Proton VPN is one of many internet privacy products developed by Proton, the team of scientists and privacy advocates behind Proton Mail. The suite Proton offers is certainly impressive, but how does its VPN hold up against dedicated VPN providers like NordVPN and ExpressVPN?

The answer is pretty well. The completely free tier is something no other competitor on our top five list offers. With no ads and the same privacy guarantees as paid accounts, it’s an ideal way to trial the service. The paid version?

Starting, currently at $2.49 per month, it’s about the average for a top-tier VPN. Stay with me and I’ll go into whether the paid features are worth paying for, as well as how Proton VPN stacks up to the rest of our top five for speeds, unblocking capabilities, privacy, and overall value for money.

Features

There are lots of extra features built into Proton VPN’s paid version of the app, most of which are designed to either enhance your privacy or make the VPN harder to block.

For example, there’s Secure Core, which sends your VPN traffic through an initial hardened, physically owned VPN server in a high-security location before sending it on to a second endpoint VPN server. This secures the traffic you’re sending twice, so you can connect to locations without worrying that the endpoint server you use might be hacked, exposing your IP. Although it’s overkill for everyday use, it’s useful if you’re connecting to countries where VPNs are being heavily monitored by the government.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s Alternative Routing. When enabled, this routes your VPN traffic along a route provided by external third-party servers such as AWS. While this does allow servers outside of ProtonVPN’s remit to see your home IP, it also allows you to connect to services that are otherwise blocking access from Proton VPN’s servers. You’re not going to get past an ISP’s DPI monitoring with this, but it’ll get you access to some sites that would otherwise detect you’re using a VPN.

As you can see so far, Proton VPN provides expert features that fit specific use cases. The same is true of the VPN over Tor feature, which allows you to access the Tor network directly from certain Proton VPN servers. Not everyone will need to access the Tor network, but if you’re a journalist or whistleblower, it might be the standout feature here when you need the extra anonymity.

Not everything is about privacy, though. Proton VPN uses a technology called VPN Accelerator, which uses multithreading and advanced TCP routing to provide you with better speeds when connecting to servers on the other side of the planet. It doesn’t do much when you’re connecting to servers you have a good connection with, but in situations where there’s high latency or excessive packet drop, it allows you to keep a significant portion of your bandwidth where you’d otherwise be slowed to a crawl by network instability.

Of course, there are all the conveniences here too. The VPN also includes a NetShield Ad-blocker, which blocks ads, trackers, and malware, enhancing both privacy and browsing speed. There’s also a kill-switch and split tunneling across all its apps, as well as DNS leak protection thanks to Proton VPN’s own private encrypted DNS servers.

Features score: 8/10

Server network

Proton VPN’s server network is impressive, to say the least. While the rest of our top 5 (barring Surfshark) offer more locations, Proton VPN is right up there for countries to choose from, offering a staggering 126. Although this leaves it just one short of NordVPN (127) when it comes to country coverage, there are some significant differences in terms of where they cover.

What sets Proton VPN apart is the focus on serving areas of the world that have been traditionally underrepresented by VPNs, such as Africa (with 26 locations) and the Asia (with 44 locations), both of which are more than any other provider on our top five list.

Of course, if you’ve already started doing the numbers, you’ll realize that this comes at the cost of offering less impressive coverage in Europe and North America than its competitors. This isn’t to say that Proton VPN doesn’t offer an acceptable range of locations, but if you need state-by-state coverage across the US, you’re better off looking at Private Internet Access instead. Similarly, ExpressVPN has you covered if you want in-depth access to Europe.

Server network score: 8/10

Apps

There’s a Proton VPN app for every major platform, including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux. There’s some feature disparity between versions of the app, but you can expect roughly the same experience from all of them, including the Linux app, which is a full GUI program. It’s roughly on par with the Windows version, whereas the macOS version doesn’t offer OpenVPN or split tunneling. Not ideal, but all of the security features are available across every platform.

There’s an interesting quirk in Proton VPN’s desktop app design that sets it apart from the rest of the apps in our top 5. When you unfurl the home menu, it displays a map of every VPN location you can access. It’s a very cool piece of design flair, which, when combined with the pleasing purple and black color scheme Proton VPN has going on, results in a piece of software that looks like something out of a spy film.

Proton VPN recently unveiled a major revamp to some of its apps, including its previously less appealing mobile apps. This update has improved not only the customisability of the service, but also how intuitive it feels to use across different platforms, since the apps now match almost entirely across all major platforms.

The Chrome version is rated significantly lower than the other browser extensions from our top 5 VPNs, but it seems a little unfair. With a score of 2.4 on the Apple App Store, many reviews seem to focus on the lack of a free version of the browser add-on. This isn’t the case anymore, as ProtonVPN has recently released a free version of all its browser apps. Some of these complaints are a little more valid, though. While I haven’t noticed it myself while testing the Chrome extension out, there are a lot of complaints about it requiring multiple log-ins to keep connected, which is an easily avoided frustration for users.

Apps score: 8/10

Ease of use

There’s nothing very difficult about the install process, and once you’re logged in, Proton VPN is easy enough to deploy. There’s a guided tour you can take to check out some of the more advanced features, but it’s easy to ignore if you just want to get started. You click the quick connect button, and you’re connected to the nearest server.

For everything else, Proton is functional if a little intimidating for new VPN users. The world map interface lets you plot out your Secure Core connection by hand, giving you a much better idea of how each location will impact your overall connection path. It’s a great way to optimize your connection speed, but it's a little more involved than just clicking a button and closing the app.

