I’m going to need an ELI5 because I have read several explanations online, and I still don’t fully understand what makes them different. Why would you want to use one over the other? Don’t they both just forward your internet traffic? How do they work, in general?
A VPN operates on the network layer (3) meanwhile a proxy works on the application layer (4) that sits on top of first.
This means that using a vpn will send all network traffic from all apps over it (if configured accordingly) meanwhile a proxy will only work for the http(s) traffic in a browser configured with it.
For most applications, you won’t be able to tell the difference.