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The best VPN in 2026, ranked by people who tell you who owns it
23 providers scored on one formula: privacy and ownership first, then what the plan really costs after the intro price ends, features, streaming, censorship bypass, and app quality from 2026 App Store reviews. Affiliate commission is not an input, and the build fails if it ever becomes one.
Before you read any VPN ranking, including this one
Kape Technologies owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and Private Internet Access — and also owns vpnMentor, WizCase and SafetyDetectives. Ziff Davis owns IPVanish and also PCMag and Mashable. Those sites are not required to tell you. We put the owner on every card so you can weigh what we say too. The full ownership map.
Gibraltar-based, transparent about its team, no affiliate programme; small and honest.
62
Owner
IVPN Limited
Jurisdiction
Gibraltar · Outside the alliances
No-logs audit
None — apps audited by Cure53, 2022
Price
from $5.00/mo
Runs oniOSAndroidMacWindowsLinuxRouterBrowserTV
Privacy & trust
68
Price & renewal
84
Features
78
Streaming
25
Censorship bypass
63
App quality
49
Publishes its team, ownership and a transparency report
No email needed to sign up
Regular Cure53 audits
Small network
Not a streaming VPN
Port forwarding dropped
Lab test pending — scored on public dataiOS app score 49/100 from 250 ratingsFull reviewVisit IVPN
Ranked 11–23
These are below the line either because of a specific problem — an undisclosed owner, a logging incident, no audit — or because they score lower across the board. Each has a full review explaining which.
Every provider gets a 0–100 score in eight dimensions. The overall number is a weighted average using these weights; dimensions we cannot yet score (our own speed tests) are removed from the denominator rather than counted as zero. The full formula is in the methodology and in src/lib/score.ts, which is public.
Dimension
Weight
What feeds it
Privacy & trust
25%
Owner type, whether the owner runs review sites, jurisdiction, audit recency and whether the report is public, RAM-only servers, open-source apps, anonymous payment
Price & renewal
15%
Cheapest monthly rate, ratio of true three-year cost to intro price, refund window
Features
12%
Kill switch, obfuscation, split tunnelling, multi-hop, ad blocking, port forwarding, P2P, WireGuard, device limit, platforms
Streaming
12%
Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu, Prime Video status weighted by how the status was established
Censorship bypass
8%
Obfuscation support plus reported status in China, UAE, Russia, Iran and Turkey
The overall ranking weights privacy hardest. If you have one job in mind, these lists re-weight the same scores — a streaming list cares more about unblocking than about jurisdiction.
On our formula, Proton VPN scores highest overall (78/100), followed by Surfshark and NordVPN. The ranking weights privacy and ownership most heavily, then price after renewal. If you mostly stream, game or travel to a censored country, the use-case lists linked below re-weight the same data and may put a different provider first.
Why does your ranking differ from vpnMentor, WizCase or SafetyDetectives?
Those three sites are owned by Kape Technologies, which also owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and Private Internet Access. We do not think that makes their writers dishonest, but it is a conflict a reader should be told about, and they are not. Our formula is published, ownership is the first thing on every card, and commission never enters the score.
Have you speed-tested these VPNs yourselves?
Not yet, and we say so on every card rather than borrowing numbers. Lab speed and leak tests run on paid subscriptions and land through 2026; until then the speed dimension is excluded from the denominator rather than scored as zero, so no provider is penalised for our backlog.
What does "lab test pending" mean?
That the score comes from public, verifiable data — ownership filings, audit reports, published pricing, protocol support, App Store reviews — but not from measurements we made on our own connection. When our tests land, the card changes to "lab tested" with the date.
Is a free VPN good enough?
Proton VPN and Windscribe run free tiers without ads or data caps that spy on you, and they are fine for occasional Wi-Fi protection. For streaming, torrenting or China they are not. Most other "free VPNs" on the App Store fund themselves by selling your traffic data or injecting ads — see our free VPN list for the ones that do not.
How often is this page updated?
Provider facts are re-checked monthly and the date is printed at the top. App Store data refreshes on the first of every month automatically. Anything we cannot confirm is marked as unconfirmed rather than guessed.
