You've probably seen a YouTuber or podcaster advertise a VPN service, extolling their virtues and perhaps making claims that prompt you to question how you've been living your digital life without one all this time. The good news is that many of the claims that VPN companies make about the necessity of their products are overblown, but VPNs can still be genuinely useful in some instances, like preventing your internet service provider (ISP) from seeing your online activities, bypassing geo-restrictions and censorship in your country, or providing an extra layer of security when connecting to an untrusted Wi-Fi network.
This article is focused on the best overall VPNs for most people. That means we're not just looking for the fastest VPN, the cheapest VPN, or the one with the most servers. The best options need to work reliably, keep your traffic encrypted, have trustworthy privacy policies and company practices, offer good performance across their server network, support a useful range of platforms and features, and be reasonably priced. We also weigh transparency, audit quality, corporate ownership, and data collection more heavily than many VPN comparisons, which is why some popular VPNs (like NordVPN or ExpressVPN) you've probably see advertised elsewhere don't make our main picks.
We've tested over 20 of the best VPNs on the market, and our picks for the best overall VPNs that balance all of the above criteria well are below. If you want to learn more about the limitations of VPNs and how they work, or if you even need one, check out our article on VPN privacy. If your needs are more specific, check out our dedicated guides for the best cheap VPNs, the best free VPNs for Windows PCs, or the best VPNs for torrenting.
In 2025, we published reviews for 20 different VPN services. These reviews followed months of research, test development, and collaboration among our engineers, testers, writers, photographers, and editors. Our process for each review involves extensive work behind the scenes, including rigorous checks and balances, to deliver the most accurate and useful test results so you can make the right purchasing decisions for your needs.
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Best VPN
Private Browsing9.1Torrent8.9Policies & Practices9.2Security8.6Speed7.3Advertised Max Simultaneous Connections:5Countries:50See all our test resultsData Limit:N/AMullvad is the best VPN that we've tested. It earns our recommendation because it offers a fantastic balance of security, privacy, speed, reliability, ease of use, and is a great value to boot. Even though Mullvad stands out as a privacy-focused VPN service, that doesn't mean it's any less suitable if that's not your priority. Its apps are reliable and easy to install, set up, and use across a variety of platforms, so you can quickly get your VPN connection up and running. It has servers in plenty of different countries and cities all over the world, and you have full control over which server you want to connect to. That makes it easy to try different servers if one isn't working like you want it to. Functionally, Mullvad's core protections (encrypted tunnel, kill switch, and DNS leak prevention) are properly implemented and work properly. Advanced users get split tunneling, obfuscation to help bypass VPN censorship, and DAITA (Defence Against AI-Guided Traffic Analysis) for additional protection. It has a flat-rate pricing plan of €5/month, no matter the subscription period.
Mullvad is a trustworthy VPN. Rather than requiring an email address and password to register, it assigns you a randomly generated account number, and if you want to go even further, you can pay with cryptocurrencies or even cash (yes, cash), so virtually nothing links your account to your real identity. The company also has outstanding privacy policies, a history of transparency, ethical corporate practices, and regularly commissioned independent audits of its privacy and security infrastructure. With all that said, Mullvad's not without trade-offs. It doesn't support port-forwarding, so if you download and seed a lot of torrents, you won't be able to connect to as many peers. Also, it only supports the WireGuard protocol, which is great for the vast majority of users, but if you need more flexibility offered by other protocols, check out our recommendation for the best VPN with more features below: Proton VPN.
Check out our article on the best VPNs for privacy for more context around Mullvad's privacy prowess.
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Best VPN With More Features
Private Browsing7.5Torrent8.7Policies & Practices6.3Security8.6Speed7.0Advertised Max Simultaneous Connections:10Countries:117See all our test resultsData Limit:N/AIf you're looking for a more feature-rich VPN than our top pick, we recommend Proton VPN. Like Mullvad, Proton has effective core functionality, keeping your IP address and DNS requests hidden inside its secure tunnel, and it has a working kill switch that stops potential leaks if your system restarts or the VPN client crashes. It also has a few more convenient features than our top pick. You can connect up to 10 devices simultaneously, and there are servers in over 100 countries, which is useful since it lets you connect to a server closer to you for a better connection. On top of that, you can configure port forwarding, an essential feature for those who need it for specific applications like game servers or P2P clients. Additionally, like Mullvad, it offers obfuscation to make it look like you're not using a VPN, an ad blocker, and 'secure-core,' a feature that ensures your connection passes through Proton's servers before reaching the server in the country you choose.
Proton VPN still isn't perfect, though. Its latency performance is disappointing, so your connection won't feel as snappy, which will affect some activities like gaming. There are also some caveats about its privacy policy and company practices that make it a little less than ideal for privacy-minded users than Mullvad. For example, the privacy policy indicates that Proton may record your IP address in some instances, and it's vague about why. This lack of clarity and jargon-filled language is present throughout its policies and terms of use, making it difficult to discern what exactly Proton does with your data. If you pay monthly, it's much more expensive than Mullvad, but it's a few bucks cheaper if you buy a one-year or two-year subscription. It's a good pick if you need those extra features, but if you don't (or don't know), you're better off going with Mullvad.
