To mark Data Privacy Week 2026, Bitwarden, a widely used open-source password manager, published results from a community survey with over 2,400 responses. The report shows which tools privacy-focused users prefer for browsers, email, search, messaging, VPNs, and more.
For browsers, Brave ranks first (38%), followed by Mozilla Firefox (31%). The ranking also includes Vivaldi, LibreWolf, DuckDuckGo, and Tor Browser, but with a much lower usage rate.
In email, Proton Mail leads (50%), followed by Tuta Mail (16%) and Mozilla Thunderbird (13%). SimpleLogin and Addy.io are the most mentioned email alias services.
DuckDuckGo (35%) and Brave Search (26%) are the top search engines, with Startpage also popular. For messaging, Signal is the clear leader (55%), followed by Telegram (19%). Threema, Element, and Session have smaller user shares.
uBlock Origin is the most used ad blocker (62%), while Proton VPN (48%) and Mullvad (27%) are the leading VPNs.
The survey also looked at views on generative AI. Many respondents said their main concerns are sharing personal data and stopping AI models from training on their data. Many also said they do not use AI tools at all.
You can view the full survey results here.
