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Privacy

The primary consideration for any VPN should be privacy. If a free VPN can't protect your online privacy, that VPN is useless. At a minimum, your VPN should employ industry-standard AES 256-bit encryption (over the OpenVPN and IKEv2 VPN protocols) or ChaCha20 (WireGuard or IKEv2) along with offering basic privacy protections like a kill switch, DNS leak protection and a no-logs policy. For critical privacy needs, you'll also want a VPN provider that is based in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction.

While secure VPN protocols should ensure proper data encryption, you may want RAM-only server architecture -- which doesn't save any data to a hard disk, meaning your VPN session data theoretically isn't recoverable. Alternatively, we find full-disk encryption for servers perfectly acceptable. While they don't paint a full privacy picture, look for a VPN that undergoes regular third-party security audits, which can help bolster trust in the VPN's ability to protect its users' privacy. It's important to do your research and make sure the company behind the free VPN you're considering is legitimate and isn't tracking and selling your data.

Speed

The speed of your VPN can have a major effect on activities like streaming, downloading, video conferencing, gaming and general web browsing. To keep things running as smoothly as possible, you'll want to look for a VPN that will have as minimal an impact on your regular internet speeds as possible. Some VPNs can cut your internet speed in half, but we find that the fastest VPNs reduce your internet download speed by only 25% or less. Many free VPNs put limitations on speeds, but there are some -- like Proton VPN, which clocked an impressive 16% average internet download speed loss in our 2025 testing -- that don't. In such cases, you can actually achieve decent speeds.  

All VPNs slow down your internet connection somewhat, but the highest-performing VPNs only reduce your internet download speed by an average of 25% or less. We benchmarked VPNs by running over 250 different speed tests -- with and without a VPN enabled -- and across various international servers. NordVPN was the fastest VPN we clocked, with Mullvad, Surfshark, Proton and ExpressVPN also delivering excellent speed performance. Here's how the internet speed loss of our top VPNs stacked up:

Usability

A good free VPN should run smoothly and be easy to use regardless of your technical expertise. It should also be free of severe limitations that prevent it from doing what you need it to do. You'll want all essential functions -- enabling or disabling your VPN, changing servers, switching protocols and enabling features like split tunneling or the kill switch -- to be clear and obvious.

When evaluating a free VPN, the main things we focus on are safety and privacy. In other words, we want to be as certain as possible that the VPN isn't logging user data or selling it to outside parties, and we want to ensure that the encryption the VPN employs is up to industry standards. Accordingly, we only recommend free VPNs that prioritize privacy and have been audited regularly by reliable third parties.

We test free VPNs with the same rigor as paid options -- checking for leaks, ensuring privacy features like kill switches work properly, poring over privacy policies and running over 250 individual internet speed tests. We evaluate how useful the free VPN is for the average user, in a practical sense. Is it fast enough for general browsing? Does it allow for streaming? Does it have data or usage limitations? A good free VPN is safe to use and is actually useful because it doesn't impose overbearing limitations that render it essentially ineffective as a VPN, like extremely restrictive monthly data allowances.

PrivadoVPN

PrivadoVPN is a decent free VPN for casual users, with cheap VPN plans as upgrade paths. Whereas Proton VPN provides unlimited use but doesn't let you pick a server manually, Privado limits you to 10GB per month of data but lets you pick from servers in 13 cities. The company features a privacy-friendly Swiss jurisdiction, a reader-friendly privacy policy and a great streaming service unblocking for watching foreign BBC iPlayer, Disney Plus, Netflix or other content libraries. Because of its Apple TV app, Privado is a good Apple TV VPN option. You'll pay $11 a month, $20 for the first year or $30 total for the first two years (the one-year plan renews at $60 and the two-year package renews at $96 every two years).