Ease of use score: 8/10

Speed and performance

Our latest testing across Proton’s protocols indicates an overall increase in its average speeds.

Over its fastest VPN protocol, WireGuard, Proton VPN (1521 Mbps) was second only to Surfshark (1615 Mbps) when connecting to our nearest VPN server.

What's more Proton VPN (1242 Mbps) maintained that excellent performance over a transatlantic server connection far better than Surfshark (355 Mbps). Proton VPN (1242 Mbps) was second only to ExpressVPN's Windows-only Lightway Turbo protocol (1373 Mbps) this time.

Our latency and jitter readings didn’t pick up anything particularly alarming either.

Sadly, Proton VPN's OpenVPN speeds are less than we’d hope, only measuring 240 Mbps (local) and 173 Mbps (long distance). Compare that to ExpressVPN (1038 Mbps / 808 Mbps) and NordVPN (974 Mbps / 857 Mbps) and it's quite a difference.

To be clear, these are all speeds that will completely suffice for almost all your internet activity. If you’re on fibre, you might struggle a little to get the most out of your connection while you’re downloading, but otherwise, it’ll handle 4K streaming without any issue at all.

Speed and performance score: 7/10

Unblocking

Given Proton VPN promotes itself as a privacy-first VPN, you'd be forgiven for thinking streaming might not be a strong suit. However, that’s thankfully not the case. We’ve tested the servers against a wide range of streaming services, including regional variants of Netflix (US, UK, Japan, Canada, and Australia) as well as other streaming giants like Amazon Prime and Disney Plus.

In all cases, the Proton VPN servers provided instant access to the services we tested. All you have to do is pick the location you want to watch from and get streaming.

We also tested Proton VPN with more regional services such as BBC iPlayer, Channel 4, ITVX, 10Now, and 9Play, all of which were easily accessible from Proton VPN.

As for torrenting? It’s a breeze. Proton VPN supports port forwarding, so you can easily connect to other peers in a P2P network. There are also a few P2P optimized servers available on Proton VPN, which allowed me to fully connect to the rest of the swarm when downloading Linux ISOs to test.

Unblocking score: 10/10

Privacy and Security

Like every other tool from the Proton team, Proton VPN has been built from the ground up for privacy and security. Depending on which platform you’re using Proton VPN on, you’ll have the choice between OpenVPN, WireGuard, and its proprietary Stealth protocol. OpenVPN and WireGuard have both been stress-tested a thousand times over by real-world deployments and audits, so you don’t have to worry about accidentally choosing an insecure protocol when setting up the service.

WireGuard is built to always use the most secure encryption by default, while Proton has set up its OpenVPN deployment to use AES-256, which is about as secure as can be.

Stealth is an obfuscated version of WireGuard that runs over TLS, making it look like normal encrypted browsing data to anyone who’s trying to analyze your traffic to spot a VPN in use. It’s mainly useful for ducking past enterprise rule-based firewalls, but your mileage may vary in how well it works on DPI-based firewalls that ISPs in countries with harsh internet restrictions use.

Of course, Proton has a strict no-logs policy, which has been verified by multiple independent audits, most recently from Securitum in July of 2024. This marks its third consecutive annual no-logs audit, all of which are available to see on Proton VPN’s website without registering for an account.

Most providers, including ExpressVPN, will ask you to sign up first, but Proton VPN is demonstrating a commitment to transparency that few VPN providers can match.

While Proton VPN doesn’t use RAM-only servers to run its service, they do employ full-disk encryption on all of its servers, which essentially achieves the same thing. None of your browsing or connection data is ever written to disk, and anyone who attempts to remove one of the servers by force would be completely unable to decrypt the hard disk without an encryption key. Not that they’d find anything useful, anyway.

Proton VPN’s Secure Core architecture adds an extra layer of protection by routing traffic through multiple servers in privacy-friendly countries, effectively defending against network-based attacks. Forward Secrecy is implemented, generating a new encryption key for each session to ensure that even if a key is compromised, past browsing history remains secure.

I can’t say Proton VPN’s malware blocking was particularly good, though. To test it out, we picked 100 brand-new phishing URLs from the anti-phishing experts at OpenPhish and connected to each one with Proton VPN open to see how they’d do. At 11% of malware sites blocked and only 19% of phishing results, Proton VPN could do far better.

Privacy and security score: 8/10

Track record

When you claim that you’re a privacy-first company, you’re going to get a lot of eyes on you. Proton VPN is no exception, which means that some privacy issues from related products tarnish its reputation slightly. In 2019, ProtonMail was forced to log the IP address of a climate activist after a law enforcement request, which significantly undermined its perception as a private email provider.

However, Swiss law works slightly differently for VPN providers. They cannot be compelled to carry out bulk surveillance by either foreign law enforcement or the Swiss government, so Proton VPN as a product is significantly less vulnerable to the same sort of requests.

As for individual accounts, Proton VPN has to comply with legally valid cases brought forth by the Swiss courts, even if these are made by a foreign entity. However, Switzerland has no official ties to EU, NATO, or US intelligence sharing pacts, and tends not to recognize law enforcement requests from countries with a poor judicial reputation.

