Best VPN for Germany in 2026

The German problem is a letter in the post

Germany does not censor, does not throttle VPNs, and has some of the strongest privacy law in the world. What it has instead is the Abmahnung industry: law firms that monitor torrent swarms, log IP addresses, obtain the subscriber’s identity from the ISP under a §101 UrhG court order, and send a demand for several hundred to a couple of thousand euros. It is legal, it is automated, and it is why Germans use VPNs for torrenting more than for anything else.

A VPN solves it structurally. The swarm sees the VPN’s address; there is no German subscriber to identify. The two things that matter are a kill switch that actually holds when the tunnel drops — test it with the kill switch tool — and a provider that keeps no logs a German court order could reach, which is why every pick here is outside Germany and audited.

Data retention: struck down, for now

Germany’s Vorratsdatenspeicherung law has been on and off since 2008. The current version was suspended in 2017 and declared incompatible with EU law by the Court of Justice in 2022. Nothing is in force; the coalition’s “quick freeze” proposal, which would preserve data only on a specific order, is the likely replacement. This is a better position than the UK or Australia, and it is why privacy is weighted a little lower here than on those pages — but Germany is a Fourteen Eyes member with a foreign intelligence service that has broad powers, and a provider outside its reach is still the better default.

Frankfurt

DE-CIX in Frankfurt is one of the largest internet exchange points anywhere, and every VPN provider has capacity there. Latency from any German city to a Frankfurt server is under 15 ms, and a good provider on WireGuard will keep 90% or more of a fibre line’s throughput. This is the easiest country on the site for speed; it barely affects the ranking.

Streaming in both directions

Germans abroad want ZDF, ARD, Joyn, RTL+ and Sky; Germans at home want US Netflix, Hulu and BBC iPlayer. The public broadcasters geo-block much of their catalogue and the private ones block datacentre ranges. NordVPN, with the most German addresses, and Proton and ExpressVPN are the consistent performers in user reports. Mullvad, deliberately, is not a streaming provider; if that is your main use, it is the wrong pick despite ranking first for privacy.

Port forwarding for seeders

Torrent clients seed much better with a forwarded port, and this is where the picks diverge. Proton and PIA offer it; Mullvad removed it in 2023 after abuse; NordVPN has never offered it. If you seed, Proton is the privacy-first choice with port forwarding; PIA the value choice with it. If you only download, Mullvad’s lack of it does not matter.

What we have not tested

Streaming reliability and throughput are from user reports and published tests. Our own tests from a German line are planned; the date at the top is when the facts were last checked.