After making a post about comparing VPN providers, I received a lot of requested feedback. I’ve implemented most of the ideas I received.
Providers
- AirVPN
- IVPN
- Mozilla VPN
- Mullvad VPN
- NordVPN
- NymVPN
- Private Internet Access (abbreviated PIA)
- Proton VPN
- Surfshark VPN
- Tor (technically not a VPN)
- Windscribe
Notes
- I’m human. I make mistakes. I made multiple mistakes in my last post, and there may be some here. I’ve tried my best.
- Pricing is sometimes weird. For example, a 1 year plan for Private Internet Access is 37.19€ first year and then auto-renews annually at 46.73€. By the way, they misspelled “annually”. AirVPN has a 3 day pricing plan. For the instances when pricing is weird, I did what I felt was best on a case-by-case basis.
- Tor is not a VPN, but there are multiple apps that allow you to use it like a VPN. They’ve released an official Tor VPN app for Android, and there is a verified Flatpak called Carburetor which you can use to use Tor like a VPN on secureblue (Linux). It’s not unreasonable to add this to the list.
- Some projects use different licenses for different platforms. For example, NordVPN has an open source Linux client. However, to call NordVPN open source would be like calling a meat sandwich vegan because the bread is vegan.
- The age of a VPN isn’t a good indicator of how secure it is. There could be a trustworthy VPN that’s been around for 10 years but uses insecure, outdated code, and a new VPN that’s been around for 10 days but uses up-to-date, modern code.
- Some VPNs, like Surfshark VPN, operate in multiple countries. Legality may vary.
- All of the VPNs claim a “no log” policy, but there’s some I trust more than others to actually uphold that.
- Tor is special in the port forwarding category, because it depends on what you’re using port forwarding for. In some cases, Tor doesn’t need port forwarding.
- Tor technically doesn’t have a WireGuard profile, but you could (probably?) create one.
Takeaways
- If you don’t mind the speed cost, Tor is a really good option to protect your IP address.
- If you’re on a budget, NymVPN, Private Internet Access, and Surfshark VPN are generally the cheapest. If you’re paying month-by-month, Mullvad VPN still can’t be beat.
- If you want VPNs that go out of their way to collect as little information as possible, IVPN, Mullvad VPN, and NymVPN don’t require any personal information to use. And Tor, of course.
ODS file: https://files.catbox.moe/cly0o6.ods
ProtonVPN: only 8 years old: RED FLAG!
Well reddish flag at least, is there a rationale behind this? I mean 8 years is quite a long time.
I think it’s just a relative color scale from a spreadsheet… with the older being the greenest, the youngest the reddest, and the rest just fall in between. ProtonVPN just happens to be in between, it’s not as red as the others but also not as green as the ones that have been around for much longer.
So you also think the choices were not that good?
I mean what you are saying is that if there had been a 50 year old one, all the others should be red?
I’m just explaining the reason why it’s more reddish (but not as red as others). It’s something most spreadsheet software (this was clearly MS Excel) can do automatically with numbers for visual indication so we can more easily see the distribution, it does not mean 8 years old is bad.
If there’s a big unbalance in color it would just make it more visible that there’s a big unbalance in ages. Probably if that had happened more colors could have been added to the gradient, maybe maroon->red->yellow->green->blue->white. But I think it was not seen as necessary in this case (or the author was lazy, since these are one of the defaults I believe).
Who cares about why it happened? I mean it’s kind of obvious. No one questioned why excel shows a specific colour, but I did why the person making the spreadsheet did in fact use what you go to lengths to explaine, in a specific way. It’s like saying sorry your paycheck was halved because we have this software and today it divided your salary in half. Not saying that’s not ok or anything, but explaining how “dividing by 2 halves a number”.
I feel you explain something, while correct, had nothing to do with what I said.