Track record score: 9/10

Customer support

More so than other VPNs in our top 5, Proton VPN feels like it expects you to do a bit of reading to get the most out of your VPN. There’s an incredibly comprehensive knowledge base that very clearly outlines how the whole app works, as well as offering a ton of solutions for common troubleshooting problems. The live chat is only for paying customers, so if you have any trouble signing up, you’ll have to email them or send a support ticket.

Speaking of, its live support isn’t 24/7, unlike NordVPN. Instead, you’ll need to get in touch with a support representative between 9 AM and 5 PM CET. While my interactions with the Proton VPN support staff have been useful, if delayed a little bit (there’s a 24-hour turnaround on any issue when you open a ticket), there have been some poor interactions that resulted in a 2.4 score on Trustpilot.

Customer support score: 7/10

Pricing and plans

Proton VPN starts at $2.49 a month with the currently Black Friday VPN deal. That makes it a very good offer, right now, coming in significantly lower than NordVPN Basic ($2.99) and ExpressVPN Basic ($3.49).

A Proton VPN subscription protects 10 devices on a single plan. Upgrading your plan to Proton Unlimited won’t remove this restriction, but it will give you access to Proton Drive, Mail, Calendar, and Pass for another three dollars a month. If you’re trying to migrate all of your data away from another provider like Google, this is a truly great deal.

There’s also a free version that only offers 10 locations (The US, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Poland, Switzerland, Singapore, Mexico, Canada, and Japan) but does so with no ads or restrictions whatsoever.

You won’t get access to all of the premium features, such as Multi-Hop or Secure Core, but it’s functional enough if you need a secure VPN to cover a single device without paying for it.

Pricing and plans score: 10/10

Should you use Proton VPN?

If you’re looking for a free VPN, get Proton VPN. With an unlimited bandwidth policy, no time-outs, and no ads, Proton VPN is just about the best free VPN you can get today. As a paid VPN? You could do a lot worse. Proton VPN will satisfy just about everyone who uses it, but it falls short in a few key areas where other VPNs simply work better.

It’s fast when it counts, but Surfshark and NordVPN both consistently outdo Proton VPN. All the rest of our top five perform better than Proton VPN at both European and North American locations, especially ExpressVPN and PIA, respectively. Still, these are minor complaints at best. Proton VPN has an extensive list of privacy-focused features, and you can try all of them for yourself with a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Overall score: 83/100

Proton VPN alternatives

Proton VPN FAQs

Psiphon is not a traditional VPN – it’s a censorship circumvention tool developed by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab. Created in 2006 to help citizens access blocked content in restrictive countries, Psiphon has gained plenty of traction among activists in censored regions like Myanmar, Iran, and China.

The service is completely free with unlimited data, but comes with a paid upgrade to access high-speed servers. We’ve found several use cases where Psiphon would be pretty handy, but it comes with some extensive caveats if you’re expecting the features you’d get from one of the best VPNs on the market.

Read on, and we’ll get into the instances where we would recommend Psiphon, and why we’d mostly recommend you look elsewhere.

Features

First up, we should point out that Psiphon doesn’t work like a VPN by default. Instead, Psiphon offers a unique hybrid approach combining VPN, SSH, and proxy technologies into a single circumvention tool.

It has two distinct modes: a proxy mode for basic web browsing and a VPN mode that tunnels all device traffic. When you boot up Psiphon, any app that runs through a SOCKS proxy is automatically configured to run traffic through the Psiphon servers. This mode is designed to access blocked sites, but it won’t disguise your browsing traffic. Anyone monitoring your network will be able to see the data you’re sending from your device.

On top of the default SSH tunnel used to power the proxy mode, you also have the option for “SSH+,” which automatically switches between different connection methods (SSH, HTTP, HTTPS) to maintain access when your proxy tunnel is blocked.

It’s an obfuscation technique that sends your traffic with an extra protocol built on top, essentially disguising your connection to the proxy as communication with a normal web server. There’s also a form of automatic multi-hop built in under the hood, which automatically routes your traffic through the best tunnels on the way to the endpoint you specify. This makes it particularly effective at bypassing the Great Firewall of China and other sophisticated censorship systems.

Split tunneling is available in a limited form. You can choose not to proxy local sites, but that’s about it. There’s no way to customise which apps use Psiphon and which don’t, as well as no way to specify individual websites you want the VPN to ignore.

The Android version includes a "MalAware" feature that detects certain types of malware in data traffic by comparing your requests against known IPs and domains that serve malware. It gives you a pretty specific readout of what threats you’re possibly being served with, although it’s not a full anti-virus solution. MalAware can only warn you; it can’t remove malware from your device.

If you’re unhappy with your current speeds, Psiphon uses a virtual currency system called "PsiCash" that you can either earn by watching advertisements or purchase to temporarily boost connection speeds.

Features score: 6/10

Server network

Psiphon operates a modest network of servers across just 28 countries, with the vast majority concentrated in Europe. There are just two servers available for North America and three in Asia.

If you want to connect to Africa, the Middle East, or Oceania, you’re out of luck. All of the servers are also country-level, so you won’t be able to switch if the server you’re connected to isn’t giving you the performance you want.

We suspect Psiphon operates several thousand servers, but it’s unclear what the exact number is. Given their relatively small global presence and slow speed results, we have to assume most of these are pretty outdated.

Server network score: 3/10

Apps

Psiphon provides applications for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. Although there are some methods available to run Psiphon as a Linux VPN, none of these are official. You’ll have to download a third-party solution instead that modifies the core Psiphon files, so go ahead at your own risk.

