vpn comparison
Other VPNs we’ve tested
eventvpn VPNs are the new hotness in the world. This is a free, ad-supported VPN that comes from ExpressVPN. Ads and VPNs don’t really mix, but EventVPN says it’s able to provide a free service through Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) and Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA), which basically allows it to serve ads without using your personal data. The problem is the pervasiveness of ads. A banner remains at the top of the app at all times, and you have to watch a 30-second ad every time you connect or disconnect; A big problem when some servers posted unreasonably slow speeds. I will admit that EventVPN is a unique concept, but I don’t see anything in it that is better than ProtonVPN or Windscribe for a free VPN service. And when it comes to the inconvenience of sitting through commercials, it’s straight up worse.
Private Internet Access (PIA) It has a long history in the VPN field, and has maintained a track record of protecting user privacy even in the face of actual criminal activity. In 2016, a criminal complaint was filed in Florida against Preston Alexander McWaters for online threats. McWaters was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators detected online threats on PIA’s servers and subpoenaed the company. As the complaint reads, “A summons was sent [Private Internet Access] And the only information they could provide is that the set of IP addresses being used were from the East Coast of the United States. According to the complaint, McWaters engaged in several other identity activities, but PIA was not among them. Despite such a straightforward approach from a VPN provider to upholding its no-logging policy, PIA didn’t impress me during my tests. It’s a bit more expensive than many of our top picks, and it provided the worst speeds of any VPN I tested, with a drop of more than 50 percent to the nearest US server. (For reference, Windscribe only reduced my speed by 15.6 percent.)
privadovpn One of the popular choices to recommend as a free VPN. It offers a good free service with a handful of full-speed servers and 10GB of data per month. You have to go through four—yes, four—redirects begging you to pay for a subscription before you can sign up, but the free plan works. The problem is how new PrivadoVPN is. There are no transparency reports or audits available, and although the speeds are good, they are not as good as Proton, Windscribe or Surfshark. PrivadoVPN isn’t bad, but it’s hard to recommend it when Proton and Windscribe exist with free plans that are equally good.
vpn to avoid
You’ll find dozens of free VPNs that claim to protect your privacy. Most of them don’t. There are a lot of VPNs that I wouldn’t recommend, but there are a few that I’ve tested and that are worth mentioning.
Hello! It’s a notorious name in the VPN industry, but it’s been almost a decade since its public debacle. Hola is free, and it is able to remain free because it uses a peer-to-peer network. Hola also owns Bright Data (formerly Luminati), a data collection company. In 2015, Hola sold access to its network of free users (through Luminati), which was used in a distributed denial-of-service attack on 8chan. It’s been a decade since that incident, but Hola still works the same way. If you don’t pay, you may be used as an exit node in Bright Data’s network, and the privacy policy makes it clear that Hola logs data about your usage, including your IP address, pages you view, and timestamps.
X-VPN Available on desktop, but it appears primarily in results on the Apple App Store and Google Play, targeting mobile users with the free offering. X-VPN doesn’t do anything obviously wrong like Hola, but it has too many inconsistencies to recommend it. For starters, it uses a proprietary VPN protocol, which it obscures within the app. Proprietary protocols like NordVPN’s NordLynx and ExpressVPN’s Lightway are based on existing, open source protocols. Additionally, X-VPN was highlighted in a Tech Transparency Project report about free VPNs with links to the Chinese government; X-VPN is based in Hong Kong. There’s no smoking gun with X-VPN, but it doesn’t need to be. The speeds aren’t the best, the app lacks basic features like split tunneling, and the paid plan’s pricing is in line with top providers.
How we test VPNs
Functionally, a VPN should do two things: keep your Internet speeds reasonably fast, and actually protect your browsing data. This is where I focused my testing. Additional features, a comfortable UI, and customizable settings are great, but it won’t matter if the main service is broken.
Speed testing requires spot-checking, as the time of day, the network you’re connected to, and the specific VPN server you’re using can all affect speeds. Because of that, I always set the baseline speed directly on my unsecured connection before recording results, and I ran the test three times on both US and UK servers. With those baseline drops, I did spot-checks at different times of the day over the course of a week to see if the speed reduction was the same.
Security is a little more involved. For starters, I checked for DNS, WebRTC, and IP leaks whenever I connected to the server using Browser Leaks. I also ran brief tests sniffing my connection with Wireshark to make sure all packets being sent were secure with the VPN protocol.
On the privacy front, the top-recommended services included in this list have been independently audited, and they all maintain some form of transparency report. In most cases, there is a proper report, but in other cases like Windscribe, transparency is exposed through legal proceedings.
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