Reference data, not a ranking
VPN comparison without the leaderboard.
Ten providers, the facts that are checkable, and a null wherever a claim could not be verified from a primary source. There is no "best VPN" here because the honest answer depends on what you are defending against.
| Provider | Independent audit | RAM-only | Port forward | Devices | From /mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NordVPN Panama (outside 5/9/14 Eyes; no mandatory data retention) |
Deloitte Lithuania 2025 | yes | no | 10 | $3.49 |
| ExpressVPN British Virgin Islands (no mandatory data retention for VPN providers); owned by Kape Technologies |
KPMG 2025 | yes | no | 14 | $2.99 |
| Surfshark Netherlands (EU; no VPN data-retention obligation, but a 9 Eyes member state) |
Deloitte 2025 | yes | no | unlimited | $2.49 |
| Proton VPN Switzerland (strong constitutional privacy protections; outside EU and 14 Eyes) |
Securitum 2026 | yes | yes | 10 | $2.99 |
| Mullvad Sweden (EU / 14 Eyes member, but Mullvad holds no data that could be handed over -- confirmed by a 2023 police raid that seized nothing) |
Cure53 2024 | yes | no | 5 | $5.76 |
| Private Internet Access United States (Five Eyes; no mandatory VPN data retention, and PIA's no-logs claim has been tested in US court more than once) |
Deloitte Audit Romania 2025 | yes | yes | unlimited | $2.03 |
| IVPN Gibraltar (outside 14 Eyes; no mandatory data retention) |
Cure53 | — | no | 5 | $5 |
| Windscribe Canada (Five Eyes member, but Windscribe's no-logs position was tested in a 2024-2025 criminal case in which it had no user data to produce) |
none published | — | yes | unlimited | $5.75 |
| CyberGhost Romania (EU; outside 5/9/14 Eyes and Romania struck down its data-retention law as unconstitutional); owned by Kape Technologies |
Deloitte | yes | no | 7 | $2.03 |
| AdGuard VPN Cyprus (EU; company relocated from Russia). AdGuard's Russian origins remain a consideration for some threat models. |
none published | — | no | 10 | $2.99 |
How to read VPN marketing
Server counts are a marketing number, not a quality metric. A provider with 20,000 servers is not ten times better than one with 2,000 -- most of those 'servers' are virtual instances on shared hardware, and many sit in the same handful of datacenters. What actually matters is whether there is capacity near you, on hardware you can saturate. A 300-server network of bare-metal 10Gbps boxes will beat a 10,000-server network of oversubscribed VPS instances every time.
'No-logs' with no audit is a marketing claim, not a verified fact. Anyone can write 'we keep no logs' on a landing page. What raises it above a claim is a recurring third-party assurance engagement (ISAE 3000 or similar) where auditors get on-site access to live server configurations -- and, better still, a court case or seizure where the provider genuinely had nothing to hand over. Note also that an audit is a snapshot of one moment: an audit from 2019 tells you almost nothing about the infrastructure running today, which is why the year matters as much as the firm.
Check what the audit actually covered. Audit scopes vary enormously: a no-logs assurance engagement, an app-code review, a penetration test of the web dashboard, and a full infrastructure audit are four completely different things. Providers routinely advertise 'independently audited' on the strength of a browser-extension code review. Read the scope line, not the badge.
RAM-only (diskless) servers are a genuine improvement, but a limited one. If a server has no persistent storage, seizing it yields nothing but whatever was in memory at that instant, and a reboot wipes the box. That defeats the after-the-fact seizure, which is the realistic threat. It does not defeat an adversary who compromises a running server, and it does nothing about logging that happens on the provider's own management or billing systems. Treat it as a good hygiene signal rather than a guarantee.
Jurisdiction matters less than most marketing implies. 'Outside the 14 Eyes' is the industry's favourite talking point, but no country in the Five/Nine/14 Eyes arrangement compels VPN providers to log user traffic in the first place, and a provider incorporated in Panama or the BVI still has to comply with the laws wherever its servers physically sit. Windscribe is in Canada -- a Five Eyes member -- and still had nothing to produce when it went to court. What the company actually stores matters more than the flag on its registration certificate.
The headline price is almost never the price you will pay long-term. The $2-3/month figures are introductory rates on a 2-3 year prepayment, and they typically renew at the standard annual rate -- often two or three times higher. Multiply the 'per month' figure by the term length to see the real up-front cost, then look up the renewal price. Longer money-back windows (CyberGhost's 45 days) are worth more than they look, because they let you test streaming and speed across a realistic period.
'Unlimited devices' is a pricing decision, not an engineering achievement. Surfshark, PIA and Windscribe all offer it; NordVPN and Proton cap you at 10, Mullvad at 5. There is nothing technically difficult about lifting the cap, so it is a fine tiebreaker for a large household but says nothing about the quality of the underlying service.
A VPN changes who can see your traffic; it does not make you anonymous. Your ISP and local network stop seeing your destinations, and websites see the exit IP instead of yours. That is the whole benefit. It does not stop browser fingerprinting, cookies, logins, or account-based tracking, and it does not protect you from an adversary who can compel or compromise the VPN provider. If your threat model is a nation-state, the right tool is Tor, not a commercial VPN.
This page contains affiliate links. If you buy a VPN after clicking one of them, we may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. Commission rates differ between providers, and they did not influence the ratings, the verdicts, or the drawbacks listed below. Every provider on this page is listed on merit, including ones that pay us nothing (Mullvad and IVPN run no affiliate programme at all). Prices change frequently and promotional rates often renew at a higher price -- always confirm the current price and the renewal price on the provider's own checkout page before you buy.
Prices and features were verified against each provider's own live pages in August 2026. Where a figure could not be confirmed from a primary source it is shown as a dash rather than filled with an estimate.