Windscribe vs TunnelBear

Both of these are run from Canada, both allow unlimited simultaneous connections, and both have a free plan you can stay on. From there they diverge about as far as two services in the same country can. Windscribe has spent a decade building controls for people who want them; TunnelBear has spent it making a VPN that asks nothing of you.

How much you have to tell either one

Windscribe asks for no email address and no password at signup, which is the property this directory's top ease band is defined by — you can be protected without telling the service who you are. Windscribe scores 5 for ease on that basis. On top of it the app exposes R.O.B.E.R.T., a configurable DNS filter, and a build-your-own plan where you pay per location.

TunnelBear is two switches and a map, and scores 4 for ease. The kill switch is called VigilantBear and the obfuscation is GhostBear, the protocol choice defaults to Auto and never needs touching, and the free plan runs on the same interface as the paid one. The cost of that design is a narrow product: no Linux app, nothing for a television, no port forwarding, no multi-hop, and support pages that say directly that getting past regional blocks is not something the company works at.

The inspection record, and where it stops

TunnelBear has the longer record here and it is not close. Cure53 has assessed it repeatedly since 2017 — the 2023 report calls itself the eleventh such review — with white-box access to the apps, the backend and the server configurations. The practice of the annual VPN audit essentially started here.

The qualification is at the recent end. No report was published for the 2024 audit; it exists as a company summary posted fourteen months later, and a ninth audit is described as complete and has never been written up. Both services are marked as checked but not recently, for related reasons: Windscribe scores 4 for privacy and TunnelBear scores 3 for privacy.

Which should you choose?

Choose Windscribe if you want to sign up without an identity, or if the free plan is going to do real work — it is the more generous of the two by a wide margin, and Windscribe scores 5 for value against TunnelBear's 4. Its kill switch also holds under a test that TunnelBear's does not.

Choose TunnelBear if the person using it is not going to configure anything, and if unlimited devices on a plan that renews at the price it charged is the whole requirement. TunnelBear scores 4 for value on exactly that basis.