The Best Free VPN

I’m a senior staff writer at Wirecutter, and I’ve covered privacy and security for over 12 years. For much of that time, I’ve been testing and evaluating VPNs.

For this guide to free VPNs, I built off the work for our main VPN guide.

• I compiled a list of 77 VPN services and then narrowed that list down to 15 services that offer a free-subscription option.
• I read reviews from PCMag, Tom’s Guide, and other publications. I also looked at VPN-industry critiques from Ars Technica and Consumer Reports, as well as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s guide to VPNs.
• During testing, I read the VPN companies’ privacy policies and available third-party audits.

When you use a VPN, all of your web traffic is encrypted and sent to a server operated by the VPN company before continuing to the public internet. This hides your true IP address from snoops and advertisers, making it harder for such parties to track you as you move between websites. A VPN can hide and even spoof your location because IP addresses are tied to geographic regions. A VPN also prevents your internet service provider, and anyone else who has the ability to peek into your network, from seeing what you’re doing online.

All of that sounds positive, right? Well, the reality is that most people probably don’t need to use a VPN every day. In the US, the content of most of your web traffic is already encrypted thanks to HTTPS. Under normal circumstances, your internet service provider (or even the person operating the Wi-Fi you’re using) can see only the names of websites you visit, not specific pages or information such as credit card numbers or text. Although a VPN can hide your location and IP address, advertisers and law enforcement have numerous other means to locate and track you online. The experts we interviewed told us that although threats can still exist on public Wi-Fi, many of the attacks that VPNs have typically protected against aren’t easily carried out today.

The proposition gets thornier with free VPNs, which have a well-earned bad reputation. Some have been accused of tracking users and serving ads, and others have been caught spying on users.

But there are always exceptions. For example, if you want to hide your online activity from your ISP, which has enormous insight into what you do online (note that many ISPs have sold customer data in the past), a VPN is your best option. VPNs can also be useful when you’re traveling outside the US, where HTTPS is less widely used, or any time you just want to feel a little safer using Wi-Fi you don’t control. VPNs are still a very useful tool for journalists, activists, and marginalized individuals to circumvent internet censorship.

If any of that applies to you, a VPN might be a worthwhile addition to your online-privacy toolbox—albeit a pricey one. You can expect to pay $10 per month or nearly $70 a year on average for a VPN subscription. But just as there are circumstances where a paid VPN makes sense, there are also a few trustworthy VPNs that offer functional (if limited) versions of their paid subscriptions and don’t try to transmute your online activities into profits.

We consider the following features to be the most important for free VPNs.

It must be a truly free subscription. Many VPNs provide time-limited trials, but we don’t consider them to be actually usable. A free VPN is one that you can use whenever you like without the risk of eventually being charged for it.

That means:

• The company does not require a credit card to sign up.
• The service is not time-limited—a two-week free trial or a 30-day money-back guarantee is not the same thing as a free VPN.
• The VPN must provide basic functionality by encrypting traffic and routing it to a server operated by the VPN company.

It cannot compromise privacy and security for free subscribers. When you use a VPN, all of your traffic routes through servers controlled by the VPN company. That means the company could spy on your activities or even sell that data for profit. We accepted only those VPN services that clearly promised to protect customers and backed up that promise with regular third-party audits.

It needs to offer essential features. Reputable free VPNs typically withhold some features for paying customers. The ideal free VPN still provides the essential features, such as encrypting all your web traffic, hiding your IP address, and offering some location-spoofing capabilities, without overly burdening you with bad performance or a low data cap.

After compiling a list of 77 VPN services, we determined that 15 of them offered a free subscription.

We then examined the privacy policies of those 15 companies, as well as any third-party audits they had released. Finally, we looked at the limitations they placed on their free subscriptions to see which offerings would be the most useful for the most people.

Speed testing

Although companies have gotten better about managing the impact of their VPNs on your web browsing, using a VPN will almost certainly slow down your internet connection. The impact of a VPN is also highly variable, depending on the quality of your connection, where you are, where the VPN server you’re connecting to is located, the time of day, and so on. For our guide to VPNs, we tested two VPNs across four US states and found greatly varying results.

Another factor that can impact your VPN’s performance is how many people are using the same VPN server as you. Think of the VPN server as a tunnel with only one lane, and lots of other roads feeding into that lane. If only a few other people are on the road with you, all the cars can easily merge together and zip through the tunnel. If there’s lots of traffic on all the lanes leading to the tunnel, everything slows down as the cars jostle for position before they reach the tunnel entrance. The same is true for overcrowded VPN servers.

