The Best VPN Services for 2024

Deeper Dive: Our Top Tested Picks

Buying Guide: The Best VPN Services for 2024

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Is a VPN Worth Getting?

The simple answer to whether you need a VPN is yes. Using a VPN is a simple way to protect your privacy online and can help circumvent unwanted internet restrictions. None of the services listed here are perfect, and there will surely be times when a VPN won’t make sense. That said, a VPN is undoubtedly a valuable data privacy tool, and it’s well worth having one in your personal security toolbox.

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Why Do I Need a VPN?

A VPN routes your internet traffic through an encrypted connection to a server controlled by the VPN provider. From there, your traffic exits onto the web as usual. If you only connect to websites secured with HTTPS, your data remains encrypted, even after leaving the VPN. It sounds simple, but VPN usage can improve your online privacy.

Think of this analogy: When your car pulls out of your driveway, someone can follow you and see where you’re going, how long you spend there, and when you return. They might even peek into your car to learn more about you. With a VPN app, it’s like driving from your house into a private tunnel, exiting into a closed parking garage, switching to a different car, and driving out. No one who is trying to follow you can know where you went.

Likewise, no one snooping around your network can see what you’re doing when you use a VPN connection. Convenient public Wi-Fi networks are also convenient for attackers. How do you know, for example, “starbucks_wifi-real” is the coffee shop’s actual Wi-Fi network? A prank popular among security researchers is to create a network with the same name as a free, popular service and see how many devices automatically connect. 

Even if you’re trusting, you might not want to trust your internet service provider (ISP). In the US, your ISP has enormous insight into your online activities. To make matters worse, congress has decided your ISP is allowed to sell your anonymized browsing history. Selling your data seems egregious since you are already paying for the service. A VPN prevents even your ISP from keeping tabs on you.

Another benefit of using a VPN is that your true IP address is hidden behind the address of the VPN server. This makes it harder to track you. Even dedicated observers have trouble telling which internet traffic is yours because your data is mixed in with everyone else’s using the server. 

Hiding your IP address has another benefit: It makes it harder for snoops to figure out your location. You can use this to your advantage and connect to distant VPN servers to spoof your location.

It’s important to understand that if your VPN connection goes down, the privacy protection you rely on goes with it. For this reason, most VPNs offer a kill switch, which shuts off your network traffic when your VPN connection drops. The only catch? A kill switch is generally turned off by default, so you might want to toggle yours on in your VPN app when you set it up—or at least familiarize yourself with how it works and turn it on when your privacy is critically important. You can read more about this essential security feature in our kill switch explainer.

Note: VPNs are sometimes confused with proxies, but they are not the same thing. To learn more, see our explainer on VPNs vs. proxies.

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What Can’t VPNs Do?

VPN services, while helpful, don’t provide every kind of threat protection. A VPN can’t help you if you download ransomware or if you give up your data in a phishing attack. We strongly recommend using local antivirus software, enabling multi-factor authentication wherever available, and using a password manager to create and store unique, complex passwords for each site and service you use. Those are all good security measures you should take in addition to using a VPN.

There are also limitations to how anonymous you can be with a VPN. Advertisers have tactics, such as online trackers and browser fingerprinting, to gather data on you and track your movements. We recommend using your browser’s anti-tracking features and installing dedicated ad or tracker blockers.

Many VPN services also provide their own DNS resolution system as a security feature. Think of DNS as a phone book that turns a text-based URL like PCMag.com into an IP address computers can understand. Savvy snoops can monitor DNS requests and track your movements online. Greedy attackers can also use DNS poisoning to direct you to bogus phishing pages designed to steal your data. When you use a VPN’s DNS system, it’s another layer of protection. Read how (and why) to change your DNS server for more.

There’s debate among security experts about the efficacy of VPNs. Since most sites now support secure HTTPS connections, much of your online experience is already encrypted. Secure DNS products like Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 exist precisely because some feel VPNs are overkill. Still, a VPN covers the information not already protected by HTTPS, places a buffer between you and the people controlling internet infrastructure, and makes tracking your activities online harder for any potential prying eyes. 

Some security-conscious industries, like banking, are confused by or suspicious of VPNs. If your bank sees you logging in from what appears to be another US state or even another country—or if it simply detects that a VPN may be in use—it can raise red flags. That’s because if a hacker were trying to get into your bank account from another country, they’d use a VPN, too. Expect to see captchas and more frequent multi-factor authentication requests when your VPN is on, or be prepared for your bank to block you from logging in at all.

