Mullvad vs TunnelBear

Both of these have decided that doing less is a feature, which makes them look like natural rivals. They are subtracting entirely different things, and once that is clear the comparison is not close.

Simplicity by subtraction, twice

TunnelBear removed features. It has a kill switch, split tunnelling, obfuscation and unlimited devices, and beyond that there is no multi-hop, no ad blocking, no port forwarding, no Linux app and nothing for a television. The support pages say directly that regional blocks are not something the company works at.

Mullvad removed the account. Registration takes no email address and sets no password, you get a random number, and you top it up with a card, cash through the post, or Monero. What it kept is a full product: multi-hop, ad blocking, obfuscation, a SOCKS5 proxy, open-source clients and servers running from memory. What it dropped is port forwarding, a television app, and any device count above five.

So TunnelBear is simple to use and thin underneath. Mullvad is thin on ceremony and substantial underneath, with one hard limit.

Who ends up holding your details

Mullvad holds almost nothing, and this has been tested rather than asserted: in 2023 Swedish police searched its servers under warrant and left with nothing. Four external reviews were published between October 2025 and June 2026 covering the Android app, a WireGuard implementation and the payment and account backend.

TunnelBear holds a normal account and has been owned by McAfee since 2018, running from Toronto under Canadian law while contracting through a Delaware company. Cure53 has assessed it most years since 2017, which is the longest such habit in this market, but no report was published for the 2024 audit and an independent lab found its kill switch leaks after a reboot and after a crash.

Sweden is inside the fourteen-country intelligence agreement and Canada inside the five, so neither wins on jurisdiction and Mullvad's answer is architectural rather than geographic.

On price they are closer than expected. Mullvad is five euros a month at every term. TunnelBear's yearly plan renews at what it charged, so neither punishes you later.

Which should you choose?

Choose Mullvad if five devices covers you, because on evidence, on features and on what the company holds it is ahead throughout. Choose TunnelBear if you need to cover more devices than five and you are content with a much shorter list of things it can do.