To protect your privacy, hide your internet traffic, or get around geoblocking, avirtual private network (VPN)is a necessity. With hackers developing more sophisticated cyberattacks every day and advertisers relentlessly harvesting your personal information, your personal data is at risk.
While you need a subscription touse the best and fastest VPNs, the best free VPNs protect your privacy at no charge. There are some trade-offs, but you may still enjoy good speed, premium features, and great security.
Proton VPN
We rated Proton VPN as one of the best paid VPNs, and the free version is also great. It has no monthly data limits, no third-party ads, and doesn’t nag you to upgrade to a paid subscription. However, there are some limitations.
Proton cut the number of free servers and locations significantly. You can connect to the U.S., Netherlands, and Japan. That limits your streaming options to those countries. Proton VPN doesn’t cap data or throttle speeds, but free servers will fill up quicker, causing slowdowns.
Those limitations aside, Proton VPN is an extremely strong, privacy-focused service that can serve as a permanent tool in your privacy arsenal, whether you pay for it or not.
Buy at Proton VPN
Windscribe VPN
Windscribe’s free VPNcan’t match Proton, but it’s relatively fast and has servers in the U.S, Canada, U.K, Hong Kong, France, Germany, Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway, and Romania. That’s a respectable amount to expand your streaming possibilities.
Buy at Windscribe
Hide.Me’s free VPN once had a cap of 10GB of data per month, but it’s now unlimited. That means you can keep using it all month without worrying about any restrictions on use. It could be a bit slower than the paid version since the limited number of servers fill quickly.
Hide.Me is an excellent all-around VPN service. If you are interested in keeping your privacy and still having a decent amount of bandwidth for free, Hide.Me has you covered.
Buy at Hide.me
PrivadoVPN
If you want access to servers in more countries,PrivadoVPNmight be the best free option. The only notable restriction is a data cap of 10GB that resets to zero each month. PrivadoVPN’s free plan still supports both streaming and P2P traffic. The company also follows a strict no-throttle policy, where it vows to never deliberately slow down your browsing speeds (a common tactic among free VPNs).
Buy at PrivadoVPN
See ourPrivadoVPN reviewfor more information about this service.
TunnelBear
That means you can stream video in higher quality without the need to preload or download in advance. However, free users have a monthly data cap of 500MB. You can increase that to 2 GB by posting about TunnelBear on X to get more streaming time.
Note that while free VPNs will help you to stay private online, they’re no good for streaming. For that, you should be considering a paidVPN for Netflixand other services.
