The best VPNs in 2026: Which ones actually work?

Free trial: Fully free plan; 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans

Monthly price: $9.99

Best deal: $2.99 per month for 24 months

Read a full Proton VPN review on Engadget.

Proton VPN was developed by scientists at the same Swiss research lab that birthed the original World Wide Web. It's a holdover from the days when the internet meant freedom and connection, instead of ads for things you just bought and scammers spinning epic tales about lost Nigerian astronauts. Before anything else, Proton VPN is designed to make you untraceable online, even by its own team.

This starts with being owned and run by a nonprofit (the Proton Foundation), which means an obligation to customers before shareholders and no overbearing parent company. It also allows Proton VPN to offer one of the best free plans in the industry, with no data or speed limits and access to eight server locations on three continents. Unfortunately, free users can't choose which location they're connected to, but that matters less when you use a VPN for anonymity.

While most of the best VPNs guarantee customer privacy by setting their servers to automatically wipe, Proton VPN goes a step further by completely encrypting all the data that passes through its system. If a hacker gets access to a server, even by grabbing it in real life, they still won't be able to see any saved data without a password. Speaking of real-world security, I should mention Proton’s Secure Core servers, which protect your information in physically locked-down locations.

Proton's apps for all major platforms are designed with every user in mind, removing annoyances for VPN newbies while keeping the top features accessible for power users. Desktop users on Mac and Windows, mobile users on iOS and Android, and customers on any other platform enjoy the same high level of quality.

When you're connected, my tests indicate that Proton VPN reduces download speeds by 12 percent on average, and much less when you're connected to a location on the same continent as yourself. If you don't already have slow internet, you likely won't notice Proton VPN making it any slower. Upload speeds take even less of a hit, so rejoice if you love to post photos and videos. Ping times, which matter for doing anything in real time (gaming, video chatting, etc.), are also kept pretty low, though they do inevitably increase with distance.

Free trial: 7 days on mobile; 30-day money-back guarantee on all plans

Monthly price: $12.95

Best deal: $2.44 per month for 28 months

Check out my in-depth ExpressVPN review on Engadget.

For a long time, I was accustomed to docking points from ExpressVPN because its prices were too high. I called it the best "premium" VPN, a nice way of saying it only earned most of what it cost. But that dark age is behind us now. Since shifting to a tiered pricing model, ExpressVPN has brought its costs in line with the industry average. Prices do jump sharply after the first subscription period, but you can get around that by starting again with a new email address.

That may sound like a bit of a hassle, but ExpressVPN is worth it. I now consider it the best VPN for beginners because that moniker reflects how well its pared-down apps guide new users through the process. It set the design standard for "one giant button" and still makes that approach work better than anyone else does. Every option is controlled by a single checkbox. Pick server locations by typing the country you want into the search bar, then clicking it to connect instantly.

Power users may not be happy with the somewhat limited selection of extra features — there are no specialized servers, no dedicated IP option and no port forwarding. ExpressVPN is very much a set-and-forget VPN. This is helped by its incredible download speeds, which dropped less than 7 percent in my worldwide average (in tests where I connected to every continent). Ping stayed below 300 everywhere, making ExpressVPN a good choice for live activities.

I don't mean to suggest that ExpressVPN has nothing going on besides the VPN itself. Every platform gets a kill switch, and there's split tunneling for Windows and Android. The Threat Manager feature blocks trackers, ads and malware, and includes parental controls; it could stand to be more customizable, but at least it works. There's also a server network with options in 105 countries and territories.

Finally, we can't forget about ExpressVPN’s Aircove router. At the moment, it's the only VPN router that works with an interface like the desktop VPN instead of forcing you to tinker with it through the router's own control panel. Aircove is a great way for VPN neophytes to get the benefits of protecting an entire Wi-Fi connection without digging into their router's digital guts every time they want to change locations.

Free trial: 7 days, plus 30-day refund guarantee

Monthly price: $15.45

Best deal: $1.99 per month for 27 months

See Engadget's complete Surfshark review to learn more.

VPNs love to claim that they're the fastest. One literally went so far as to name itself "FastestVPN," the VPN equivalent of naming your restaurant "Thai Food Near Me." For my money, though, Surfshark is the only service that has the right to call itself the fastest.

My speed tests are pretty simple. I set up two computers side by side. On one screen, I repeatedly test the speed of my internet connection without the VPN. On the other, I connect to different VPN locations and check how much it changes my speed each time. When I ran this test on Surfshark, I found an average speed loss of just 5.4 percent. For reference, Windscribe, CyberGhost and Mullvad — three very good VPNs — each posted a loss of around 25 percent.

Numbers can be hard to match with reality sometimes, so here's what using Surfshark feels like in practice. I live in Oregon and I was able to connect to servers in Colombia, Dubai and Indonesia and stream video in 1080p without any losses. Websites loaded at exactly the same rate on both screens. That's the difference between claiming you're the fastest and being the fastest.

