Mullvad vs OVPN

Two companies registered in the same country, both of which have had the no-logs question put to them by an institution rather than a reviewer, and both of which came out of it intact. That is rare enough that this comparison is worth more than the size of either company suggests.

A search and an injunction

In 2023 Swedish police searched Mullvad's servers under warrant and left with nothing. In 2020 a court demanded customer data from OVPN and it had none to give — it fought the injunction and won on exactly that basis.

Both stories are stronger than an audit, and only one of these companies has an audit as well. No independent examination of OVPN has ever been published; what it has instead is the court case, servers it builds and owns and runs without disks, and insurance carried specifically to fund defending a legal demand, which is a genuinely unusual thing to buy.

Mullvad adds four external reviews published between October 2025 and June 2026. Sweden is inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement, so neither is helped by its address.

Who owns each of them now

This is where they separate. Mullvad VPN AB is registered in Gothenburg and independent. OVPN was acquired in May 2023 by an American group now trading as Point Wild, which sells several other VPN brands — including Hotspot Shield, a service with no independent audit at all and a kill switch that let unencrypted traffic past during a crash.

That does not undo the 2020 court case, which happened under the previous owner and remains true. It does mean the company answering a demand tomorrow is not the company that answered one then, and for a product whose entire argument is institutional resistance, that is the thing to weigh.

On the product, Mullvad asks for no email address and no password and takes cash; OVPN runs normal accounts. Mullvad allows five devices, OVPN four on the monthly plan. Mullvad's clients are open source and OVPN's are not. OVPN supports streaming, which Mullvad does not claim, and both have multi-hop, ad blocking and memory-only servers.

Which should you choose?

Choose Mullvad if independence and an anonymous signup matter, which for a service bought on this argument is most of it. Choose OVPN if the 2020 court case and the hardware it owns outright are what convince you, and the change of ownership does not.