Surfshark 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.

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.

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.

A security company that wanted a real VPN bought one. In November 2024 it acquired AzireVPN, a small Swedish operator, and its own audit post states that the resulting infrastructure now powers both products, which it operates and maintains itself. That is a change of position, not just a purchase: before it, this brand ran on a network it rented. Transparency reports are published annually and a warrant canary monthly.

Then it did the rarer thing. It commissioned an outside firm to examine the infrastructure, the firm found two problems it rated critical — both concerning how servers are provisioned and booted rather than how traffic is handled — and the company published the report anyway, severity ratings intact, with an explanation of why exploiting either would require physical access to its datacentres. The same examination found no evidence of user activity being logged.

The cost is what that report has not yet said. There is no published confirmation that either critical finding has been fixed, so what a reader has is a company being unusually honest about problems that were open when it wrote. The company is American, so an American court is what compels it, there is no Linux client or router support, and signing up requires an identity like everywhere else.

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.