NordVPN review: the biggest network, priced for people who forget to cancel

Ownership: read this before the features

NordVPN is a product of Nord Security, which since 2022 has also owned Surfshark. The two brands compete in public — both publish “NordVPN vs Surfshark” pages — and share a parent in private. The operating company, Nordvpn S.A., is registered in Panama, a jurisdiction with no mandatory data retention and no membership of the Five, Nine or Fourteen Eyes alliances. Engineering and most staff are in Vilnius, Lithuania, which is in the EU and therefore inside a legal regime that can compel companies operating there. Nord’s position is that the Panamanian entity holds the customer relationship and the Lithuanian entities provide services to it. That is a common structure and not a dishonest one, but it is worth understanding that “based in Panama” describes a company, not the engineers.

Nord Security does not own any VPN review sites, which distinguishes it from Kape and Ziff Davis.

Audits

Four no-logs audits by Deloitte (2018 as PricewaterhouseCoopers, then Deloitte in 2020, 2022 and 2024), plus application security audits by Cure53 and VerSprite. This is the longest run of any major provider. The reports are made available to customers on request rather than published, which we count as a mark against — an audit you cannot read is a claim, not a check.

Network and protocols

Around 7,400 servers in 126 countries, the most of any provider we track. NordLynx is Nord’s WireGuard implementation with a double-NAT system that avoids storing a static IP per user, which was the original objection to WireGuard for privacy use. OpenVPN and IKEv2 remain available. Obfuscated servers run OpenVPN over TCP 443 to pass deep-packet inspection. Specialty servers cover P2P, Double VPN, Onion-over-VPN and dedicated IPs in a dozen countries.

The whole fleet moved to RAM-only operation in 2020, so a seized or compromised server carries nothing once powered down.

What it costs, honestly

The intro price is real and the two-year plan is good value for those two years. The problem is what comes next: the plan renews at the standard yearly rate, and the checkout page mentions this in small text. In our App Store analysis, billing and auto-renewal is the most common complaint theme in NordVPN reviews by a wide margin, which is the users telling you the same thing.

A 30-day money-back guarantee applies to plans bought on the website. Plans bought through the App Store follow Apple’s refund rules instead.

Streaming and censorship

User reports through 2026 are consistent that NordVPN unblocks Netflix (US, UK, Japan and most large libraries), BBC iPlayer, Disney+, Hulu and Prime Video. SmartPlay, its DNS-based unblocking layer, is on by default. In China and the UAE the obfuscated servers work more often than not, with the usual degradation in sensitive weeks. Russia is intermittent since Roskomnadzor began targeting protocols in 2024. India is served by virtual servers after Nord withdrew physical servers in 2022 rather than comply with CERT-In’s logging directive — a decision in its favour.

The iPhone app

This month’s App Store analysis of 2,000 recent reviews gives the app a score of 58/100, ranking it in the lower half. The listing rating is a strong 4.66 stars from nearly 700,000 ratings, but recent reviewers are considerably less happy than the all-time average, and 41% of sampled reviews raise a critical problem. Billing and auto-renew is the top complaint, followed by connection drops and crashes. The gap between the all-time rating and recent sentiment is the widest of any major app we track. Full breakdown.

What we have not tested

Speed and leaks. We have not yet run our own throughput or DNS/WebRTC/IPv6 tests on NordVPN. Those dimensions are excluded from the score rather than estimated, and this page will change when the numbers land.