5 Best VPN Services (2025), Tested and Reviewed

Other VPNs that we tested

Private Internet access (PIA) Has a long history in the VPN space, and he maintained experience in defense of user confidentiality, even in the face of a real criminal activity. In 2016, a criminal complaint was filed in Florida against Preston Alexander Mcwaters for online threats. Mcwaters was finally sentenced and sentenced to 42 months in prison. Investigators traced online threats to PIA servers and assigned the business. As the complaint indicates: “A summons was sent to [Private Internet Access] And the only information they might provide is that the IP addresses used was from the United States East Coast. Mcwaters has started several other identification activities, according to the complaint, but Pia was not among them. 15.6% of my speed.)

Mysterious is the essential DVPN, or decentralized VPN, as far as I know. The concept of a decentralized VPN has existed for some time, but it has really gained ground in the past two years. The idea is to have a network of residential IP addresses that make up the network, buying your traffic through normal IP addresses to bypass the increasingly common block lists for VPN servers. Mysterium accomplishes this network with Mystnods. It is a crypto knot. People buy the knot to gain crypto and they are put in the Mysterium network. It is not intrinsically bad, but the grip of your traffic via a single residential intellectual property is a bit worrying. Even without the decentralized kick, Mysterium was slow and he does not maintain any kind of confidentiality material, whether it is a third -party audit, a guarantee canary or a transparency report.

Privadovpn is one of the popular options to recommend as a free VPN. It offers a decent free service, with a handful of high -speed servers and 10 GB of data per month. You will have to suffer from four – yes, four – redirection begging you to pay a subscription before registering, but the free plan works. The problem is the new private. There is no transparency or audit report available, and although speeds are decent, they are not as good as Proton, Windscriber or Surfshark. Privadovpn is not bad, but it is difficult to recommend when Proton and Windscribe exist with free plans that are just as good.

How we test the VPNs

Functionally, a VPN should do two things: keep your internet speed reasonably quickly and actually protect your navigation data. This is where I concentrated my tests. Additional features, a comfortable user interface and personalization parameters are excellent, but they do not matter if the basic service is broken.

The speed tests require the verification of the point, such as the day of the day, the network to which you are connected and the specific VPN server that you use can all influence the speeds. For this reason, I have always set a basic speed on my unprotected connection directly before recording the results, and I carried out the test three times on the American and British servers. With these reference drops, I checked in place at different times of the day during a week to see if the decrease in speed was similar.

Security is a little more involved. To start, I checked the DNS, Webbrtc and IP leaks whenever I connected to a server using browser leaks. I also carried out brief tests sniffing my connection with Wireshark to make sure that all the packets sent were secured with the VPN protocol used.

On the confidentiality front, the most recommended services included in this list have been verified independently, and they all maintain a kind of transparency ratio. In most cases, there is an appropriate report, but in others, like Windscriber, this transparency is exposed by legal proceedings.