If you want to learn more about VPN protocols and how they impact your connectivity, check out our WireGuard vs. OpenVPN investigation.
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Best Free VPN
Private Browsing9.2Torrent6.4Policies & Practices9.4Security8.6Speed0.0Advertised Max Simultaneous Connections:UnlimitedCountries:10See all our test resultsData Limit:10 GBMany free VPNs aren't trustworthy, as they're often unproven, collect excessive user data, or operate with questionable business practices. Windscribe Free is a notable exception, and we recommend it as the best free VPN on the market. The VPN itself performs well and is reliable and easy to use. It keeps your IP address and DNS requests inside an encrypted tunnel and offers a reliable kill switch if the connection drops. Windscribe Free provides servers in 10 countries and supports a wide range of platforms.
Its privacy and no-logging policies are clearly written and explicitly state that the company doesn't log any user traffic, while disclosing exactly what information they do collect for billing and enforcing device limits. You can sign up with only a username for 2GB of monthly data, or provide an email address to increase the limit to 10GB, which Windscribe says is used only for marketing emails. You can also create an anonymous account using a unique 32-character hash as your sole login, requiring no personal information whatsoever. Windscribe operates independently, communicates regularly with users, is open-source across all platforms, and frequently commissions rigorous third-party audits of its security infrastructure and policies surrounding privacy and no-logging. If you're comfortable with a monthly data limit, it's the best free VPN on the market.
If you want to see some other free options, check out our article on the best free VPNs.
Notable Mentions
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Windscribe:
If you want a little more versatility than our top pick provides, Windscribe is an exceptional alternative to Mullvad with a similarly strong focus on privacy and ethics. Their security posture is underpinned by frequent audits of the service's privacy and no-logs policies; however, Mullvad remains our top pick for general use thanks to its competitive pricing. Windscribe requires a full year's payment upfront to match the rate Mullvad offers on a monthly basis.
See our review -
IVPN:
IVPN is another outstanding VPN that's just as good as Mullvad in terms of features, usability, and privacy practices. It even offers three subscription tiers if you want more bundled features or simultaneous devices. We still recommend Mullvad as our top pick because it delivers marginally better speeds, lower latency, and a slightly larger server network, but you can't go wrong with either.
See our review -
NordVPN:
NordVPN is one of the biggest and most well-known VPN services, and it offers a slew of extra features, much like Proton VPN. We don't recommend it because their policies indicate that they can collect a lot of your personal information, make vague statements about user privacy, and publish third-party audits that are limited in scope, making the company difficult to trust.
See our review -
Proton VPN Free:
Proton VPN Free is a great free VPN that, unlike Windscribe Free, has no monthly data cap. The tradeoff is that it's more restrictive in other ways. You can't download torrents, manually select which country to connect to, and there are a few concerns with its corporate and privacy practices that make Windscribe Free more trustworthy and versatile.
See our review
Recent Updates
May 27, 2026:
We've reworked this recommendation article to clarify our picks and make it more approachable, with clearer guidelines and trade-offs between them. We've removed the 'Best Free Unlimited VPN' category and moved Proton VPN Free and IVPN to the Notable Mentions section.
Apr 24, 2026:
We've updated this article to reflect that Windscribe now supports hashed account login. We've reviewed and verified that our current recommendations remain the best picks, and have added Windscribe as a Notable Mention.
Feb 19, 2026:
We've reviewed our picks to ensure they're still relevant and haven't made any changes.
Jan 06, 2026:
We've made extensive changes to this article after updating our VPN reviews to Test Bench 0.10. Most notably, we've changed our free recommendation from Hotspot Shield Free to Windscribe Free, as the former has significantly worse privacy practices compared to the latter. We've also added a new category, 'Best Free Unlimited VPN,' and made changes to the text throughout to reflect our new privacy tests.
May 14, 2025:
We've updated this article to reflect the changes made in Test Bench 0.9.1. Namely, we've adjusted our definition of what we consider a leak, and we've removed Perfect Privacy from the Notable Mentions since it no longer stands out as the only VPN whose kill switch works.
All Reviews
Our recommendations above are currently the best VPNs for most people. We only recommend VPNs with a clear and digestible privacy policy, a proven track record of protecting their customers' privacy, transparency about their ownership, and acceptable security and speeds. We also factor in price (a cheaper VPN wins over a more expensive one if the difference isn't worth it), user feedback, and reputation within the community.
When choosing a VPN, consider what you need it for and understand its limitations. Depending on your risk profile, using one at all times is probably unnecessary. Modern websites, browsers, and devices have ample built-in security measures to protect you from the most common threats. If you're trying to secure an older device that doesn't support third-party VPN installs, take a look at our article on the L2TP protocol.
You can learn more about the industry standards for securing web traffic in our articles on AES-256 encryption and Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA), or dive deeper into the public-key algorithms used to authenticate and secure devices in our guides to Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) and Rivest-Shamir-Adleman (RSA).
With all that in mind, here's the list of all our VPN reviews.