The Best Free VPNs of 2024

The table below compares our top-rated free VPNs based on download speed, number of server locations, logging policy, and more:

We hold free VPNs to the same high standard as paid ones. We never recommend free VPNs that log your web activity, leak your IP address, or otherwise endanger your internet privacy and security.

Free VPNs are used for many different reasons and on a variety of devices. Follow the links below to our guides with recommendations for popular purposes, devices, and countries.

Despite their worldwide popularity, the free VPNs below performed very badly in our tests and we strongly advise against using them.

Hola Free VPN

Hola Free VPN is very fast but it isn’t safe to use. It logs your internet activity, doesn’t unblock websites, and blocks P2P traffic. Hola VPN Chrome was even removed from the Chrome Store in 2021 after being labeled as potentially dangerous.

TunnelBear Free

TunnelBear has the largest free server network, but it caps data at 2GB per month, which is too restrictive.

Betternet Free VPN

Betternet Free VPN is a slow VPN lacking many critical security features. It also leaks your DNS requests.

VPN Proxy Master

VPN Proxy Master doesn’t have adequate security features and we even detected dangerous functions and malware in its apps.

Thunder VPN

Thunder VPN suffers from slow speeds, enforces an invasive logging policy, and uses a very weak encryption protocol.

SuperVPN Free VPN Client

SuperVPN Free is the absolute worst free VPN there is. It has a dangerous logging policy, its ownership is very opaque, and its apps are full of adverts.

Turbo VPN

Turbo VPN is infested with third-party adverts, has unsafe permissions, and we even detected malware in our security audits.

Many popular free VPN services are unsafe and pose serious risks to your internet security and privacy.

Free VPNs are often riddled with aggressive advertising, or even malware. Many collect and monetize user data by selling it to third parties. Hola VPN, for example, was caught selling its users’ bandwidth to botnets.

Furthermore, numerous free VPN applications use weak encryption or leak IP and DNS data.

The chart below illustrates some of the key findings of our free VPN research and investigations:

Aside from their privacy and security risks, most 100% free VPNs are simply less effective, too. They often have slow speeds and rarely unblock popular streaming services.

The Dangers of Using a Risky Free VPN

We’ve listed below the three key dangers of using an unverified and unsafe free VPN:

1. Data Logging & Intrusive Advertising

Free VPN services need to make money to support their business. Most services do it through in-app ads, with third-party code that sends internet usage data back to the ad platform.

Some free VPNs even log your web browsing data and sell it to third-parties.

If you are using a VPN to use the internet privately, avoid those that have advertising.

2. Data Leaks & Weak Encryption

Strong encryption and a secure server network cost money. Many free VPNs are poorly maintained — as a result, they simply aren’t secure.

We see many popular free VPNs like YogaVPN and TurboVPN leak DNS and IP address information. Basically, free ‘VPNs’ like these are proxies that don’t encrypt your data.

3. Ownership & Accountability

Most popular free VPNs on the App Store or Google Play Store belong to companies that do not prioritize user privacy. At the very worst, some actively harvest your data.

We investigate which companies and individuals are behind a VPN service. For example, our past research revealed that 60% of popular free VPNs had suspicious links to China, – including many free VPN services in Taiwan.

How Do Free VPNs Make Money?

It isn’t really possible to run a VPN for free. There are development, infrastructure, and staff costs, to list a few.

How a free VPN makes its money is really important. As the saying goes: if you aren’t paying for a product, then you are the product. These are most common ways free VPNs make money:

• Being subsidized by a paid service (another VPN or security software)
• Advertisements
• Selling user data

It’s safer to choose free VPNs that are subsidized by paid-for VPN services. Freemium services like Windscribe, Proton VPN, and PrivadoVPN are good examples. These companies don’t have to monetize their free applications directly.

Freemium VPNs often use the infrastructure of the full paid service, but with major restrictions on its functionality. This often means a limited number of servers, and a monthly data cap of 10GB or less.

As a result, these free VPNs also tend to have slower speeds and unblock fewer streaming services than their paid equivalents.

The worst VPNs are usually completely free to use. They generate income by running invasive advertisements or – in the worst cases – logging and selling user data to third parties.

Not every free VPN is dangerous. Certain free VPNs are very good for small and specific tasks like using public WiFi securely, temporarily changing your IP address, or unblocking geo-restricted videos for a few hours.

However, it simply isn’t possible to match premium VPN services completely for free. You’ll almost always be limited by several factors including monthly data caps, slower speeds, torrenting restrictions, and inferior streaming capabilities.

Below is a list of the most common limitations of free VPNs that you won’t find in high-quality paid VPN services:

1. Limited Streaming (Unblocking) Capabilities

Free VPNs typically cannot bypass the geo-restrictions implemented by streaming services around the world.