Surfshark achieves this without any exclusive VPN protocols or other gimmicks. It's largely a product of Nexus, Surfshark's term for keeping its server network more closely linked than VPNs traditionally do. This gives it a lot more options for getting your signals to their destination and back quickly. It also lets Surfshark switch your IP address regularly without disconnecting you, which makes you a lot harder to track.

Free trial: 7 days on Android; 30 day refund on all plans

Monthly price: $12.99

Best deal: $3.39 per month for 24 months

Get more details from my full NordVPN review deep dive.

NordVPN is notable for a number of reasons, but what got it this high on the list is the quality of its network of servers. Subscribers can choose from a list of 153 cities in 117 countries. You can use that to stretch a single Netflix account into more shows than you can watch in a year, or access streaming channels and events that are otherwise blocked in your country. In my tests, NordVPN managed to unblock Netflix multiple times in five different locations.

Better yet, only around 40 percent of NordVPN's servers are virtual locations. A "virtual location" means the server is physically located in one country, but gives you an IP address from another one. These are just as secure, but a VPN having too many of them — generally more than half the total — can indicate that it cares more about growing its network than actually making it work. NordVPN has real servers on every continent (except Africa, an absence that keeps it from being higher on the list).

It also offers several types of specialized servers, including double VPN connections that offer redundancy in case one server fails. You'll also get Onion Over VPN servers, which connect you to a VPN server and use that server to connect to the Tor Network, a volunteer-run collective that puts several layers of encryption on any internet connection. Tor is hugely important for guaranteeing privacy, but can be dangerous without the preliminary protection of a VPN.

There's also an antivirus and content blocker called Threat Protection, split tunneling on Windows and Android and a kill switch on every platform. Upgrading gets you more intense threat protection, a data breach scanner and the NordLynx password manager. Beyond all these features, NordVPN has good fundamentals, with download speeds second only to Surfshark.

Free trial: Fully free plan; 30-day money-back guarantee on paid plans

Monthly price: $11.99

Best deal: $2.69 per month for 26 months

hide.me is dedicated to free VPN service like nobody else. As Windscribe and TunnelBear enforce data caps and Proton VPN removes free server choice, hide.me remains the only VPN you can use indefinitely for free, without even a payment method. You can freely choose between right server locations, there are no ads, and while there's supposedly a speed cap, I've never experienced serious slowdowns.

This combination of factors makes hide.me one of the few free VPNs you can use for streaming. The others are great for security, but if you realize minutes before your Eurovision watch party that it's not available in your country, hide.me is the VPN you should turn to. It's easy to download and use, so experiencing its free service is almost totally without friction.

Unfortunately, paying for hide.me is less worthwhile. You unlock a total list of 91 countries, but plenty of other paid VPNs have better networks and faster speeds. Still, if you enjoy using hide.me for free, a paid subscription might be worth it so you can stick with a familiar interface.

Free trial: 14 day refund guarantee except on cash and crypto payments

Monthly price: 5 Euro

Best deal: 5 Euro per month

Read a full Mullvad review that goes into more detail.

Mullvad VPN is making a bit more noise lately. City-dwellers might have noticed its public transit ad campaign urging you to reclaim your privacy. Despite the hype, though, it remains privacy-focused to the core — as scrappy and anti-system as Windscribe, but much less obnoxious about it.

If you're so inclined, you can sign up for Mullvad, install it and use it without handing over any information about yourself whatsoever. First, accounts aren't tied to email addresses. Instead, each one gets a 16-digit number as its name, unconnected to any other online presence. Accounts also include separate payment tokens; by writing your token on an envelope containing cash and mailing that to Mullvad's headquarters, you can pay for your subscription untraceably.

Mullvad is also one of the few VPNs that doesn't even track user activity on its own website. Its servers are fully RAM-only, automatically deleting any saved information several times per day. Of course, this would all be for nothing if it wasn't a good VPN to use, but Mullvad fortunately hits that mark too. Its apps are sensibly designed, work quickly and include legible descriptions of any feature whose function isn't immediately obvious.

Free trial: 24 hours on Windows and macOS, three days on Android, seven days on iOS; 30 day refund on all plans

Monthly price: $12.99

Best deal: $2.03 per month for 26 months

My full CyberGhost review has more information.

In the past, CyberGhost has been guilty of having good-looking apps and features without the technical backend necessary to make them truly a joy to use. Luckily for all of us, it's worked hard to close that gap, and now I've got few qualms recommending it at least as a backup streaming VPN.

Cyberghost has two standout features. First, its streaming-optimized servers target specific platforms in particular countries, such as Netflix UK, and are quite good at both unblocking those sites and keeping playback quality high. The other top feature is Smart Rules, which let you automate its behavior down to the smallest detail. Set it up right and you'll hardly ever have to open your CyberGhost app at all.

Speeds are good, though not spectacular, and connecting to a server often entails waiting through a bit of lag. That said, prices are so good that even this slightly flawed experience comes at a very high value. CyberGhost is currently offering a 26-month plan that works out to a cost of about $2 per month. While it renews at a worse deal, as is common among VPNs, it's still priced at just under $5 per month going forward.