VPNs & Security

The verdict

The fastest here, and the one to buy if a bank or an employer needs to see the same IP address every time: a dedicated IP is a few dollars a month in twenty-seven countries, including Turkey. Its obfuscated servers are inside the scope of its Deloitte assurance work, which is better corroboration than most rivals manage. It also prints its renewal price on the pricing page, which sounds like faint praise until you notice Surfshark does not. That renewal is the catch. At $139.08 a year it is the dearest on this page, and it is explicitly non-refundable.

NordVPN is the one everybody has heard of, and for this audience it earns the attention on one specific feature: the dedicated IP. Shared VPN addresses are used by thousands of people at once, which is why banks lock accounts and employer systems refuse logins.…

The verdict

Five euros a month, the same for everyone, forever. No first-term teaser, no renewal shock, no upsell, and the same price whether you pay monthly or a year ahead — which after reading the other four on this page is a relief. It is also the only one whose no-logs claim has been tested by police at the door: Swedish officers arrived with a search warrant in 2023 and left with nothing, because the servers keep nothing. You sign up with a random account number and no email address. The trade-offs are real and they are about convenience, not trust.

We earn nothing from Mullvad. They ban affiliate marketing outright, publish that policy, and state that they do not even pay for links. It is on this page anyway, because for some of you it is the right answer and a page that only lists…

The verdict

The one to buy if you have a lot of devices, because it is the only one here that does not count them. It is also far and away the best on OpenVPN, at 640 megabits against NordVPN's 110, which matters more than it sounds: OpenVPN over port 443 is what still gets through locked-down hotel and office networks when WireGuard is blocked. The serious mark against it is that it will not tell you what it costs. The renewal price appears nowhere — not the pricing page, not the terms, not the support site — and third parties put it at roughly triple the headline.

Surfshark's selling point is that it does not count your devices. Laptop, phone, tablet, work machine, partner's phone, the router in the flat — one subscription covers all of it, and nobody else on this page does that. The second reason to look at it…

The verdict

The most thoroughly checked VPN there is: audits published continuously since 2018 by five separate firms, covering the protocol, the apps, the router, the build process and the no-logs claim, with RAM-only servers verified rather than merely asserted. Low jitter too, which is what actually governs an all-day call. But it is the priciest on renewal bar NordVPN, the window to escape an unwanted renewal is fourteen days rather than thirty, and in 2025 a bug left real IP addresses exposed during remote desktop sessions — which is precisely how many people reach their employer's systems.

ExpressVPN is the one you can check most thoroughly, and for some readers that is worth the price on its own. It has commissioned published audits every year since 2018 from Cure53, KPMG, PwC, F-Secure and Praetorian, covering not just the no-logs claim but the…