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VPNs vs. Security Suites

Just as antivirus utilities evolved into multi-function security suites, over the past year we’ve seen VPN services add other types of security features, from password managers to built-in antivirus protection. Norton Ultra VPN Plus, for example, contains most of the same features as the Norton 360 Deluxe suite, though some are hidden. The Threat Protection module in NordVPN Threat Protection Pro is like an antivirus, but it lacks the expected ability to scan local files for malware. Surfshark One’s antivirus component earned good scores against malware and a perfect score against phishing frauds. It ropes in a handful of other security features, but not enough to challenge top security suites.

Coming from the other direction, many traditional security suites have included a VPN component for years. Some are in-house productions, like Norton’s. Other companies, like Bitdefender, license VPN technology from third parties. Mergers and acquisitions in the space muddy these waters further and make it difficult to tell who owns what, who’s licensing which technologies, and which tools are developed from the ground up versus bought from someone else. Thankfully, we keep track, and you can find that information in greater detail in our individual reviews. It’s not yet clear how this collision of security-plus-VPN with VPN-plus-security will ultimately play out in the coming years, but you can be sure we’ll keep a close eye on the matter going forward.

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What Is the Best Free VPN?

Not all VPN services require payment. There are, in fact, many excellent free VPNs. But every free VPN we’ve tested has limitations. Some limit you to a few simultaneous connections or devices. Others restrict your data or limit you to a handful of servers. Still others do all of the above.

Finding the best free VPN is an exercise in balancing those restrictions. Windscribe, for example, lets you use any server on its network but limits you to 2GB per month (10GB if you sign up with your email address). Proton VPN has the unique distinction of placing no data restrictions on free users, but it does limit which servers you can access.

For those of you who are at least willing to put down some cash, we also have a roundup of the best cheap VPNs.

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What Is the Best VPN for Mac?

While this list includes the best VPNs we’ve tested, you may be looking for one specifically for Mac. For complete details, read our roundup of the best VPNs for Macs. Based on our testing, the best options for Apple’s OS are Proton VPN and NordVPN.

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What Is the Best VPN for Torrenting?

When you use BitTorrent, you should absolutely consider using a VPN. Many ISPs and network managers block Torrenting altogether, and a VPN can prevent them from seeing that you’re connecting to a peer-to-peer sharing service. Of course, torrenting certain files may get you in trouble, whether they are bootlegged or even banned in your area, and a VPN can protect you here as well. To find the right service for staying safe while torrenting, head over to our roundup of the best VPNs for torrenting.

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What Is the Best VPN for Gaming?

Gamers need privacy protection, too. While the idea of using a service that can increase your latency and generally interfere with your connectivity may not appeal to you, you might want to play a game that isn’t available in your area, or you might not want to expose your real IP address to other gamers. VPNs might even make it more difficult for rivals to use distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to knock players offline. Read our story on the best VPNs for gaming for help picking the VPN that strikes the right balance between productivity and privacy.

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What Is the Best VPN for China, Russia, or the Ukraine?

VPNs are useful for improving individual privacy, but there are also people for whom a VPN is essential for their safety. Journalists and activists often rely on VPN services to circumvent local government censorship and safely communicate with the outside world. Check the local laws before using a VPN in China, Russia, or in any country with repressive internet policies. Another place people might want to use a VPN is in a war zone such as Ukraine, where hiding locations might well be a matter of life and death.

To fully and comprehensively anonymize your traffic, use the free Tor network. While a VPN tunnels your web traffic to a VPN server, Tor bounces around your traffic through several volunteer nodes, which makes it much harder to track. Using Tor also grants access to hidden dark websites, which a VPN cannot do. Some services, such as NordVPN and Proton VPN, offer Tor access on specific servers.

A VPN protects you against mass data collection and casual criminals who vacuum up user data for later use, but a determined adversary will almost always find a way to breach your defenses. If this does happen to you, read our story on what to do when you’ve been hacked.

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How to Get a VPN

The VPN market has exploded in the past decade, growing from a niche industry to a highly crowded and competitive one. Many VPN service providers are capitalizing on the general population’s growing concerns about surveillance and cybercrime, which means it’s hard to tell when a company is providing a useful service and when it’s selling snake oil. Fake VPNs have even popped up, so be careful. 

