ExpressVPN vs Surfshark

The ratings put these two close together, and the marketing puts them in the same bracket: quick, simple, cheap on a long term, expensive on renewal. Read the detail and one of them has a problem the other does not.

The switch that is supposed to fail closed

A kill switch exists to cut your traffic when the tunnel drops, so your real address is never exposed by a reconnection you did not notice. Under testing, Surfshark's allowed traffic through after a restart. That is the one feature whose failure is silent — you cannot tell by looking that it did not work — and it is the reason to hesitate over Surfshark whatever else it does well.

Surfshark also does not support IPv6, and the guidance is to disable IPv6 on your network. Turning off part of your connection so that a privacy tool behaves is a real cost, and it lands on the same reader who was told the tool was simple.

ExpressVPN's kill switch works, and its servers run from memory and rebuild on restart.

What the extra devices are worth

Surfshark places no limit on simultaneous connections. ExpressVPN allows ten. For one person that is irrelevant; for a household with phones, laptops, tablets and a television it is the difference between covering everything and rationing.

Surfshark also has multi-hop and built-in ad blocking, and ExpressVPN has neither. ExpressVPN answers with speed, obfuscation that works without configuration, and a browser extension that functions on its own rather than as a switch for the desktop app.

Both are registered in places worth knowing about: ExpressVPN in the British Virgin Islands, outside the intelligence agreements, and Surfshark in the Netherlands, which is inside the fourteen-country one.

Which should you choose?

Choose ExpressVPN if you want the protective feature to behave the way the label says, and ten devices is enough. Pick Surfshark if you have more devices than that, you want multi-hop, and you are willing to verify the kill switch yourself after a reboot before relying on it.

If that caveat is unacceptable and you still want unlimited devices, the honest answer is that neither of these is the product you want, and the cost of the wrong choice here is not obvious until it matters.