With a reader recommending coverage of this article about VPNs that have ties to China, I want to do a Do You Use It? poll about VPNs that people use with an eye toward recommending good ones that probably aren’t reading all your traffic.
Here are ten whose names I’ve at least heard of. Are you using or aware of any others that aren’t on this list? I think our polls max out at 20 choices, so if a lot of options come in, I’ll have to pick and choose which to include. Thanks!
(Please don’t write comments about or recommendations for any VPNs in this thread—save it for the actual poll thread. However, if you think one should absolutely not be included, feel free to share that.)
Windscribe seems to appear on many VPN review sites besides the ones you have listed @ace. ClearVPN is another - developed by MacPaw and also available via Setapp.
It might be outside the scope of your poll, but the category of VPNs integrated into browsers (Opera VPN, Brave VPN, DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro) may be worth considering.
Thanks, folks! For the eventual poll question, I plan to have an “I don’t use a VPN” answer, but it would seem that there should also be some other non-VPN service answers. What about:
Self-hosted VPN
Employer-hosted VPN
I don’t think I want to get into the browser extensions that are basically just proxies, and although there are a number of browsers that claim to have VPNs, it really comes down to Brave VPN (which is Guardian) and Vivaldi’s integration of Proton VPN. All the others, from what I can see, are just encrypted proxies.
DuckDuckGo Privacy Pro would seem to be a full VPN and uses its own infrastructure. So that should appear in the full list.
Tailscale is great, but it’s not really a VPN since it’s managing traffic only among your own devices.
If Tailscale is outside your intended scope for the poll, I understand. But I’m definitely using it as a VPN, replacing NordVPN, based on the strategy @david0 describes in this post.
This seems like a distinction without a difference. If you just want a browser to route through a VPN, and not all the traffic on your PC, then using an encrypted proxy is going to be equivalent to a VPN that is only used by that browser.
Both are accomplishing three goals:
Limited to that one application
Traffic between you and the endpoint of the VPN or proxy is encrypted to prevent snooping
Your point of origin is obscured, so you appear to be the IP address and location of the endpoint.
Take Opera, for example. With the VPN on, whatismyipaddress.com thinks I’m in Sweden with a 77.x.x.x address. With the VPN off it has my real IP address and location, which is not in fact Sweden.
I think these are typically used not for private Internet access, but for remotely accessing an otherwise inaccessible network.
Of course, they may still be used as Internet-access VPNs. For instance, when I was on a business trip to China, I was able to bypass the Great Firewall by connecting to my employer’s private network via a corporate VPN and then use the corporate proxy server for my web browsing.
But you may want to distinguish between these use-cases. My wanting to access my home LAN when traveling is different from my wanting to hide my activity from anyone snooping my traffic.
iVPN
I used it for years since I had a deal that would give me the annual renewal at half-price. However, there is no app for TVos, and, although the iPad version claims to be Vision Pro compatible. it doesn’t open when tapped. So, I’ve moved on.
In terms of reducing the number of options, it’s worth noting that several VPN services can be owned by the same holding company. For instance, when I was last evaluating VPN providers I found that CyberGhost, Private Internet Access (PIA), ZenMate, ExpressVPN, and Intego VPNs are all owned by Teddy Sagi through his company Kape Technologies. You might find that they have similar privacy/data retention policies and so could be grouped together (I didn’t get as far as reading them as I wasn’t interested in anything owned by him). There’s a good chance there are other examples of ‘different’ VPN services being offered by the same larger holding company. Edit: Sufshark and Nord Security merged in 2022, so there’s another potential grouping.
Incidentally, I came across this common ownership when trying to choose a new VPN because the one I had wouldn’t work with the FRITZ!Box (common in Germany and puts all sorts of limits on your internet activity including blocking VPNs). I needed something that offered an ‘obfuscated VPN’ mode, which many services don’t (but several in your list do). I don’t know whether this is an important distinction for your poll?