PrivadoVPN has a no-logs policy, but it hasn't been audited and hasn't published any transparency reports, meaning it's not ideal for users with serious privacy concerns. Investigative journalists, political activists, asylum-seekers or paranoid torrenters should consider a VPN with better privacy, like Proton VPN. Additionally, Privado's uneven speed performance was a disappointment in our testing. Its modest network of servers in 50 countries falls well below the 100-plus countries that many of our top VPN recommendations provide. Still, Privado could be a worthy choice as a free or cheap VPN for basic privacy or streaming.

Read our PrivadoVPN review.

Mullvad VPN

Mullvad VPN is a good budget VPN. It costs $6 a month with no price hikes, has blazing-fast internet speeds, a RAM-only server infrastructure and a privacy-conscious signup process. For privacy-concerned users -- like investigative journalists or political activists, Mullvad is a great option. Its small server network of 582 servers in 50 countries, coupled with its shaky streaming capabilities, makes it a tough sell for people who want to stream a lot of content from around the world. But if you want top-level privacy on a budget, Mullvad is an excellent choice.

Read our Mullvad review.

PIA

PIA is a wallet-friendly VPN that’s cheaper than most competitors at $12 per month, $40 for the first year (renewing at $50 annually) or $79 every three years. While there's no free tier, PIA is cheap and offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. Also, PIA allows for unlimited simultaneous connections -- a benefit that pricier VPNs such as ExpressVPN and NordVPN don’t have. It’s suitable for streaming, provides a solid network of 35,000-plus servers in 91 countries and has highly customizable apps. People who live in or frequently travel to the US may appreciate that PIA has servers in all 50 states -- handy for streaming regional sports like NFL games. 

We like that its apps are open-source, meaning anyone can inspect the source code for bugs or vulnerabilities. While PIA largely sticks to covering the basics, it features some extra privacy amenities, including split tunneling on MacOS (which lets you use a VPN for certain apps and services but not others) -- still a relative rarity among VPN providers. 

However, PIA was rough around the edges in our latest round of testing. We clocked its internet speed loss at an underwhelming 48% average, which can have an impact on data-heavy activities like streaming or gaming. Additionally, we encountered many CAPTCHAs while trying to perform basic tasks like running a Google search. Although streaming was largely decent, we had to change servers more often than with other providers. Still, PIA is a solid budget choice for those who need full US server coverage. Otherwise, your money is probably better spent on Proton VPN, which offers faster server performance and robust privacy while charging slightly more than PIA.

Read our PIA review.

Most free VPNs simply aren't as safe

Free VPNs can be very dangerous. Why? Because to maintain the hardware and expertise needed for large networks and secure users, VPN services have expensive bills to pay. As a VPN customer, you either pay for a premium VPN service with your dollars or you pay for free services with your data. If you aren't ordering at the table, you're on the menu.

Some 86% of free iOS and Android VPN apps -- accounting for millions of installs -- have unacceptable privacy policies, ranging from a simple lack of transparency to explicitly sharing user data with Chinese authorities, according to two independent 2018 investigations into free VPN apps from Top10VPN. Another 64% of free VPN app offerings had no web presence outside their app store pages, and only 17% responded to customer support emails. 

In June 2019, Apple reportedly brought the hammer down on apps that share user data with third parties. 80% of the top 20 free VPN apps in Apple's App Store appear to be breaking those rules, according to a June update on the Top10VPN investigation.

In 2021, 77% of apps were flagged as potentially unsafe in the Top10VPN VPN Ownership Investigation -- and 90% of those flagged as potentially unsafe in the Free VPN Risk Index -- still posed a risk. 

"Google Play downloads of apps we flagged as potentially unsafe have soared to 214 million in total, rocketing by 85% in six months," the report reads. "Monthly installs from the App Store held steady at around 3.8 million, which represents a relative increase as this total was generated by 20% fewer apps than at the start of the year as a number of apps are no longer available."

On Android, 214 million downloads represent a lot of user login data, culled from unwitting volunteers. What's one of the most profitable things one can do with large swaths of user login data? 

