browser, email, your banking app, maps and everything else installed on the phone.
A Telegram proxy isn't something you download as a separate app. All Telegram mobile and desktop apps can connect through a proxy on their own, and you turn it on in the settings or with a link. So offers to download a special app just for that still surprise me a little.
On Android, a VPN is a feature of the system itself: the first time, the system asks for permission, and while the VPN is running, it shows its own notification. There's also a detail people rarely mention. Android can run only one VPN connection at a time, and when a new one is created, the old one is switched off. So if one VPN is already running on your phone and you turn on a second one, the first one goes off. This follows from Android's source code.
The open-source code of Telegram for Android includes a list of the services the app declares to the system, and there's no VPN service among them. The proxy is switched on inside Telegram itself, so the system doesn't ask you anything, doesn't show its own notification, and the proxy doesn't clash with a VPN that's already on.
What happens to the rest of your phone
With a VPN, your banking app, maps and everything else go through the VPN server too. With a proxy in Telegram, only Telegram is rerouted. Your banking app and all the other apps go online directly, as usual, so there's nothing to turn off for them. And the proxy itself is set up inside the Telegram app, so you don't need to turn on a VPN on your phone for it.
Who can see what you do in Telegram
Neither the proxy owner nor the VPN operator can read your messages, and the reason is the same in both cases: Telegram itself encrypts cloud chats between your device and its server, and secret chats also between the devices of the people talking. The data leaves your phone already encrypted, and the middleman passes on something it can't read.
But the middleman does see a few things. Telegram's help says plainly that the owner of an MTProto proxy can't read your messages or identify your account, but can collect metadata: which IP you connect from, at what times, and the simple fact that you're trying to use Telegram. So when a middleman who sees your address promises that "nobody will see you", I wouldn't believe it.
With a VPN the picture is wider, because all of your device's traffic goes through it. The digital rights group EFF writes in its guide to choosing a VPN that a VPN hides your data from your internet provider, but everything the provider used to see is now visible to the VPN operator. According to them, many such services keep as much information as providers do and may log IP addresses. For the same reason as above, the VPN operator can't read your Telegram messages, but it does see where the rest of your phone goes.
That's why Telegram gives the same advice for both: use only trusted providers, because proxies and VPNs can be very different.
Where a proxy won't help you
On calls, I looked at Telegram's open-source code for desktop and Android, and according to that code, call audio doesn't go through the proxy. In Telegram Desktop, the function that decides whether a proxy is suitable for calls currently always answers "no", and on Android a private call is created with an empty proxy parameter.
Telegram Web doesn't support proxies at all, so in the browser a proxy won't change anything. A Telegram proxy doesn't touch your other apps either: the browser, email and everything else on the phone go online the same way as without it, which is handy for your banking app.
If all you need is Telegram
Maybe you were searching for a VPN for Telegram, but if Telegram is the only thing that matters to you, I think a proxy is enough. It's turned on right inside the app, it leaves your banking app and the rest of the phone alone, and the phone doesn't ask you for any permission. What a Telegram proxy is and how to choose one, I've covered in detail in a separate article.
If the task is about the whole device, for example on public Wi-Fi where you don't know who runs it, then that's a different tool for a different job. Telegram, by the way, has nothing against VPNs and says that if you already use a VPN you trust, you can keep using it. That kind of tool is worth choosing just as carefully as a proxy, since all of your phone's traffic goes through it.
Now, as promised, about us. FreeGate is a personal MTProto proxy that works only inside Telegram: your banking app and other apps open as usual, and there's nothing to turn on or off. Each device gets its own link, and if it leaks, you can change it in your account with one tap, and the old one stops working at once. We can't see your messages, Telegram encrypts them itself, and the proxy only passes on encrypted data. FreeGate works in the official Telegram apps for iOS, Android, Windows, macOS and Linux, and everything said above about calls applies to us too.
You sign up with an email, no phone number and no automatic charges. After you sign up and confirm your address, you can try it free for 1 day, with no payment. After that it's $1.00 for 30 days or $2.50 for 90 days, and that's the price per device, so for a phone and a computer you choose 2 when buying. You can connect at freegate.app/world.