The best VPNs for beginners

Windscribe asks less of you than almost anything else you can buy. Registration takes no email address and no password. One subscription covers as many devices as you own, free tier included. And if you only ever connect to three countries, you can buy three rather than the whole network, which is a pricing idea nobody else has tried. The ease of use and the value both come from the same instinct: charge honestly, and ask for nothing you do not need.

Its privacy case rests on something harder to fake than a promise. The company publishes a running count of legal requests received and complied with, and the second number has stayed at zero because there has never been anything on the servers to hand over — a position it has held through actual court proceedings, and again when police seized a machine and found a stock install running from memory.

What you give up is jurisdiction, and it is not a small thing. Windscribe Limited is registered in Ontario under Ontario law, which puts it inside the five-country intelligence agreement that most people buying a VPN are trying to get away from. The last outside review of its server software was in June 2024, so it now sits just outside what this site counts as recently checked.

hide.me is run by a Malaysian company, and the free plan is the part worth knowing first: no account, no email address, no card, no data cap and no expiry. You download it and you are protected. That is a different proposition from a free tier with a countdown attached, and the company treats it as a product rather than a funnel.

The paid plan is unusually complete for the price. Ten devices, first-party apps across nine platform families including Apple TV and Fire TV, split tunnelling in both directions, and a multi-hop mode where you pick both the entry and the exit server rather than choosing from fixed pairs. IPv6 is carried inside the tunnel on every location rather than blocked, which is the harder of the two ways to solve that problem.

The downside is what the audit covers and how much sits behind the paid tier. Securitum examined the no-logging claim properly — interviews, configuration, a server image — but dated its report 7 June 2024, past the two-year line this directory draws. Whether the servers run without disks cannot be settled from published sources. And the ad blocker, the proxy, the streaming servers and port forwarding are all for paying subscribers only.

Mullvad has spent fifteen years removing things. There is no account in the usual sense: you are issued a random number, you add time to it, and nobody asks who you are. You can pay in cash by post. The price is five euros a month at one month and at ten years, so the pricing page has nothing to compare and no reason to hurry you. Its value is in that flatness rather than in the length of the feature list.

The strongest thing anyone can say about a no-logs promise is that it was tested, and Mullvad's was. In 2023 Swedish police arrived with a warrant, searched the company's servers and left empty-handed, because there was nothing on them to take. The servers run from memory rather than disk, and every app is open source, so the claim is checkable rather than merely stated.

The cost is that the product is deliberately small, and you will meet the edges quickly. Five devices is the limit and it cannot be raised. There is no port forwarding, split tunnelling only pushes apps out of the tunnel rather than pulling them in, and streaming is not supported. Sweden also shares intelligence with thirteen other governments, which is the one thing about its privacy that Mullvad cannot answer by design.

Proton VPN is the rare free tier that is not a lead magnet. There is no data cap and no expiry: the company says it will be free forever, and the paid plan exists to add servers and speed rather than to unlock the basic function. That alone makes it the answer for anyone who wants protection on a laptop without a subscription decision attached.

The paid product is unusually well evidenced. Every year for five years an outside firm has gone into the server infrastructure and checked that the no-logs promise matches what the machines actually do, and every report has been published rather than summarised. Switzerland sits outside the intelligence-sharing arrangements. The apps are open source, port forwarding works, and there are proper television apps rather than a phone app stretched sideways.

The thing to weigh is responsiveness. Of everything measured on the same bench, Proton adds the most delay before a page starts loading — bulk downloads finish quickly, but video calls and ordinary browsing feel a step behind in a way you notice within a minute. Signing up also needs an email address, which is a smaller thing but worth knowing if anonymity is the point.

IVPN is built on the position that most people asking for a VPN do not need one, and says so on its own site rather than in an interview. Registration issues a random account identifier: no email address, no password, nothing tying the account to a person unless you volunteer it. Cash by post is accepted on any term of a year or longer.

The engineering follows the argument. Every client is open source under GPLv3, multi-hop routing through two countries is included on the cheapest plan rather than sold as a tier, and the desktop apps run a system firewall that blocks everything outside the tunnel and can be left on across a reboot. AntiTracker filters ads and trackers at DNS level, and connections can be disguised with V2Ray on every platform.

The cost is that the audit record is thinner than the annual cadence suggests. Cure53 has examined the service every year, but the 2025 engagement covered the mail and DNS side products; the gateways you connect through were last audited in February 2023, and the no-logs claim itself only ever in March 2019 — a format the company says it will not repeat. Five devices is the ceiling on Standard, and no plan offers port forwarding.

