NordVPN Alternatives

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The most useful thing about this service is how little it asks you to commit. The free plan carries a monthly data allowance rather than a countdown to a card prompt, so you can find out whether it suits you without paying, and the paid plan puts no ceiling on simultaneous devices — an unusual pairing, and the reason its subscription costs so little per month on a long term. Its own privacy policy goes as far as recommending cryptocurrency to keep payment data to a minimum.

The mechanism behind the marketing is worth reading closely. The service is sold on Swiss privacy law, and the controller named in its privacy policy is a company organised under the laws of Iceland. The Swiss entity, and an American one, appear in that same document as payment processors acting on the Icelandic company's instructions.

The cost is what you cannot check. Nobody outside the company has examined the no-logs claim, so the specific commitments in the policy stand on the company's word. Speed falls off substantially at distance, losing most of a fast connection on the furthest servers tested. And a product sold on privacy uses mobile advertising identifiers to attribute its own marketing, which is common and still worth knowing.

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.