When you read reviews looking for a good service, don’t just focus on connection speed since that’s the factor you (and the VPN) have the least control over. Since nearly all VPN companies offer some mixture of the same technologies, consider value when looking for your best VPN service. How can you get the most for the least? Look for extra VPN features like split tunneling, multi-hop connections, and so on. You may not always need them, but they’re helpful when you do.

Nearly every VPN service provider has its own app with an interface for managing connections and settings, and we recommend using it. You might dismiss such things as mere window dressing and prefer manually managing your VPN connections. However, that can be tedious and often doesn’t give you access to the additional privacy tools many VPNs provide.

The best way to know if a VPN works is to try it in all the environments where you plan to use it, like home, work, and school. Some VPNs provide free trials or even completely free subscription tiers of service, so take advantage of them. Free access to a VPN lets you see if you can access all the sites and services you need and test the speeds in your area to see if they’re acceptable.

We recommend starting with a short-term subscription to ensure you are happy with the service before committing to annual, two-year, or lifetime paid plans. Yes, you may get a discount by signing up for a year, but that’s more money at stake should you decide the service doesn’t meet your needs after the fact.

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How Do I Set Up My VPN?

Getting a VPN is easy; setting one up on your machine can be a bear, however, if you don’t know what you’re doing. What server should you connect to? Should you let the software choose for you? What security features should you enable?

We answer these questions in our story on choosing and setting up a VPN. If you don’t like the idea of downloading yet another app, you can also configure Windows 11 to connect directly to the service you choose. You can read how in our story on setting up a VPN in Windows 11—be warned, however, that this is not the easy way to do it.

VPNs protect your data using a variety of publicly available open-source encryption protocols, as well as proprietary ones. The most common open-source options include OpenVPN, WireGuard, L2TP, IKEv2, and others. Meanwhile, some VPNs like ExpressVPN are looking toward the future with what the company calls its “post-quantum encryption” protocol, Lightway.

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Can I Trust My VPN to Protect My Privacy?

If you’re using a service to route all your internet traffic through its servers, you have to be able to trust that service. It’s easier to trust companies that have been around longer because their reputation is likely to be well-established—and it’s what’s at stake should the company do you wrong. The trouble is that the VPN industry is relatively young compared with antivirus, for example, and some VPN companies play dirty. Figuring out who to trust is difficult.

At PCMag, we pay special attention to VPN companies’ privacy practices, not just the technology they provide. We read their privacy policies as part of our testing procedure and discuss company practices with company representatives. We look for a commitment to protecting user information and practices that gather and retain as little user information as possible.

As part of our research, we also determine where the company is based and under what legal framework it operates. Some countries don’t have data-retention laws, making it easier to keep the promise of “we don’t keep any logs.” It’s also useful to know under what circumstances a VPN provider will hand over information to law enforcement and what information it would have to provide (and what it could provide) if that happened. For more, see our story on VPN logging.

The best VPN services have a privacy policy spelling out what the service does, what information it collects, and what the company does to protect said information—ideally in plain English. Some companies explain they collect some information but don’t inform you how they intend to use it. Others are more transparent. We talk about these details in every review we write of a VPN service.

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What Are the Best VPNs for Streaming?

Netflix and other streaming services often block VPNs because they can access region-locked content. A service that works today may be blocked tomorrow. That could be an issue for some readers because while many users rely on VPNs solely for online privacy purposes, others use them to unblock streaming from different regions around the globe.

For example, if you’re watching Brooklyn 99 on Netflix from a US-based IP address while waiting for your flight to the UK, you may find that the show isn’t available on the service by the time you land at Heathrow. This is down to the way that local content licenses are distributed by the major studios, where some shows are globally distributed, and others are only licensed for viewing in particular countries.

We test five of those countries here at PCMag each time we review a VPN: Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US. The results of those tests are included in the chart below, along with descriptions of how we classify each type of Netflix library we might encounter during testing.

Over the past few years, we’ve found VPNs have improved their ability to access streaming content. Previously, it was unusual to find a VPN that could stream Netflix content from outside the US. Lately, though, either Netflix has softened its efforts to ban VPNs, the VPNs have gotten better at circumventing those bans, or some combination of both. This means more VPNs can access more streaming content than ever before. However, accessing region-locked streaming content can breach the terms of service for your preferred streaming service, so remember that doing so may risk getting your account terminated.