TunnelBear treats being understood as the product. The app is two switches and a map; the kill switch is called VigilantBear and the obfuscation GhostBear, and the effect is that somebody who has never thought about protocols never has to. No plan caps devices, including the free one, so nothing has to be planned around.

Behind the cartoon is an unusually long review record. Cure53 has assessed the service repeatedly since 2017 — its 2023 report calls itself the eleventh such review — and these are white-box tests covering the apps, the backend, the server configurations and the public interfaces rather than a questionnaire. The annual audit that competitors now advertise is a practice this company started.

The catch is that the record is thinner at the recent end than the cadence suggests, and the product is narrow. No report was ever published for the 2024 audit; it exists only as a company summary posted fourteen months late, and the ninth is described as finished and has never been written up. An independent lab found the kill switch leaks after a reboot and after a crash. There is no Linux app, nothing for a television, no port forwarding, no multi-hop and no attempt at streaming — the support pages say so directly.

This is the ad blocker company's second product, and it is built to be undemanding. There is one transport, written in-house, so there is no protocol menu to understand and nothing to configure before you are protected. Ten devices, applications on six platforms and a router, a working kill switch, no leaks in testing, and cryptocurrency accepted at the till.

That simplicity extends to finding out whether you want it. The free tier gives you a few gigabytes a month on two devices, which is enough to test the thing properly rather than to sample it for a week, and the paid plan carries a month-long refund window on any term of a year or more.

The cost is throughput. Independent testing measured it at a small fraction of the unprotected line, slow enough that on a modern connection the tunnel, rather than your broadband, decides how fast everything goes. If your connection is already slower than that, you will not notice. The single in-house protocol cuts the other way too: nobody outside the company has ever examined the thing carrying your traffic, and no assessment of the service has been published.

Most of the large antivirus companies are American or British. This one is Romanian, and it says so deliberately: its own page argues that its jurisdiction sits outside the five, nine and fourteen-country intelligence arrangements. For a reader choosing on where the courts are, that is a real distinction from the other suite VPNs here, and it is the main reason to consider it.

What it is not is a network of its own. The service runs on the Hydra protocol, which the company licenses rather than wrote, and the servers behind it belong to a separate company that sells the same infrastructure under its own brand. Two products, one network. Neither vendor's site makes that easy to discover, which is precisely why it is stated here.

The trade-off is that nothing outside the company has ever tested the no-logs promise, so a strong jurisdiction is being asked to carry weight that an audit would normally carry. The price doubles at renewal, from $34.99 for the first year to $69.99, and the ad blocker is the only extra of substance. It is a reasonable second line of defence for somebody already inside this company's ecosystem, and a thin argument for anybody who is not.

A first-year price that is not really the price is the norm in this market. This one is not that. A year for one device is $49.99, three devices $64.99, five devices $69.99, and the subscription renews automatically at the same figure — stated on the same page, next to the buy button, rather than in a footnote. For a reader who has been caught by a renewal once, that alone is worth something.

The jurisdiction is the other argument. The company is Finnish, says so plainly, and Finland sits outside the five, nine and fourteen-country intelligence arrangements while still being inside the European data-protection regime. The applications carry the things a general reader needs and not much more: a kill switch on desktop and Android, an ad blocker on desktop and iOS.

The catch is the pricing model that makes the honesty possible. Charging per device means the entry price buys one device, at roughly what competitors charge for five or ten, and a household quickly finds itself on the more expensive tier. Nothing outside the company has examined the no-logs claim either, so the same gap as the other suite vendors applies. You are paying a premium for predictability and a jurisdiction, not for capability.

A VPN normally takes the connection you have and sends it somewhere else. This one takes every connection you have and uses them at once. Broadband and mobile data together, or two mobile networks, bonded into a single session that survives either link failing. That is why it sells to live broadcasters and to people working from moving vehicles, rather than to people worried about their government.

That changes what the product is for. A dropped Wi-Fi connection mid-call does not end the call, because the mobile link was already carrying part of it. A weak connection is supplemented rather than merely encrypted. The applications cover the five platforms a general reader needs, and the monthly price sits at the ordinary market rate with the usual discounts for committing longer.

