The best VPNs we’ve tested so far

Buying guide: choosing a VPN

A VPN moves your traffic; it does not make you anonymous

The single most useful thing to understand before spending money is what a VPN actually changes. It encrypts the connection between your device and the provider's server, which stops your internet provider and anyone on the same network from seeing which sites you open. It also replaces the IP address that websites see with one belonging to the provider.

That is genuinely worth having on hotel and airport Wi-Fi, and it is the reason a VPN can reach content restricted to another country. What it does not do is stop tracking you carry with you. Cookies, browser fingerprinting, and being signed into an account all identify you exactly as before. If you log into your usual accounts through the tunnel, the sites on the other end still know who you are.

The practical effect is that you are moving trust rather than removing it: your internet provider can no longer see your browsing, but the VPN provider now can. Everything else on this page is really about deciding which providers deserve that.

Judge the no-logs claim by the audit, not the homepage

Every provider says it keeps no logs. The phrase costs nothing to print, so it tells you nothing on its own. What separates the claim from marketing is whether an outside firm has been allowed to inspect the running infrastructure and publish what it found.

When you look at an audit, check three things: who performed it, what they were actually given access to, and how recent it is. An audit of a mobile app is not an audit of the server fleet. A report from four years ago describes a company that may no longer exist in the same form. And an audit commissioned and summarised by the provider itself, with no published report, is a press release.

The strongest evidence is not an audit at all — it is a court case in which a provider was ordered to hand over data and demonstrably had none to give. That has happened to a small number of providers, and it is worth more than any marketing page.

Who owns the company matters more than the server count

Providers compete loudly on server counts and country totals, which are among the least useful numbers available. A few thousand servers you never use changes nothing about your privacy. Ownership does.

A number of well-known VPN brands are owned by the same parent companies, and some of those parents also own the review sites ranking them. Others have previously operated advertising or data businesses. None of that is automatically disqualifying, but it is context you want before handing a company your entire browsing stream, and it is rarely mentioned on the product page.

Jurisdiction matters for the same reason, though less than it is usually made to sound. What a government can compel a provider to hand over only matters if the provider is holding something in the first place.

The price you are shown is not the price you will pay

VPN pricing is built around a long first term. The headline figure is almost always a two or three year plan divided into a monthly number, and it renews at a substantially higher rate. Buying the same service for one year, or monthly, often costs several times as much per month.

Before subscribing, find the renewal price rather than the introductory one, check whether the money-back window is counted from purchase date, and confirm cancelling is possible from the account page rather than only by contacting support. These are the details that decide whether a cheap VPN stays cheap.

Before you pay, check these

• A published, recent audit. Ideally of the server infrastructure, by a named firm, with the report readable in full.
• A kill switch that you have tested. It should cut traffic when the tunnel drops — not reconnect quietly while you keep browsing.
• Modern protocol support. WireGuard or a well-implemented equivalent, with OpenVPN available for networks that block it.
• The renewal price, not the intro price. Check what year two costs before you commit to year one.
• DNS handled inside the tunnel. A provider that leaks DNS queries to your ISP has undone much of the point.
• A cancellation path you can find. Confirm you can end the subscription from the dashboard without emailing anyone.

How we test

We buy the subscriptions at full price rather than accepting review copies, so everything below is based on actually using the product — including the parts that only show up after you've paid, like the renewal price and how hard the software is to cancel or remove.

PrivacyTestLab does earn money from a small number of affiliate partnerships, and those links are marked. What that money does not do is change a verdict: written recommendations go through the same evaluation regardless of whether an affiliate relationship exists, and no business pays for placement on this page. The full breakdown of how the site earns is on the transparency page.