Design-wise, the Windows application features some particularly dated interface choices, which make it reminiscent of software from the early 2000s. It’s not pretty by any means, but it’s functional enough.

The options are clearly laid out from the dashboard, but the PsiCash menu is presented to you twice on the main page. However, once you get to the settings menu, the actual settings are buried within sub-menus that aren't clearly labeled, which makes it pretty complex if you aren’t already familiar with general networking concepts.

,The mobile applications offer a somewhat more modern design but are also pretty clunky and unintuitive. On Android, you get additional features like the MalAware detection system and device-wide tunneling options. However, the iOS version is more restricted, making it the weakest version of Psiphon.

Installation is straightforward across all platforms and no account registration is required to use the basic service. However, if you want to purchase speed boosts, you must provide payment information and an email address.

Ultimately, all versions of Psiphon suffer from the same fundamental limitations: the absence of essential VPN features like kill switches, DNS leak protection, and reliable connection stability.

Apps score: 5/10

Ease of use

Psiphon is relatively easy to set up and use as long as you’re not installing it on Linux. You won’t need to provide any details to get the basic version of Psiphon up and running, so all you have to do is download and run an executable on Windows. That makes it highly portable if you need a VPN you can deploy in any situation.

On Android and iOS, you’ll need to install it from the Play or Apple store, but other than that, the process remains the same. All in all, it's a pretty decent VPN for beginners.

However, the automatic browser launching feature is pretty annoying, and there’s no option to turn it off. Worse, if you haven’t got a SpeedBoost enabled, it actually serves you ads from Psiphon’s partners. If you’re concerned about being tracked by advertising agencies, this is the worst tool you could use.

It’s also hard to find the server you want to connect to, as they’re not listed in alphabetical order. You’ll have to scroll through a list of random servers to find the correct one, which is just an unnecessary issue that seems fairly easy to fix.

Ease of use score: 5/10

Speed and performance

We recognise that Psiphon's a free service that’s being run with a very specific use case in mind: getting around content blocks for web content. However, the performance speeds we recorded on Psiphon’s free version were nigh unusable.

It shouldn’t be a surprise, as the free version is limited to just 2 Mbps, and these speeds make HD video streaming impossible. Page loading times were excessive, too, and video content buffered constantly. Frankly, Psiphon’s speed makes the service impractical for anything beyond basic text-based web browsing. It is not the fastest VPN on the block.

Things got a little bit better when we upgraded to Psiphon Fast, but even these speeds were significantly poorer than what we’d expect from top-tier VPNs. With Psiphon SpeedBoost enabled, we clocked maximum speeds of 35.9 Mbps.

This is just about workable if you’re only trying to stream a single 4K video, but with anything else taking up your bandwidth, Psiphon isn’t able to take the strain. Even with the SpeedBoost enabled, we found that connection stability on the VPN wasn’t particularly solid.

It’s also important to remember this is a temporary boost. You’re paying for this upgrade, whereas most top-tier VPN providers just give you unlimited data to play with for the sake of a subscription.

Speed and performance score: 1/10

Unblocking

We’ve been able to access some of the major streaming sites using Psiphon, but the speeds make it difficult to recommend as a streaming VPN.

It worked with Netflix US and UK, as well as Disney+, but that’s about it. Psiphon doesn’t have a particularly large set of servers to choose from, so we couldn’t do tests on some of the regional streaming sites we’d usually take for a spin. Even if we could connect, the speeds are so poor that it wouldn’t be worth sticking around to watch a show. Even on Netflix, our speeds were unwatchable.

To be clear, Psiphon's strength lies in bypassing government censorship rather than commercial geo-blocking. It has historically proven effective at accessing social media platforms, news websites, and communication tools in countries with heavy internet restrictions. While it’s worked in the past to uncensor sites for Chinese netizens, it’s unclear if it’s currently effective.

Torrenting support is practically non-existent due to speed limitations and the service's focus on web browsing rather than file sharing. The 2 Mbps speed cap makes downloading large files impractical, and the frequent connection drops in VPN mode further complicate P2P activities.

While torrenting does work, Psiphon blocks everything outside of a specific set of common ports for port forwarding, meaning you’d have to tunnel your torrenting use through the service if you wanted to get the best connectivity.. All in all, forget about using Psiphon as a torrenting VPN.

Unblocking score: 3/10

Privacy and security

Psiphon's privacy and security practices are actually somewhat of a mixed bag. If you approached it with modern VPN standards in mind, it would automatically fail.

There is no kill switch protection on any platform, meaning internet traffic continues unprotected when VPN connections drop. You also can’t specify which apps you want covered by the VPN tunnel, either.

The L2TP/IPSec protocol it employs is secure enough as it’s covered by AES-256 encryption, but it’s still considered less secure than modern alternatives like WireGuard or OpenVPN.

So, no kill-switch, no split tunnelling, and underpowered VPN protocols. If you’re looking for privacy, look elsewhere.

It’s also important to state that this is not a no-logs browser service. While Psiphon doesn’t collect browsing activity, it does collect and retain metadata related to the service, including connection times, device information, and bandwidth usage.

In some cases, this includes the domain visited. Psiphon also uses AWS in part to support its infrastructure, which creates a serious problem from a privacy point of view, as Amazon will log every IP that uses its services.

That’s somewhat worrying, considering Psiphon operates from Canada, which is a Five Eyes surveillance alliance member. In the event law enforcement from this jurisdiction comes knocking on Psiphon’s doors, it’s quite likely they’d be obliged to hand over a significant amount of data, which could correlate your activities from elsewhere on the internet.