The tradeoff is that the privacy story is the weakest thing about it. The company is American and therefore inside the five-country arrangement, the no-logs claim has never been examined by anyone outside, and nothing about the architecture reduces what the operator could see if it chose to. Bought as insurance against a bad connection it is genuinely without competition here; bought as protection from surveillance it is an ordinary American VPN with an unusual feature.

Longevity is worth something in a market where brands appear and vanish, and this is one of the older consumer VPNs still on sale. It is run from New York by a company that also sells a handful of other productivity and security tools, and it has kept a wide platform spread — desktop, mobile, Linux and browser extensions — along with its own protocol built for networks that block ordinary VPN traffic.

The pricing is where it differs from its neighbours. A month costs about what everyone charges, a year is priced sensibly, and three years costs a hundred dollars in total, which works out below almost anything else here on a per-month basis. Split tunnelling is included, so the applications that need the tunnel get it and the ones that break inside it do not.

What you give up is the same thing several entries in this directory ask you to give up, and it is not small. The company is American, so it sits inside the five-country arrangement, and nothing outside the company has ever examined the no-logs promise. The lowest rate also requires paying three years in advance, which is a bet on the company still trading at the end of the term.

This is a browser maker's subscription business, and what it is becomes clear once you know where to look. The servers are not its own. A Swedish operator states on its own help pages that this organisation has used its global network of VPN servers since July 2019, and that a portion of that network is what the subscription offers — five hundred machines across thirty-odd countries.

The arrangement is the whole proposition, and it cuts both ways. That network was built by a company with an unusually strong published record on privacy, and Mozilla's own privacy notice states that traffic is encrypted and sent to that operator, with no logs of network activity kept by either party. What you add on top is a brand many people already trust for reasons unrelated to VPNs.

The cost is that the company you actually contract with is American, which puts it inside the five-country arrangement, and it has published no outside examination of how it handles subscriber data. An operator's record belongs to that operator and does not transfer to whoever resells its servers. At $59.88 a year for five devices the price sits in the ordinary middle, and buying from the operator directly is a real alternative worth pricing first.

NordVPN has done the evidence work more thoroughly than anyone. Six times now an outside firm has gone into the infrastructure under a formal assurance standard, interviewed staff, inspected the servers and checked the configuration against what the privacy policy claims — most recently Deloitte, at the end of 2025. Panama sits outside the intelligence-sharing agreements. The servers hold nothing on disk.

The product around that is broad. It will route you through two servers, reach the Tor network without a separate browser, and disguise the fact that you are using a VPN at all on networks built to block them. There are proper apps for televisions and a browser extension that works without the desktop app running.

The catch is what you actually pay. The rate on the advertising covers twenty-seven months in a single charge, and what it renews at is more than three times that number — a subscription whose real cost arrives two years after you decided, when comparing it against anything else has become inconvenient. The audit report is also not published: you can read it only after logging in to an account you have already paid for.

ExpressVPN is the one that gets out of the way. You install it, press the button, and it connects quickly to something sensible without asking you to pick a protocol or a server. On networks that interfere with VPN traffic it works around them automatically rather than making you find the obfuscation setting. If a VPN is infrastructure you would rather not think about, this is the one that asks least of your attention.

Behind that, the servers hold nothing on disk and rebuild themselves from a known state on every restart, which is a genuinely good architecture and has been reviewed by an outside firm. There are apps for everything, including televisions, and a browser extension that works on its own.

The cost is money and it is substantial. The introductory rate covers a little over two years, after which it renews annually at roughly three times what you were quoted. The evidence is also thinner than the marketing implies: the most recent review checked the controls as they stood on a single day rather than over a period, the apps have not been examined since 2024, and the code for them is closed. Router firmware, long a selling point, has been discontinued.

Private Internet Access does the thing almost nobody else does: it publishes the source code for every app it ships, on every platform. You do not have to believe the no-logs claim on the strength of a marketing page, because you can read what the software actually does — and an outside firm has separately inspected the servers and their configuration to check that the infrastructure matches.

It is also generous in the ways that cost money. There is no limit on simultaneous devices. Port forwarding works, which matters if you torrent. There is a proxy included alongside the tunnel, apps for televisions, and a three-year plan that renews at exactly what you paid rather than stepping up.

The thing to weigh is where it lives. This is a Colorado company operating under US law, inside the five-country intelligence agreement, and no amount of open source changes which courts can issue an order. The company's answer is that it has been asked and had nothing to give, which it publishes. The kill switch is also the weak point: under testing it allowed traffic past the tunnel after a restart, which is worse than not having one.