Aside from Windscribe and PrivadoVPN, most free services don’t work with popular streaming platforms like Netflix, Disney+, and HBO Max.

On the other hand, top-rated streaming VPNs like ExpressVPN and PrivateVPN easily unblock most streaming services from overseas.

2. Limited Torrenting and File-Sharing Support

Often, free VPNs either heavily restrict file-sharing speeds or block torrenting traffic altogether.

This is because file-sharing and P2P traffic consumes high levels of bandwidth that costs VPN services money.

Moreover, most safe free VPNs enforce daily or monthly data limits, which hinder the transfer of large files.

Not to mention the fact that free VPNs don’t offer extra torrenting features like port forwarding or a SOCKS5 proxy.

While not all paid VPNs are optimized for torrenting, those that are will provide advanced torrenting settings, excellent security, and fast torrent speeds across thousands of P2P-friendly servers.

3. Daily or Monthly Data Usage Limits

Most secure and trustworthy free VPNs place restrictions on the amount of data you can transfer in a day or a month.

Typically, these data usage limits range from 1GB to 10GB per month, although there are rare free VPNs — like Proton VPN Free — that don’t impose any data limits at all.

This problem doesn’t exist with paid VPN services, which don’t apply any restrictions on how much data you use.

4. Slower (or Capped) Connection Speeds

A few years ago, free VPNs were much slower than they are now.

Thanks to technology advancements, many top free VPNs are now able to deliver fast speeds throughout their network.

However, this isn’t always guaranteed. Some secure free VPNs are in fact much slower than paid alternatives.

For instance, Hide.me’s free servers are considerably slower than its paid ones.

This is likely due to server congestion, which occurs when too many free users are connected at the same time.

Server congestion is a common problem with free VPNs, which can have millions of users connected to the same servers.

5. Small Free VPN Server Network

As you will have seen from our list of recommended free VPNs, free VPN server networks are small.

Even the largest free VPN server networks consist of a few hundred servers at most, or cover approximately 40 to 50 server locations at best.

This pales in comparison to paid VPNs, which can offer access to as many as 18,651 servers worldwide.

Windscribe Free offers the most server locations in our recommendations, with a network covering 11 countries. In comparison, paid providers like CyberGhost and Surfshark operate servers in more than 90 countries.

6. Lack of Advanced Security Features

Even the very best free VPN services are limited when it comes to advanced settings.

Other than a VPN kill switch, extra features such as VPN split tunneling, multi-hop (or double VPN) servers, and IPv6 leak protection are rarely found in free VPN services.

These additional settings are almost always reserved for paying customers. If having access to them is important to you, then you’ll have to opt for a paid-for VPN.

We regularly test every free VPN we review. If a VPN service offers both free and a paid versions of their apps, we will often test both versions as part of the same review.

In other words, we put free VPNs through the same exact testing process we apply to paid VPN services.

We test for speed, security, unblocking (including streaming), and torrenting. We analyze every privacy and logging policy in detail, as well as assessing a VPN’s ease of use and reliability.

Use the table below to see how our highly-rated free VPN apps performed in our key testing categories:

VPNs with a data cap receive a reduction to their overall rating.

Our VPN reviews and verdicts are completely impartial. We never accept compensation in return for positive coverage.

We’ve bought a wide range of test devices in order to fully test a VPN service’s complete range of applications.

Below is a specific breakdown of the factors that make up our free VPN testing process, and how we weigh each individual category:

1. Privacy & Logging Policy: 20%

We only recommend free VPN services that respect your internet privacy and provide a high degree of anonymity.

We scrutinize each VPN’s privacy policy to fully understand what information the service is collecting, why it needs it, and how long it stores it for.

We also expect to see transparent and detailed policies, written in plain language.

A VPN shouldn’t collect unnecessary or personally-identifying activity data, for instance your IP address or records of the websites you visit.

The most private VPNs operate a strict no-logs policy. We highly value a policy that has been independently audited by a trusted third-party, or has been confirmed by real-world events (e.g. VPN server seizures and court cases).

2. Speed: 20%

A VPN slows down your internet speeds — at least marginally. This is because your data has to travel via the VPN server before reaching its destination, which makes its journey longer.

High data encryption can also slow down the speed at which the data travels through the VPN tunnel.

With free VPNs, the speed loss tends to be higher than with the best paid VPNs. However, that doesn’t mean you have to endure painfully slow connection speeds.

We run regular manual speed tests, measuring each VPN’s download speed, upload speed, and ping time.

We conduct speed tests around the world, connecting to local and international VPN servers, in order to get a full picture of the VPN’s performance.