Most VPNs attempt to manage this problem by having multiple servers in popular locations; if one server gets too full, the service moves people to another. This can become a problem for free VPNs, because most VPNs don’t give free subscribers access to all of their servers. When we ran our speed tests on one of Proton VPN’s free servers, we saw mixed results, as the first batch of tests had barely any impact, but the last few slowed to a crawl.

Your options for addressing a slow VPN are very limited. If the app allows it, you can try manually selecting a server with fewer users, usually displayed as a “load” on the server. If the app doesn’t allow you to pick specific servers yourself, you can toggle the VPN off and on to try to get assigned to a new server.

In the shady world of free VPNs, Proton VPN stands out with its trustworthy reputation and lack of a data cap. This is a free VPN you can rely on and use every day. Although the free subscription doesn’t give you all the features of paid plans, Proton covers the basics well.

Proton VPN doesn’t limit how much data you can use for free. Most free VPNs from reputable companies are really feature-limited trials, and many limit the amount of data that free subscribers can use. Proton VPN has no data cap, so you can actually use it all the time without risk of going over an allotment.

Proton VPN isn’t the only free VPN that places no limits on data. Hide.me, Hotspot Shield, Opera VPN, Planet VPN, Privado VPN, TurboVPN, and Zen VPN likewise let free subscribers browse as much as they like. But Proton VPN still beat out these competitors with its reputation for security, ease of use, and a straightforward subscription structure. Proton also offers other services, such as secure email and cloud storage, for free along with its VPN.

Its limitations are easy to live with. Unless you pay for a Proton VPN subscription, you can access servers only in Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the US. That shouldn’t be an issue for US-based users, because you’re likely to get better performance by connecting to the nearest server. Multi-hop connections, a feature that routes your web traffic through two VPN servers to ensure that your data is secure even if one server has been compromised, are also limited to paid subscriptions. Multi-hop is a good tool but likely overkill for most people, and it greatly degrades web browsing. Proton VPN additionally limits free subscribers to just one simultaneous connection per account. That means you can use only one device at a time, which is easy enough to manage.

Proton VPN has a good track record for security. We found that its privacy policy was easy to read, and we appreciate that the company maintains a transparency report showing interactions with law enforcement. The company clearly states that it does not log the content of your web traffic, the sites you visit, your IP address, or how long you’re connected to its service. To back up its no-log policy, Proton has also released third-party audits, which include the auditors’ examination of Proton’s servers; in 2024, we saw the release of Proton’s third annual audit of its logs policy by a third party.

In 2021, Proton acknowledged that it was compelled by Swiss authorities to record the IP address of a suspect who had used Proton’s encrypted email service. The company clarified that VPN customers could not have been targeted in the same way, and that the company had no other data to provide authorities.

In 2024, researchers disclosed a new attack, dubbed TunnelVision, that affects all VPNs. Proton told us that its Windows app is not affected, and enabling its kill switch should prevent the attack on iOS and macOS.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Limited servers can sometimes limit performance. As we explained above, herding many people to a few VPN servers can degrade those customers’ web-browsing speeds. We saw this effect in our testing but found that it was highly inconsistent: Sometimes our connection was great, and other times it was terrible. Proton VPN’s app does its best to connect you with a server that has as little load as possible, but doing so can be tricky with only 300 servers available to free subscribers. However, we appreciate that Proton VPN adds more free servers during elections and other periods when there’s likely to be increased demand for its VPN.

It’s fine for privacy but less useful for unblocking content. Using a VPN can help spoof your location by making your web traffic appear to come from the VPN server rather than your computer. Some people use this ability to access streaming content that’s available only in certain regions. With only five regions available, Proton VPN’s free subscription provides few options for spoofing your location.

If you’re using a VPN for privacy, however, this small collection of server locations is probably fine. Most people are likely to use the closest server for the best performance, and the bulk of Proton VPN’s free servers are in the US. Anyone using a VPN to avoid government censorship is likely to find Proton VPN’s free servers appropriately located. Wirecutter has not evaluated any VPN for its ability to subvert government surveillance, and doing so can entail personal risk.

