TunnelBear 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.

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.

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.