That said, the most alarming privacy issue we’ve come across is a DNS leak in Psiphon’s VPN service. Psiphon claims it has taken particular care when choosing the DNS servers the app can connect to, ensuring they’re all picked from a vetted whitelist.

Unfortunately, we found that we could see our home IP address even with Psiphon active while using a DNS leak tool. We recognise that Psiphon isn’t built as a privacy tool, but DNS leaks simply aren’t acceptable when you’re offering VPN functionality.

On the plus side, Psiphon has undergone several independent security audits by reputable firms, including iSEC Partners, 7A Security, and, most recently, Cure53 in 2019. These audits found several flaws in Psiphon’s core VPN technology, all of which have since been fixed. Apart from the weaknesses identified, each audit has suggested that overall, Psiphon is quite secure.

Privacy and security score: 4/10

Track record

Since its 2006 inception at the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, Psiphon has built a reputation specifically within the internet freedom community rather than the broader VPN market.

For example, during the 2021 Myanmar protests, Psiphon's user base surged from approximately 5,000 to 1.6 million monthly users, reflecting previous usage spikes after internet blackouts in Belarus and Azerbaijan. Clearly, in areas where internet freedom is on the line, Psiphon works.

That’s one reason you’ll have heard about it less than some of the big-name VPN providers. Psiphon is first and foremost a censorship bypass tool, rather than an all-in-one VPN. However, you also won’t have heard about it because there’s little to be said against Psiphon’s track record.

It hasn’t suffered any major security breaches, and the app has a completely clean rating when run through the CVE list, indicating that researchers in the wild haven’t found exploits for the app. That’s pretty impressive, considering Psiphon has been running for close to a decade and a half.

Track record score: 8/10

Customer support

Psiphon offers pretty minimal customer support. While there is a basic FAQ section on the website, it’s not easily accessible, and the dated nature of some of the questions suggests that it hasn’t been updated in a while.

There is no live chat or phone support, so if you’ve got an issue, you’ll need to send out an email request and hope someone gets back to you. One thing we did like is that Psiphon runs an email service that will send you back a bunch of country-specific links to download the app if your access to the main site is blocked.

It is somewhat odd, given Psiphon’s position as a VPN for users in restrictive countries, that there are no community forums and practically no useful user guides to help with installation.

Don’t expect extensive customer support from Psiphon. If you need a VPN that walks you through the setup process and keeps 24/7 customer support on hand, you’re better off investing in a premium VPN like ExpressVPN instead.

Customer support score: 3/10

Pricing and plans

Psiphon operates on a freemium model with the core service available at no cost. The free version includes unlimited data usage but caps speeds at 2 Mbps and includes advertisements whenever you boot up the VPN. Simple enough. What isn’t simple is Psiphon’s paid plan.

You can pay for Psiphon in two ways. On mobile, Psiphon can handle payment subscriptions through the app store. These are pretty self-explanatory: $2.99 per week, $10 per month, or $72 per year. These subscriptions remove advertisements and increase speed limits, although the performance you’ll get is significantly below the standard set by other premium VPN.

There’s also the PsiCash system, which we’re not a huge fan of. Instead of buying a subscription, PsiCash allows you to activate an on-demand boost to your VPN speeds. You have to purchase an amount of PsiCash, which is then credited to your account. You can then spend the PsiCash on temporary speed boosts for 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, or 1 month.

The cost is significantly higher than just buying a subscription and requires you to create a separate PsiCash account to manage your funds, but it’s the only way to access the speed boost on Windows. PsiCash is somewhat unique in that you can also earn credits by watching ads, but we haven’t investigated this at length.

Pricing and plans score: 5/10

Should you use Psiphon?

It’s very difficult to recommend Psiphon as a generic VPN solution. It’s clearly built for a specific need, and it’s hard to say that Psiphon’s useless when it could be the lifeline for someone in a heavily censored country.

It’s been built to be super simple to download and deploy without any payment necessary, so we can see some use cases where it’d work. For example, if you're an activist journalist and need access to news and communication platforms at a moment’s notice, Psiphon may also be right for you.

Otherwise, there are a few serious things wrong here. The speeds are subpar for anything other than browsing the internet, there are several outstanding questions about both technical privacy and the privacy policy, and the payment scheme is confusing, to say the least.

If you need free VPN functionality, you should consider alternatives like Windscribe Free or ProtonVPN's free tier instead. Both of these providers offer better security practices and improved speeds.

Overall score: 43/100

Psiphon alternatives

 The Opera web browser has included a simple free VPN for a very long time, but it only protects your browser traffic, has almost no features and is generally very slow.

Opera has now unveiled Opera VPN Pro, a true system-wide VPN which allows you to protect all your app traffic on up to six Android, Windows or Mac devices.

The service is accessed from the Opera browser rather than a standalone app, in much the same way as the free VPN: tap a button on the address bar and connect. But it's an entirely different service underneath.

• Want to try Opera VPN Pro? Check out the website here

You can now select countries (and sometimes cities), with 33 countries available. You're able to choose OpenVPN or IKEv2 protocols, depending on the platform. And rather than route your traffic through Opera's overloaded free servers, Opera VPN Pro uses the same network as NordVPN, delivering much better speeds (more on that below).

