VPNs with a browser extension

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

CyberGhost runs a very large server network from a Romanian company, and the part that matters most is invisible: the fleet runs from RAM, so nothing is written to disk and everything held is lost the moment a machine reboots. Deloitte examined those no-logging safeguards as they stood on 31 October 2025 and issued a formal assurance report, a stronger artefact than the attestations most of this market publishes.

What you buy is breadth: servers sold for streaming and a Smart DNS for devices that cannot run an app, a content blocker that refuses ad and tracker domains at the server rather than in the app, first-party apps down to Fire TV, and forty-five days to change your mind rather than the usual thirty.

The catch is the pricing structure and a piece of ownership the site never mentions. The advertised rate buys twenty-six months in one charge; the renewal buys twelve for the same money, so the monthly figure roughly doubles two years after you decided anything. The company is a wholly owned subsidiary of Kape Technologies, which has traded under that name only since 2018 and owns two other services in this market — a fact that appears nowhere on its site. There is no port forwarding and no multi-hop.

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.

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.

Surfshark is built for a household rather than a person. One subscription covers unlimited devices, which is the difference between protecting your own laptop and protecting everyone's phones, televisions and tablets without counting. The apps are good, there are proper television builds, and it will route you through two servers or block ads before they load.

The evidence behind it is stronger than its reputation suggests. The whole fleet runs from memory with nothing written to disk, Deloitte produced a reasonable-assurance report on the no-logs claim in 2025 after assessing the servers themselves, and a separate firm penetration-tested the network infrastructure later that year.

The cost is at renewal, and it is what holds the value score down. The rate on the advertisement covers twenty-seven months in one charge, after which it renews annually at roughly double the effective monthly figure. The Netherlands is also inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement, which is easy to miss when a service is described as a privacy-friendly European option. The apps are closed source, and IPv6 is not supported at all — the guidance is to switch it off on your network.

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.

This service is built to move bulk data, and it does that better than the category generally manages. A large download finishes in a fraction of the time most protected connections take, on a network reaching more than eighty countries, with obfuscation and a route through Tor included rather than sold on top. If what you want is to shift a lot of traffic through a tunnel, the engineering is pointed directly at it.

The reason it is worth understanding is who else sells it. Its owner supplies the same underlying network to security companies that market their own VPNs as independent choices, each with its own applications and its own privacy policy stacked in front of the identical servers. Somebody comparing those products on privacy is comparing the policies, not the tunnels carrying their traffic.

The cost is everything that is not bulk transfer. The delay before a response begins is among the worst measured anywhere, so calls stutter and ordinary pages feel heavier than they did unprotected. Testing found the kill switch letting unencrypted traffic past during a crash, no outside assessment of the service could be located, and signing up requires both an email address and a payment method that identifies you.

The device coverage is genuinely broad for the money. Applications are published for Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android, plus Fire TV and browser extensions, with ten simultaneous logins and unlimited bandwidth. A month costs $5, two years costs $19.95, and a lifetime plan costs $40 paid once.

That lifetime plan is the thing to think hardest about. It converts a subscription into a single payment, which sounds like a saving and is really a transfer of risk: you are betting $40 that the company keeps operating, keeps the servers running and keeps honouring a plan it no longer earns revenue from. Providers that sell lifetime access have a structural reason to under-invest in the customers who bought it.

The catch is that there is no company to assess. No legal entity, registered address or country appears on the home page, and the terms and about pages return navigation links and nothing else. Nothing outside the business has examined the no-logs claim either. The result is a cheap, capable-looking product asking for a permanent commitment while declining to say who is on the other end of it, and those two facts sit badly together.