How we tested
Here at Mashable, we aim to review and recommend the best VPNs to our reader — and above all, a VPN needs to be trustworthy to get our seal of approval. The service gets exclusive access to all of your personal data and traffic, so a VPN that doesn’t prioritize user privacy is a nonstarter. However, we also need to make sure a VPN works. Therefore, our VPN reviews blend analysis of providers’ approaches to privacy and transparency with insights from hands-on testing.
The bulk of our VPN testing happens as part of an everyday workflow. We believe it’s important to see exactly how a VPN functions in a real-world setting, not in a lab, to accurately capture the user experience. This testing is conducted on Mashable staffers’ work-issued laptops and personal smartphones.
We supplement this testing with easily repeatable benchmarks that shed further light on three specific aspects of a VPN’s performance, including a DNS leak test, speed tests, and content unblocking tests. The results of these benchmarks are not created equal and have different degrees of influence on our final VPN recommendations.
We record the findings of our analysis and testing in a rubric, and each VPN provider gets scored on a five-point scale on the basis of trustworthiness, performance, user friendliness, and value. This rubric standardizes scoring across our VPN reviews and makes it easy to draw granular comparisons between different VPN services. A 0/5 is a flop that should be avoided at all costs, while a 5/5 is a VPN we can’t live without. Any VPN that scores a 4.5/5 or higher receives a Mashable Choice Award, and the highest-scoring VPNs are featured in this guide to the best VPNs.
Read our full VPN testing methodology.
What no longer makes the cut
As of March 2025, we no longer recommend NordVPN, ExpressVPN, or CyberGhost VPN. I was willing to overlook some of their issues in the past because we hadn’t tried any better options, but in light of testing (and loving) Proton VPN, I’ve relegated them to this metaphorical discard pile.
NordVPN used to be our “best premium VPN.” It has the same core security features as Proton VPN, including an anti-censorship protocol, multi-hop, Onion Over VPN, and split tunneling on all platforms. It also supports up to 10 simultaneous connections. However, its server network is smaller than Proton VPN’s, its plans are more expensive, and its record isn’t as clean. In 2019, NordVPN didn’t tell users about a security breach at one of its third-party data centers until allegations of it circulated on X. (The company implemented network upgrades, better security standards, and bug bounty program in the aftermath.) I also don’t love that users need a NordVPN account to read the results of its no-logs audits.
ExpressVPN was previously our “best VPN for streaming or travel” because of its servers’ geographic diversity, but Proton VPN’s network is even more widespread (and it plans don’t cost as much). Also, ExpressVPN doesn’t offer multi-hop, supports two fewer connections, and restricts its split tunneling tool to Windows and older Macs with macOS 11 from 2020. Its ownership by Kape Technologies is a slight cause for concern — in a previous life, the company made software that bad actors used for adware injection — but it helps that Kape doesn’t touch ExpressVPN users’ personal information.
CyberGhost was previously an honorable mention for streaming and travel, mostly because it was a cheaper option with the largest server network out of the VPNs we’d tested at the time (including locations optimized for streaming, torrenting, and gaming). Feature-wise, CyberGhost only offers split tunneling on Android, and multi-hop is a no-go across the board. CyberGhost is also owned by Kape, but unlike ExpressVPN, it states in its privacy policy that it may share users’ personal data with its parent company. It’s pretty new to independent audits, too, which you can only read by requesting a copy via email, filling out a contact form, or creating a CyberGhost account.