If you don’t need a VPN for daily use: With its user-friendly interface and seven years of annual audits, TunnelBear is one of our favorite VPNs. It also offers a free subscription but limits free users to just 2 GB of data per month. That isn’t enough for everyday use, so we can’t give it the same full-throated recommendation as Proton VPN. But unlike Proton, TunnelBear grants free subscribers access to all of its server locations, so it’s a good choice for anyone who is looking to spoof their location.

A VPN can be a useful tool, but it can’t be the only one you use to stay safe online. Despite their claims, most VPN services can’t fully protect against malware, scams, or phishing sites. Before you install a VPN, make sure that you’re also taking some basic steps to secure your online life.

Use a password manager. Weak passwords won’t stand up to a determined attacker. And if you’ve reused passwords across multiple accounts, an attacker may be able to take over several of them by cracking one password. A password manager creates and automatically fills in unique and complex passwords for each site and service you use. Password managers are safe to use and much easier than remembering passwords on your own. We like 1Password and Bitwarden.

Use two-factor authentication (2FA) wherever possible. With 2FA, you need a password and an additional “factor” to log in to an account. That factor might be a fingerprint scan, a code generated by an app on your phone, or a security key that you plug into your computer. Even if an attacker manages to steal your password, they still won’t be able to access your account without the second factor. It’s the best way to protect your online accounts.

Block ads and trackers in your browser. One way in which advertisers can track you online is with trackers embedded into the websites you visit. While most ads are merely annoying, some attackers place ads on legitimate websites that direct to malicious sites. A tracker blocker, such as the EFF’s Privacy Badger, makes the web a little nicer to look at and safer as well.

Consider antivirus protection. Even if you’re clever enough to avoid malware in general, everyone makes mistakes. Antivirus software can be a safety net, protecting against more complex threats that are harder to spot. Windows Defender is included with every Windows installation and free to use.

Practice security hygiene. Your computer and browsers have built-in tools to help keep you safe online, so learn how to use them. Pay attention to warnings from your browser about insecure sites, and keep an eye out for unusual URLs that might be pointing to phishing sites. Be sure that your apps and operating systems are up to date with the latest security patches to block known threats, too.

We started with our list of 77 VPNs and eliminated all the services that didn’t offer a free VPN subscription option. This process left 15 services, most of which we dismissed for having an inadequate history of third-party audits or too restrictive policies for free subscribers.

Bitdefender is better known for its antivirus software. Bitdefender’s Premium VPN includes a free-subscription option, but it isn’t easy to find. Instead of signing up for a free tier, you sign up for the paid service and then let the free-trial period lapse; after that, you can continue using the VPN but only on three servers, with one device at a time, and with only 500 MB per day of data.

Like our top pick, Hide.me places no limit on the amount of data you can use with its free VPN, but it does restrict you to eight server locations and one device at a time. We’d like to see this company establish a longer track record for third-party audits as well.

NordVPN doesn’t have a traditional free-VPN offering, but you can get some of the benefits of a VPN for free with its unique Meshnet feature. Meshnet allows you to route traffic between devices where you’ve installed NordVPN’s apps; for example, you could route the traffic from your mobile devices through your home computer and get much of the same benefit as from a typical VPN. However, it isn’t much use unless you’re traveling, and it doesn’t provide the same flexibility as other VPNs.

Opera has a VPN built right into its browser, and you can use it for free with unlimited data and three server locations. However, the VPN protects only the web traffic from the Opera browser. We think that’s too restrictive for most people, but it could be useful in a pinch or if you already use the Opera browser.

Windscribe’s free VPN service limits your data in an unusual way. If you create an account without providing an email address, you can use 2 GB of data per month; if you do provide an email address, you get 10 GB per month. That’s more generous than TunnelBear’s allotment but still not enough for daily use. We’d also like to see Windscribe get a few more third-party audits under its belt.

Urban VPN deserves some special attention because it was the only free VPN we evaluated that said explicitly in its privacy policy that it uses data gleaned from its users to generate marketing “insights” that it uses internally or sells to other companies. These insights can include a user’s browser activity—basically, what you do online. Urban VPN says in its policy that this data is anonymized and cannot be connected to an individual user, but we don’t believe that’s good enough, and we recommend that you use our top pick instead.

We also evaluated and eliminated Aura, Avira Phantom VPN, Hotspot Shield, Planet VPN, PrivadoVPN, Steganos Online Shield, Turbo VPN, and ZenVPN.

This article was edited by Caitlin McGarry and Jason Chen.