There still aren't a lot of features (more on that below, too), and there's no iOS app yet, but the price is certainly right. Opera VPN Pro is $5.99 billed monthly, around half the price of some monthly plans. It drops to $2.99 a month on the six-month plan, and only $1.99 billed annually, a tiny $23.88 for a full year's protection.

Privacy

Most VPN providers make huge efforts to convince you of their bullet-proof privacy, and that you'll be entirely safe with their service. Opera is, well, a little more cautious. Here's the relevant part of its privacy policy:

"VPN Pro is provided by a third-party service provider... Data communicated through VPN Pro will be encrypted and routed through one of thousands of servers... However, we do not promise that the service is absolutely secure. Despite our best efforts and the best efforts of our provider, criminals or other bad actors may still be able to access your data."

Is that worrying, unusually honest, or both? We're not quite sure, but it's something to bear in mind: Opera VPN Pro doesn't offer any big privacy promises, and it's probably not the best choice for privacy-critical tasks.

Opera says VPN Pro is a no log service, explaining: "We do not collect or store records of web pages you visit or links you click on in the servers dedicated for this Service."

Sounds promising. And as Opera VPN Pro is based on NordVPN's much-audited servers and network, we'd be reasonably sure that there's nothing harmful going on here. But Opera hasn't put its own apps or infrastructure through any audits of their own, so right now there's no evidence to back this up. We're left to take the company's words on trust.

Windows app

While Opera VPN Pro can now protect your entire Windows device, it's still accessed entirely from the Opera browser. You must download and install Opera, launch it whenever you need protection, and click a VPN icon in the address bar to control the app.

That's a relatively heavyweight solution (installing an entire browser requires far more resources than a simple standalone client), but once you've launched the app, it looks and feels much like any other VPN offering.

Opera VPN's dashboard is simple and free from clutter, which is just what we like to see. There's a connect button, and tapping the location option displays a list with all of your recent connection points at the top, as well as Opera VPN's server list. This is where you can pick and choose where you'd like to put your pin in the map.

There are no city-level locations, however, and no favorites system. This isn't a massive red flag, but it is a small quality of life feature that most top-rated VPNs include as standard, these days.

The only other feature is a Settings icon. Tapping this displays a VPN Pro section in Opera's general Settings page. This is even more basic than the location list, with little more than a couple of account management options and a reconnect feature (which automatically restarts if the VPN fails).

The app doesn't make any mention of protocols. Our investigations revealed it used a standard Windows IKEv2 connection, slower than WireGuard, but properly configured for maximum security.

Kill switch

The Opera VPN Pro website has no mention of a kill switch, and our tests showed why: it doesn't seem to have one. When we forcibly closed our Windows VPN connection, Opera displayed a 'Disconnected' message and reconnected within seconds, but it didn't block our internet and our device traffic wasn't protected.

This reconnect feature is welcome, and reduces your data exposure. It's no substitute for a working kill switch, though, and our tests revealed it had an odd 'feature' (or bug) of its own.

Suppose you've finished with Opera VPN, closed the browser, and you're connected to something else via a different Windows network connection – maybe a secure login for a work system. We’ll call this service X.

We noticed that if we forcibly closed X’s connection, then Opera VPN Pro acted like this was a failure in its own service, popped up a warning and tried connecting to its own network. But X was trying to reconnect, too. Sometimes Opera connected first, sometimes X, and sometimes that connection failed after a few seconds, presumably because the two systems were fighting over who was in charge, and they’d both try reconnecting again.

This may not happen much in real life. If you’re not using a second connection, it may never happen at all. But just the fact that the app can make such a fundamental mistake is a concern, and we’re left wondering what other issues might be lurking somewhere in its code.

Performance

We tested Opera VPN Pro's speeds with Windows systems in both UK and US locations, using multiple speed tests, over several sessions. That's a minimum of 120 individual checks, and it's often considerably more.

The results were relatively ordinary at 230-280Mbps. That's about what we expect for an IKEv2 connection (Atlas VPN also managed 230-240Mbps in recent testing, Hotspot Shield 220-260Mbps). However, WireGuard-equipped VPNs are typically two to three times as fast, and Surfshark and TorGuard reached 950Mbps+ in their last tests.

Opera's VPN has always been about privacy and security more than accessing geoblocked content, so we didn't expect much from our unblocking tests. And sure enough, it gave us very mixed results in both the UK (unblocked BBC iPlayer, couldn’t even access ITV or Channel 4) and Australia (succeeded with 9Now, failed with 10 play).

But the service went on to surprise us everywhere else, unblocking Netflix in the US, UK, Australia, Canada and Japan, as well as Amazon Prime Video and Disney Plus: a very capable record.

If you’re looking for even more, though, ExpressVPN, Hide.me, Ivacy, NordVPN, PureVPN and Surfshark all unblocked 100% of our sample sites in their last tests.

Support

The Opera Pro VPN support site is just about as basic as we've seen, with a tiny number of extremely short articles containing almost no useful details at all.

We opened the article 'Can I use Opera VPN Pro on my Laptop/Desktop computer?' hoping to find step-by-step guides to setting up the service, for instance. ExpressVPN has seven in-depth tutorials on Windows alone, but Opera's article was 58 words long, and said little more than 'it's available for Windows 8 and MacOS 10.15 or later, just download Opera Browser to use it.'

Live chat is available, but only Monday to Friday, 8am to 4pm (CEST). You can leave a message and the support team will respond by email, but officially this could take up to 48 hours.

