
Price: $79 for the first two years or $60 for the first year (then $100 per year afterwards) or $12 a month.We recommend OpenVPN anyway because it's the current standard-bearer of VPN protocols, and it offers an excellent balance of speed and security, so seeing higher speeds on the OpenVPN protocol was a convenient surprise.Ĭost: Decent introductory prices spike after initial term But when connecting through the NordLynx protocol, speeds were approximately 50 Mbps less across the board than what we got through OpenVPN.


We also tested speeds through NordLynx - NordVPN's proprietary WireGuard-based protocol - which the company says is the fastest protocol it offers, to see how those speeds stacked up against speeds we achieved through OpenVPN. Having more servers in more locations can ensure users have servers close to their physical locations and can help ensure lighter load on the servers - both of which can help improve overall speeds. While it's not the smallest network, it falls short of other top players in the space like ExpressVPN (94 countries) and Surfshark (95 countries). It would be nice to see NordVPN expand its relatively meager network of 59 server locations. Our speeds through NordVPN's servers in Australia and Singapore - as expected - averaged the slowest at 260.81 Mbps and 305.34 Mbps, respectively. Unlike with some other VPNs, like IPVanish, NordVPN doesn't provide a real-time view of the current load on each server, so there's no way to manually connect to the server with the lightest load if you want to try to improve your VPN speeds. However, New York is a location that consistently sees heavy VPN traffic, so server load may have had a bit of a hand in the slightly slower speeds there. When connecting to New York - the closest server we tested to our physical location - NordVPN averaged 343.12 Mbps, which was somewhat surprising considering we achieved faster average results when connecting to servers much farther away in the UK (351.41 Mbps) and Europe (345.70 Mbps). Our average internet speed without the VPN clocked in at 368.07 Mbps and averaged 321.28 Mbps across our tests when connected to NordVPN servers. We tested NordVPN's speeds while connected to the VPN's servers via OpenVPN in New York, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore. That makes it one of the fastest VPNs we've tested so far, and puts it into second place behind ExpressVPN, which registered a miniscule 2% speed loss in April. However, NordVPN only slowed our regular internet speeds down by 13% in our latest round of tests. During those tests, NordVPN registered an average 53% loss in speeds - which is on par with what VPN users can generally expect to lose through a VPN connection.

We conducted our latest round of NordVPN speed tests over the course of three days in July and August and were thoroughly impressed with how the VPN provider's speeds improved over previous tests conducted in 2020. Average speed loss of 13% in summer 2022 speed tests.Speed: The second-fastest VPN we've tested The company's overall efforts at transparency also leave quite a lot to be desired. Most notably, we found that NordVPN routes some user traffic through residential IP addresses supplied by a company with a questionable history. But with a little digging, we uncovered some pretty major cracks in the facade, particularly when it comes to privacy and transparency. And it's pretty affordable for how much it can do, even if it's not the cheapest VPN out there.įrom a distance, NordVPN almost looks like the perfect VPN.

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It's based in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction and offers all the standard security and privacy features users should expect from a quality VPN, plus a handful of extras like double-hop VPN and Onion over VPN. NordVPN is super fast, packed with useful features, and it's a breeze to use. One of the biggest players in the virtual private network industry, NordVPN appears to hit all the right notes in providing a service that offers everything a customer would want. Network 5,600-plus servers in 84 locations across 59 countries.Latest tests No leaks detected, 13% speed loss in summer 2022 tests.Savings 59% off with 24-mo plan (+ 3 extra months).