You can catch malware 

Let's get this out of the way right now: 38% of free Android VPNs contain malware -- despite the security features on offer, a CSIRO study found. Yes, many of those free VPNs were highly-rated apps with millions of downloads. If you're a free user, your odds of catching a nasty bug are greater than 1 in 3. 

Ask yourself which costs less: a secure VPN service for about $100 a year, or hiring an identity theft recovery firm after some chump steals your bank account login and Social Security number?

It couldn't happen to you, right? Wrong. Mobile ransomware attacks are skyrocketing. Symantec detected more than 18 million mobile malware instances in 2018 alone, constituting a 54% year-over-year increase in variants. In 2019, Kaspersky noted a 60% spike in password-stealing Trojans. 

Malware isn't the only way to make money if you're running a free VPN service; there's an even easier way. 

The ad-valanche

Aggressive advertising practices from a free plan can go beyond getting hit with a few annoying pop-ups and quickly veer into dangerous territory. Some VPNs sneak ad-serving trackers through the loopholes in your browser's media-reading features, which then stay on your digital trail like a prison warden in a B-grade remake of Escape from Alcatraz.

HotSpot Shield VPN earned some painful notoriety for such allegations in 2017 when it was hit with a Federal Trade Commission complaint (PDF) for over-the-top privacy violations in serving ads. Carnegie Mellon University researchers found the company not only had a baked-in backdoor used to secretly sell data to third-party advertising networks, but it also employed five different tracking libraries and actually redirected user traffic to secret servers. 

When the story broke, HotSpot parent company AnchorFree denied the researchers' findings in an email to Ars Technica: "We never redirect our users' traffic to any third-party resources instead of the websites they intended to visit. The free version of our Hotspot Shield solution openly and clearly states that it is funded by ads, however, we intercept no traffic with neither the free nor the premium version of our solutions."

Buffering... buffering... buffering

One of the top reasons people get a VPN is to access their favorite subscription services or streaming site -- Hulu, HBO Max, Netflix -- when they travel to countries where those companies block access based on your location. What's the point in accessing the geoblocked video content you've paid for if the free VPN service you're using is so slow you can't watch it, despite a good internet connection?

Some free VPNs have been known to sell your bandwidth, potentially putting you on the legal hook for whatever they do with it. The most famous case of this was Hola VPN, which was caught in 2015 quietly stealing users' bandwidth and selling it, mercenary-style, to whatever group wanted to deploy the user base as a botnet.

Back then, Hola CEO Ofer Vilenski admitted they'd been had by a "spammer" but contended in a lengthy defense that this harvesting of bandwidth was typical for this type of technology.

"We assumed that by stating that Hola is a [peer-to-peer] network, it was clear that people were sharing their bandwidth with the community network in return for their free service," he wrote.

If being pressed into service as part of a botnet isn't enough to slow you down, free VPN services also usually pay for fewer VPN server options. That means your traffic is generally bouncing around longer between distant, overcrowded servers, or even waiting behind the traffic of paid users.

To top it off, subscription streaming sites are savvy to those who try to sneak into their video services for free. These services routinely block large numbers of IP addresses they've identified as belonging to turnstile-jumping freeloaders. Free VPNs can't afford to invest in a long list of fresh IP addresses for users the way a paid VPN service can.

That means you may not even be able to log into a streaming service you've paid for if your free VPN is using a stale batch of IPs. Good luck getting Netflix to load over that VPN connection. 

Paid options get better all the time

The good news is that a lot of solid VPNs on the market offer a range of features, depending on your needs and budget. You can browse our ratings and reviews to find the right VPN software for you. If you're looking for something mobile-specific, we've rounded up our favorite mobile VPNs.

If you'd like a primer before deciding which service to drop the cash on, we have a VPN buyer's guide to help you get a handle on the basics of VPNs and what to look for when choosing a VPN service.