The best VPNs for torrenting

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.

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.

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.

Most no-logs promises are checked, if at all, by a firm the company hired. This one was checked by an opponent. A two-month information injunction sought customer data, the company fought it, and it won on the ground that the data being demanded did not exist to hand over. That is a stronger class of evidence than any audit, because the party asking the question wanted a different answer.

The mechanism behind it is deliberate and physical. The company builds and owns its servers rather than renting capacity, and runs them without disks, so there is no persistent storage for connection records to accumulate in. It carries insurance to cover the legal costs of defending that position, which is an unusual thing to buy and a revealing one.

The cost is threefold. There has never been an independent audit, so everything except the court case rests on the company's word. The device allowance on the monthly plan is low enough that you will have to choose which machines to protect, and it rises only if you commit for longer. And since 2023 the company has been owned by an American group that also sells several other VPN brands — announced openly at the time, and not mentioned anywhere a new visitor would see it.

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.

PureVPN sells a very cheap long term from a British Virgin Islands company, with the group itself run from Karachi. What the subscription covers is broad: ten devices, first-party apps across nine platform families down to Apple TV and Fire TV, servers picked out for individual streaming services, and an ad and tracker blocker on every tier.

The reason to read the entry is a 2017 federal case. An FBI affidavit records that the company supplied records tying one customer account to two originating IP addresses — a home connection and an employer's — precisely the category a no-logs policy is understood to exclude. Its answer at the time was that it had not broken its policy because it kept no browsing history, which was a defence about a question nobody had asked.

The tradeoff is that the reassurance has aged and the price has a second half. The last independent assessment ran in February 2023; the company describes an always-on arrangement letting an auditor arrive unannounced, but a standing permission is not an assessment that happened, and its own pages no longer name the firm that did the last one. The long plan charges once for twenty-seven months and then renews yearly, and port forwarding and a dedicated address are extra.

The commitment here is written unusually specifically. Rather than promising no logs and leaving the term undefined, the policy enumerates what is not recorded: browsing history, traffic destination, connection timestamps, DNS queries, the IP address you were allocated and the one you connected from, content and bandwidth. Naming the allocated and the connecting address separately is the detail that stands out, because those are the two records that identify a session after the fact.

Specificity of that kind is worth something on its own. A general promise can be quietly reinterpreted; a list this particular would have to be contradicted outright, and the company that wrote it is small enough that it is the same people answering for it.

The cost is that nobody has ever checked. No outside firm has examined the claim, so the wording is the whole of the evidence. Independent testing also measured the tunnel taking roughly two thirds of the connection in every region tried, which is consistent but heavy, and Sweden shares intelligence with thirteen other governments — a fact about the jurisdiction that no amount of careful drafting can answer.

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.

AirVPN is what a VPN looks like when it is run by engineers with no marketing department. Every piece of software is open source. The plans go from three days to three years with no tier system, because every plan includes everything. You can open an account without giving an email address and pay in cryptocurrency with no processor in between. The service has been operating on these terms since 2010.

Its transparency is unusual in kind rather than degree. There is a public monitor showing the load and bandwidth of every server, updated continuously, so the claims about capacity are checkable by anyone at any time rather than being taken on trust. Port forwarding is included, obfuscation works on every server, and the Tor integration is built into the client.

It is not the easy option, and the gaps are real. There is no iPhone or iPad app at all, which rules it out for a lot of people immediately. Nobody outside the company has ever audited anything, so the no-logs claim rests entirely on the source code and your willingness to read it. Italy is inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement, and Italian residents are barred from using the service altogether.

TorGuard was built for people who move a lot of data, and the subscription reflects that in a way little else does: port forwarding and a SOCKS5 proxy are both included rather than sold as extras, and the obfuscation options run deeper than the category norm, with Shadowsocks and Stunnel in the client and a separate proxy app adding several more.

Then a group of thirty-six film production companies sued, and on 3 March 2022 the parties filed a stipulation in the Southern District of Florida in which the company agreed to use commercially reasonable efforts to block BitTorrent traffic on its servers in the United States. That obligation appears nowhere on its own website, which still advertises every American server as optimised for peer-to-peer transfer with port forwarding support.

What you give up is most of the reassurance the rest of this market offers. Nobody outside the company has ever examined the servers or the logging claim, and the company cites no audit — so the no-logs promise rests on the promise. The base subscription buys neither streaming access nor a dedicated address; both are monthly add-ons on top of it. The refund window is seven days rather than thirty, and cryptocurrency payments are excluded from it entirely.

The offer is straightforward and cheap. Three days to try without handing over a card, 188 locations, unlimited data on every paid plan, a warrant canary the company maintains, and SOCKS5 access alongside the ordinary tunnel for people who want it. A year runs to $39.99 against a list price of $119.88, and two years to $55.99, with a dedicated IP and port forwarding sold as separate extras.

What sits underneath that is a company nobody outside it can identify. No legal entity, no registered address and no country appears on the home page, the pricing page or the legal pages — the terms and privacy pages return too little content to read at all. A customer testimonial describes it as "offshore", which is marketing rather than an address.

The catch is that this makes half of the privacy question unanswerable rather than merely unfavourable. A VPN in a bad jurisdiction can at least be reasoned about: you know which courts apply and what they can compel. An unpublished one cannot be reasoned about at all, and a warrant canary is only as meaningful as the legal system it is supposed to signal about. Cheap, functional, and asking for a kind of trust it gives you no way to calibrate.

The design decision here is to sell access and charge for it. This is a service bought by people who need a connection to work from a network that actively blocks such connections, and its reputation rests on continuing to work where that is difficult. Independent testing bears out the performance half of the claim: measured across four regions, the tunnel cost almost nothing in throughput, and in one region the protected connection tested faster than the unprotected one.

The mechanism is a proprietary stack, a large engineering effort aimed at obfuscation, and a price that funds it. The subscription costs several times the market's usual monthly rate, with no discount for committing to a longer term, and extra simultaneous devices and higher-capacity servers are charged on top of that again.

The catch is what the privacy policy says. The company retains the last twenty connection records for each account, including the time and duration of each session, the country, and the device type, tied to the registered email address. It describes this as a support tool, which it may well be, and it is still a record of when you connected and for how long. No outside firm has examined any of it, and the interface has been described by testers as dated and awkward.