ExpressVPN vs Astrill

Astrill has a specific reputation: it works from places where most VPNs do not. That reputation is earned, and it is worth setting against what the company writes in its own privacy policy.

Getting through a network that blocks everything

Astrill works from networks that stop most other services, and testing found it costing almost nothing in throughput across four regions. If you are somewhere that filters aggressively at the national level, that capability is not a luxury and very few products have it.

ExpressVPN also has obfuscation that works without configuration, and is quick. For most filtered networks — an office, a hotel, a school — it is enough. For the hardest cases it is not, and that is the gap Astrill sells into.

Astrill also has port forwarding, multi-hop, a SOCKS5 proxy, unlimited devices and router support, which is a longer list than ExpressVPN's.

What Astrill's own policy says it keeps

Astrill's policy records the time and duration of your last twenty connections. That is written down by the company, not alleged by anyone, and it is why Astrill scores 1 for privacy here — the lowest score this directory gives. No independent examination of the service has ever been published, and the company cites none.

ExpressVPN's evidence is thin rather than absent: the KPMG review covered the controls on a single day rather than over a period, the apps are closed and have not been examined since 2024, and Kape Technologies owns it alongside two rival VPNs.

Price is the other gap. Astrill costs thirty dollars a month with no discount for a longer term, and charges again for extra devices and for faster servers. ExpressVPN's introductory rate covers twenty-eight months before renewing at roughly triple, which is still a fraction of Astrill's.

Astrill is registered as a brand of Veloxee Corp. in Vaduz, Liechtenstein — not the Seychelles, as is widely reported — and sits outside every intelligence-sharing agreement, as does ExpressVPN in the British Virgin Islands.

Which should you choose?

Choose ExpressVPN unless you are behind a filter it cannot cross. It costs far less, and it does not record your connection times by its own admission.

Choose Astrill if getting a connection at all is the problem, and understand that you are paying a large premium to a service that logs when you connected and has never been audited.