Our top-rated free VPNs are almost as fast as many of the paid VPNs we review. You’re unlikely to notice huge drop-offs in speed, and you’ll able to stream high-quality video or torrent quickly.

3. Security & Technical Features: 15%

Testing the security levels of a free VPN is of particular importance. That’s because dangerous and ineffective free VPNs are much more common than risky paid services.

We make sure every free VPN we recommend is free of malware, actually encrypts your web data transfers, and does not collect personally-identifiable activity data.

The security standard and encryption levels used by a VPN application are equally important aspects we thoroughly analyze.

Most VPNs use the AES encryption cipher to encrypt web traffic. While AES-128 is secure enough, we do favor applications that use the stronger AES-256 encryption cipher.

Additionally, the VPN protocols used need to be highly secure and reliably fast. OpenVPN and WireGuard are by far our preferred default choices.

That said, we do value proprietary protocols, like ExpressVPN’s Lightway, that perform just as well. Crucially, we will never recommend a proprietary protocol without proper testing and inspection.

A VPN service must also have a working kill switch that prevents IP address exposures due to abrupt VPN connection interruptions. All the service’s main apps should come with this tool, and ideally enabled by default.

4. Streaming: 15%

One of the most common reasons to use a VPN is for bypassing streaming geo-restrictions. By changing your IP address, you can access video content usually blocked in your geographic region.

Sadly, free VPNs are notoriously bad for streaming. Most content platforms, such as Netflix, dedicate many resources to blocking VPN users – and free VPN connections are often the easiest to identify and block.

We’ve run thousands of tests to see which VPNs unblock which streaming services. We regularly check multiple Netflix regions, BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, and more.

Although free VPNs have a very low success rate at unblocking streaming platforms, the best ones like PrivadoVPN and Windscribe are able to stream US Netflix and BBC iPlayer.

5. Ease of Use: 10%

A VPN service’s compatibility with many devices and operating systems is clearly very important. The more devices you can it on, the better.

Unless a VPN is specifically dedicated to mobile users, we expect every VPN service to have good native applications for Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android devices.

Installing and using these applications should be straightforward, even for a complete novice. Once the VPN has launched, finding and connecting to a VPN server should only take a few seconds.

Additionally, we rate even more highly VPN services that have built native apps for Fire TV devices, a user interface for Linux, and offer .apk installation files for increased Android compatibility.

The absolute top VPNs even offer the option for router setup, and include a Smart DNS service to use the service on Apple TV and games consoles. Most free VPNs do not offer the latter solution, though.

6. Server Locations: 5%

We analyze each VPN’s server network in detail. We pay particular attention to the total number of servers, how well distributed they are across the world, and any specialized servers (e.g. P2P-, streaming- or Tor-optimized servers).

Larger VPN server networks give you greater chances of enjoying fast connection speeds and unblocking geo-restricted web content.

The greater the range of servers the less congested they’ll be and the more anonymous IP addresses you’ll have access to. Moreover, the higher the chance there will be a server close to your physical location, for increased speeds.

Free VPNs often have limited VPN server networks, both in terms of server count and server locations. However, there are free services with 10 or more global server locations.

7. Torrenting: 5%

Using a VPN is crucial for safe and anonymous torrenting. We first examine each VPN service’s P2P file sharing policy, as many don’t allow free users to torrent at all.

We then check for P2P-optimized servers, AES-256 encryption, and make sure the VPN kill switch is working effectively.

We also run IP and DNS leak tests to ensure the VPN won’t leak your true torrent IP address while you’re in the torrent swarm.

Finally, we run a series of P2P performance tests. Most importantly, we record the VPN’s average torrenting bitrate. Just because a VPN is fast for streaming, it doesn’t mean it’ll deliver fast P2P file sharing speeds.

The best free VPNs have an average torrenting bitrate of at least 4MiB/s.

8. Bypassing Censorship: 5%

Bypassing internet blocks in high-censorship countries is one of the hardest things for a VPN to do. Many VPNs, free or paid, aren’t equipped to circumvent strict web filters.

Building adequate obfuscation technology and tools requires a high degree of commitment and investment.

To accurately test if a VPN works in a highly-censored country, we rent a remote-access server in China to replicate how an internet user in China would try to bypass internet blocks.

The process is the following: we install a VPN on the server and then regularly check if it can unblock popular websites known to be blocked (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, or Wikipedia).

9. Customer Support: 5%

In our experience, the speed, knowledge, and reliability of a VPN service’s customer support makes a big difference.

The VPNs that provide 24/7 live chat support and maintain detailed setup and troubleshooting online guides are the ones that deliver the best experience to their existing and future customers.

Many free VPNs do not offer 24/7 live chat support, mainly for financial reasons. However, as a minimum, we expect a free VPN to offer email support as well as helpful online troubleshooting guides and FAQs.