We posted a test question explaining that Opera VPN Pro connected for us, but then we weren't able to access the internet on any apps until the connection was closed. That's typically a DNS-type issue, but would the agent give us any kind of detailed response to help figure that out?

The good news is the reply arrived quicker than expected, in around 18 hours. The bad news is it included nothing but the most generic advice that anyone with more than five minutes VPN experience would figure out for themselves: uninstall and reinstall, or try it on another device.

Final verdict

Opera VPN Pro is a nice extension of the free Opera VPN service. It's capable of unblocking Netflix, thanks to a decent spread of servers, but dedicated streamers will be disappointed with its overall unblocking power. Opera VPN is somewhat basic when it comes to features, too, especially compared to our top-rated services. If you're looking for an all-rounder, you'll be happier elsewhere.

• We've highlighted all the best VPNs

You might not be immediately familiar with the Opera web browser, but it has been around long enough to have settled down with a wife and kids. First released in 1995, Opera earned a name for itself as the browser that adhered the closest to web standards such as CSS, making it the go-to choice for web developers.

In 2016, the company released a VPN baked into its web browser; no separate app required. We had a look at the paid OperaVPN Pro version a couple of years ago, and found it somewhat underwhelming as a paid product, especially compared to the best VPNs on the market.

In a world where you can find full–featured free offerings from companies like Windscribe, Proton VPN Free, and PrivadoVPN Free, is there still an argument to be made for using OperaVPN? Let's find out.

Features

Opera's offering is rather sparse; users don't get more than the bare minimum in terms of features. There are three VPN server locations to choose from, and free users also get access to a split tunneling tool, which Opera VPN Free calls “bypass rules”, a feature which is, strangely, absent from the paid Pro version.

Bypass rules allow you to choose if you want specific websites to use your regular connection rather than the VPN connection. This comes in handy if you do a lot of online banking.

OperaVPN also comes with IP and DNS leak protection – but that’s it for features. There’s no support for streaming or torrenting, and no additional security tools beyond those that come as part and parcel of the Opera web browser. All the other features are for paying customers.

The biggest drawback is that Opera VPN Free only protects your browser and nothing else, unlike other free providers that protect all the apps on your device.

Features score: 3/10

Server network

The Opera VPN Free server network is, in a word, tiny. There are three server locations for free users to connect to, including the Americas, Asia, and Europe. By contrast, paid users get access to servers in over 60 locations worldwide.

There is another option called ‘Optimal location’, which automatically chooses the server it thinks offers the fastest connection. There is no ability to pick a more specific location, no cities on offer, though the ability to at least pick a certain point on the map puts OperaVPN above some free VPN providers, which connect you to a random server in a random location whenever you hit the connect button.

As OperaVPN only protects web traffic, there are no specific servers for torrenting or streaming.

Server network score: 3/10

Apps

To use Opera VPN’s free or Pro version, you must install and use the Opera web browser. The browser is available on a wide range of operating systems, including Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iOS, and Chromebooks.

Apps score: 5/10

Ease of use

We found that Opera VPN Free was surprisingly intuitive to use. As basic an offering as it is, there’s little to confuse even those unfamiliar with VPNs.

You access the VPN by clicking the small “VPN” icon in the address bar. After that, you get the usual big power button style connect button with a message that reads ”Unprotected - Enable for enhanced privacy” when the VPN is off and “Protected - Your browsing is secured” when the VPN is up and running – and a map visual showing you where you're connected to.

Beneath that is a dropdown with four different connection options, which will show your chosen location and new IP address. The other settings for the VPN are accessed via a rather tiny cog icon that takes you to the settings menu.

There’s a handful of additional VPN-specific settings, mainly centered around whether or not you want certain sites to use the VPN, though there are no tool-tips to help beginner users understand why they might want to enable/disable any of these settings, nor is there any help given to explain how the split-tunneling/whitelisting feature works.

Ease of use score: 3/10

Speed and performance

OperaVPN’s performance varies wildly depending on the time of day you access it. Our testing was carried out on a 1 Gb fibre connection during the morning and the evening.

The Asian location gave us a top connection speed of 249 Mbps down with an upload speed of 103 Mps.

The European and American locations were both equally as inconsistent, with top download speeds of 380 Mbps and 136 Mbps respectively. These tests were repeated over multiple days, and speeds varied from passable to barely usable, with the best results being returned in the evening GMT.

4K streaming, for instance, requires connection speeds of 25 Mbps, so while you could maybe stream high-def content via Opera VPN Free, it would be heavily dependent on the time of day you were trying to watch anything.

By contrast, Windscribe’s test results put it in the top ten fastest VPNs with a download speed of 785 Mbps using the WireGuard protocol and a top speed of 365 Mbps when connecting through the OpenVPN protocol. PrivadoVPN Free and Proton VPN’s free offering both returned download speeds that are faster and more stable than OperaVPN as well.

Speed and performance score: 4/10

Unblocking

While OperaVPN Pro was surprisingly competent when it came to unblocking streaming sites around the world, the same cannot be said for the free version.

It failed to access any content on Amazon Prime Video, couldn’t unblock Disney+, and attempts to get to Paramount+ led to a screen telling us that the service wasn’t available in our part of the world.

The same went for BBC iPlayer, with the service detecting that we were not based in the UK and denying us access. If accessing streaming content is a big selling point for you, then not only does this force you to use the websites to stream rather than the bespoke apps, which often leads to degraded picture quality, but you would simply be better off using a different free VPN, with both PrivadoVPN Free and Windscribe offering far better results.