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What Is the Best VPN for Pornhub?

As more states pass age-restriction legislation, another kind of region-locked content that may increasingly require a VPN to watch is porn. In response, Pornhub has blocked access for any users connecting from more than 10 different states in the US. For a guide to watching adult content despite such blocking, check out our guide on how to watch porn safely, as well as our picks for the best VPNs for viewing Pornhub.

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What Is the Best VPN for TikTok?

TikTok is another service that may soon require a VPN to access from the US after President Biden signed a bill banning it. While the ban won’t go into effect until January 2025 (if it survives the inevitable legal challenges), many die-hard fans are already thinking about how they will keep getting their fix. If that sounds like you, take a look at our picks for the best VPNs for TikTok.

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How Many Devices Can My VPN Protect at Once?

Some important things to look for when shopping for a VPN include the total number of simultaneous connections the VPN service allows, the number of servers it has, and its server location count.

Most VPN services let you connect up to five devices with a single account. Any service offering fewer connections is outside the mainstream. You need to connect every device you wish to protect to the VPN service, so a mere two or three licenses often is barely enough for one person, let alone a connected couple or family.

This paradigm may be changing, however. Many services now offer far more than five simultaneous connections, while others have eliminated the restriction entirely, offering protection for unlimited devices. Avira Phantom VPN, IPVanish VPN, and Windscribe VPN all place no limit on the number of simultaneous connections. (Note: IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)

Of course, there are more than just phones and computers in a home. Game consoles, smart TVs, and smart home devices such as light bulbs and fridges all need to connect to the internet, too. Many of these things can’t run VPN software on their own. To solve the issue, some VPN companies provide instructions on configuring your router to use a VPN, which protects any devices connected to your home network.

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Where Are My VPN’s Servers?

One key consideration when picking the right VPN is how broadly the company’s servers are distributed worldwide. Having numerous servers in diverse locales means that no matter where you travel, you should be able to find an available server nearby. The closer the server, the better the speed and reliability of the connection it offers. Remember, you don’t need to connect to a far-flung VPN server to gain security benefits. Depending on where you live, a server down the street is as safe as one across the globe.

We also examine how many virtual servers and virtual locations VPN companies use. A virtual server is just what it sounds like—a software-defined server running on server hardware that might have several virtual servers onboard. A virtual location is a server configured to appear somewhere other than where it is physically located.

While neither approach is inherently problematic, choosing one location and discovering your server is somewhere else entirely is worrisome. Some VPN companies take a smart view of virtual servers, using them to provide VPN support for regions where it might be too risky to house a server physically. When VPNs use these technologies, we prefer they be transparent about it.

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What’s the Fastest VPN?

When a VPN is active, your web traffic takes a more circuitous route than usual. In most cases this added hop can result in slower download and upload speeds, as well as increased latency, compared with a connection that isn’t routing through a VPN. The good news is that using a VPN probably won’t remind you of the dial-up days of yore. 

When we test VPNs, we use the Ookla speed test tool. This test provides metrics for latency, download speeds, and upload speeds. Depending on your needs, any one of these can be an important measurement, but we tend to view the download speed as the most important. We test each VPN ten times and record the median score for each performance category. See our story on how we test VPNs for the full details. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)

In our most recent batch speed tests, NordVPN came out on top with an actual increase to our download speeds compared with a base connection with no VPN enabled. You can read more about how a result like this is possible in our full breakdown of the fastest VPNs we’ve tested.

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What Is the #1 Best VPN?

There are plenty of choices when it comes to picking a VPN—so many that we have Editors’ Choice-winning VPNs for several use cases. Our current overall favorite is Proton VPN, which gets a rare 5-star rating and an Editors’ Choice award. It takes a strong privacy stance, is fast in our testing, and has an impressive collection of advanced tools along with an excellent free tier. NordVPN may cost a bit more, but it offers a ton of security tools and extras while blowing away the competition in speed tests, earning it a 4.5-star rating and our Editors’ Choice for premium VPNs. Windscribe, another Editors’ Choice, ties NordVPN’s score thanks to its radical privacy and transparency policies—getting started doesn’t even require an email address—along with its feature-packed apps across all the platforms we tested.

Max Eddy contributed to this story.