Windscribe review: the honest Canadian with the best free tier after Proton

Ownership and the 2021 seizure

Windscribe was founded in Toronto in 2016 by Yegor Sak and remains owned by its founder and employees. It has no investors and has said it will not sell. That matters in a market where every other ownership change has gone the other way.

In June 2021, Ukrainian authorities seized two Windscribe servers in Kyiv as part of an investigation. Windscribe published what happened in unusual detail: the servers held no logs, but the disks contained the OpenVPN server’s private key, unencrypted, which in theory would have let the seizing party impersonate a Windscribe server or decrypt captured OpenVPN traffic to those two servers. Windscribe rotated keys, moved to in-memory key handling and RAM-only servers, and explained the failure in plain language. Most providers would have said nothing. That candour is why the incident counts for Windscribe here rather than against it.

Jurisdiction and audits

Canada is a Five Eyes member, which is the main objection, and Windscribe has been served with at least one Canadian court order that it has described publicly — there were no logs to provide. Packetlabs audited infrastructure and applications in 2024, the first full independent audit; the Windows client and browser extension were audited earlier. The desktop and mobile apps are open source since 2022.

Protocols, network and features

WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2, and two obfuscated transports, Stealth (TLS-wrapped) and WStunnel (WebSocket). Around 600 servers in 69 countries. R.O.B.E.R.T. is a DNS-level blocker for ads, trackers, malware and configurable categories, applied to every device on the account. Port forwarding via ephemeral ports or a static IP add-on. Split tunnelling. A firewall-mode kill switch that blocks everything outside the tunnel. Unlimited devices on Pro. No live chat; support is by ticket and a well-regarded bot.

What it costs, honestly

No intro discount, no renewal increase. Build A Plan — pick locations at $1 each with a $3 minimum, unlimited data — is unique and suits anyone who only needs one or two countries. The refund window is short at three days.

Streaming and censorship

User reports have Windscribe working with Netflix (US, UK) and BBC iPlayer via its Windflix servers, with Disney+ and Hulu patchy and Prime inconsistent. In the UAE and Turkey it works; in China it is hit and miss with Stealth; in Russia intermittent.

The iPhone app

This month’s App Store analysis of 960 recent reviews places the app in the upper tier, with a moderate critical-complaint rate and no billing flag. Crashes and bugs are the main complaint theme; the listing rating is a solid 4.64 stars. Full breakdown.

What we have not tested

Speed and leaks. Published tests put Windscribe’s WireGuard mid-pack. Our own tests are pending; the speed dimension is excluded from the score until they land.