While it was able to access a variety of different torrenting sites, Opera VPN Free offers no protection if you want to download any of these torrents, as you need to use an external client. If you’re looking to do any P2P file sharing, you’d be better off looking at one of the best torrenting VPNs instead.

Unblocking score: 0/10

Privacy and Security

The biggest issue we faced when talking about Opera VPN Free’s privacy and security features is that the provider shares so little definitive information anywhere online.

The client’s privacy and security settings are as bare bones as the rest of its offering, while also managing to be confusing by offering a variety of protocols depending on the platform you're using. On Windows and macOS, it uses the IPSec protocol. On Android, it uses either IPSec or OpenVPN, and on iOS, it uses the WireGuard protocol.

While other VPN providers offer up-to-date and speedy VPN protocols like WireGuard, OperaVPN free users are restricted to only the somewhat dated IPSec protocol on Windows and macOS.

There’s also no way for you to choose your protocol if you have issues connecting to a server or online resource. Opera does claim to have AES-256-bit encryption, but it's difficult to verify any of these claims when Opera itself is so tight-lipped about what the VPN is capable of.

We can confirm that there are no DNS, IP, or WebRTC leaks found in any of our testing, and the Opera web browser itself blocks malicious websites, as well as offering advert and tracker blocking.

That's great news, meaning that it provides some additional protection from intrusive websites trying to track what you’re doing, or wasting your bandwidth with annoying adverts. Beyond that, however, there’s none of the additional security or privacy features we would hope or expect to see, like multi-hop connections, anti-virus, obfuscated servers, or a kill switch.

The company has taken steps to assure both users and critics that it is committed to privacy and security. Towards the end of 2024, the company underwent an independent third-party audit, bringing in Deloitte to look at its systems and processes. The result of this was that Deloitte confirmed that Opera does live up to its no-logs policy and does not log or store any user data.

This is a big step toward proving that while it might be feature-light, Opera VPN Free doesn’t mess around with the privacy of its users.

Privacy and security score: 5/10

Track record

There’s not a great deal to say here, which is a good thing. OperaVPN doesn’t seem to have been involved in any major controversies or data breaches, though there have been some concerns voiced about Opera’s parent company, given that Opera is now majority owned by a Chinese company called Kunlun Tech Co., Ltd.

It also underwent a third-party audit last year that confirmed that its no-logs claim isn’t just an empty promise that can't be verified.

Track record score: 8/10

Customer support

The short answer is that there is not much in the way of support for Opera VPN Free. Opera VPN Pro has its own dedicated support site, but it’s about as basic as they come. There are a handful of short articles that are mostly concerned with the basics of getting the VPN configured and working.

One of the articles claims to detail the difference between the Pro and Free versions, but it’s little better than a marketing page that directs users to the respective sites for each product and offers only two sentences with an overview of the differences between them.

Free users get even less. There is no dedicated support portal for free users, and nothing more than a handful of extremely basic “how to use the VPN” entries in the overall Opera browser support pages.

If you can’t find any help there, then there are community forums you can use, but the VPN doesn’t even merit its own dedicated forum for queries! There’s one for the AI tools that Opera bundles in, but not for the VPN.

Again, this is in comparison to other free VPNs that boast full-featured knowledge bases and sometimes even a support team you can reach out to for help.

Customer support score: 1/10

Pricing and plans

Opera VPN is available both as a free and a paid Pro version. The Pro version is priced as follows:

• 1 year - $48
• 6 months - $30
• 1 month - $8

There are no bandwidth limits when using the free version of the VPN, and you can install the Opera browser on as many machines/devices as you like, with the understanding that only your browser traffic is going to be protected by the VPN.

The paid version supports up to 6 simultaneous connections for your devices, which is fewer than a lot of other premium VPNs.

The company offers a 7-day free trial, but there seems to be some confusion over the length of the money-back guarantee.

On the Opera website, it appears to suggest that there is a 14-day money-back guarantee, which requires you to fill out a form, print it, scan it, and then send it to Opera’s support desk, which is hardly an intuitive or user-friendly procedure.

But if you look at the Opera VPN Pro forums, it claims that the company offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, and that all you need to do is email the support team.

Pricing and plans score: 7/10

Should you use Opera VPN Free?

Opera VPN's free offering brings very little to the table that would see us recommend it over its competitors, and Opera seems almost embarrassed by its existence, judging by the dearth of information in its own official forums and support pages.

It has a tiny server network, it only protects your web browser, there’s no support for torrenting or streaming, no support site to help if you run into trouble, and its connection speeds range from the barely-usable to the just-about-adequate. There’s no killswitch, no ability to choose your VPN protocol, and basic whitelisting for URLs only.

It’s not all bad, though. The company passed an independent audit confirming its no-log claims, it’s about as simple a VPN as you could get, making it very easy for absolute beginners to get to grips with, and it does add at least some additional protection to your browsing by masking your IP and ensuring there’s no sneaky DNS leaks.

OperaVPN aims to be the most convenient way to encrypt your web browsing, and that approach does have some merits. The problem, though, is that other free VPNs are almost as simple to use, offer faster speeds, more features, and protection for all your other apps.

OperaVPN might appeal to those who aren’t particularly tech-savvy and want a truly simple product, but the argument could be made that a non-tech-savvy user isn’t going to be browsing the web through Opera to begin with.

Overall score 39/100