Fastest VPNs for 2022
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At PCMag, we’ve always thought that thinking of security as a zero-sum game isn’t helpful. It reinforces feelings of powerlessness, making people believe that there is nothing they can do to protect themselves from all the bad digital things in this world. However, there are often trade-offs with security tools between ease of use and security quality. This is especially true for VPNs.
The VPN creates an encrypted tunnel for your web traffic. This makes it more difficult for anyone snooping on your network to figure out what you’re up to, and for anyone on the web to trace online activity back to you. It even blocks your ISP, which is useful because it seems eager to sell your anonymous data.
Using a VPN (usually) costs money, but it also comes with a performance cost. Some websites will block VPN traffic because they consider it suspicious. But there’s a deeper problem: using a VPN will almost permanently reduce your upload and download speeds and increase the latency of your internet connection.
Our experts tested 19 products in the VPN category this year
Since 1982, PCMag has tested and evaluated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. (See how we test.)
While speed is important, other factors like protecting value and privacy are much more important. As such, we tend to put less emphasis on speed in our reviews, unless it’s impressively good or very bad. But readers, understandably, are concerned about the impact of a VPN on their web browsing experience. This is the reason for our testing.
COVID-19 has changed the way we test VPNs
Back in the calm, days before COVID-19 hit, here at PCMag we will be running speed tests on all the VPN products we planned to review again over the course of a week or two. This is no longer possible.
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The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic means that all PCMag employees have been working from home since March 2020. Our homes don’t have the high-bandwidth internet connection we enjoyed at PCMag Labs. Testing VPN speeds from our homes will not be the same as previous years’ data and will present all kinds of messy variables. For example: Was this VPN performing particularly badly because it was a bad product, or was it because one spouse was on a video call at the same time?
Instead of giving up on VPN speed testing altogether, our solution was to test VPNs in small batches and release results as we begin. This allows us to reduce the risk to our analysts, but we can still run the same rigorous testing we’ve always done.
This rolling form will also allow us to provide more recent speed test results and give us an opportunity to more easily update the results of different products throughout the year to see if they are still competitive.
It is humbling to see how this global health disaster has affected our modest operations. It really shows how every aspect of our working lives has been affected by COVID-19. We will continue to adjust our approach throughout the year, to ensure the safety of our colleagues and the integrity of our work.
Fastest VPNs (so far)
With all that in mind, the results of the tests we’ve run so far are shown in the graph below. We’ll continue to update the chart as we go, adding new results for products as we test them. Note that the table below shows the services in order of their impact on download speeds, as in the carousel at the top of the story.
How we collect our data
When we review VPNs, we use a dedicated tool provided by Ookla that uses the same technology as the Speedtest.net tool. The only difference between our tool and the online tool is that our tool automates the test, although there are some situations where we use the online test as well.
(Editors’ note: Ookla is owned by PCMag’s publisher, Ziff Davis.)
The Ookla test measures three metrics: latency, download speed, and upload speed. Latency is a measurement of the time between when your computer sends a request and when it receives a response. It is also called ping time. Lots of things can affect latency, such as how far your application actually travels through internet pipes. Response time is measured in milliseconds, however, even a significant increase may not be noticeable to the average user. Latency is important when playing video games over a VPN, as lower latency means a more responsive experience with less lag.
Download and upload speeds measure the amount of data transferred through your Internet connection in a given period of time. Both are measured in megabits per second (Mbps). This is the analogy promoted by ISPs and wireless companies when they claim that their connection is the “fastest”.
When we test VPNs, we try to get a sense of the service’s impact on internet performance by finding the percentage change between VPN use and no VPN use for several speed measurements. We run ten tests without an active VPN and find that Mediator of the results. Then we do the same, but with the VPN activated.
By comparing average results with and without VPN, we find the percentage of change between the two. The more the change from base performance, the more impact the VPN will have on your internet speeds. Then we repeat the process for each VPN we test.
We tested each of these services in as repeatable a way as possible, but there are limitations inherent in our testing. The biggest problem is that our tests are performed from PCMag Laboratories in New York City. If we run the same tests on a similar network in a different part of the country, we will almost certainly get different results. Networks are also volatile things, and even small changes can drastically affect speed test results, so while we controlled for as many variables as possible, it’s hardly a “sterile” network environment.
We believe these tests are a performance snapshot that creates a repeatable metric to measure each service. The goal is to compare services, not individual speed ratings. Your miles with these services will almost certainly differ somewhat from ours.
You can read more about how we test VPNs and, most importantly, how our testing has changed over the years at How We Test VPNs.
How do we interpret our data?
We test dozens of VPNs every year and have to get rid of the glut of data that this test produces. Above all else, our final list should be meaningful and easy to understand. To do this, we looked at each category (download, upload, latency) and took every product that meets or exceeds the average score for each. We then ranked each product based on the number of categories in which it outperformed the average. Finally, we organized them by overall download performance, and then only took the top ten performance.
Here are the details of all products:
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Private Internet Access VPN, CyberGhost VPN, Mullvad VPN, IPVanish VPN, and NordVPN performed better than average in all three categories.
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TorGuard VPN, IVPN, Mozilla VPN, Hotspot Shield VPN, and Malwarebytes VPN all beat the average in two categories.
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Bitdefender Premium VPN, HMA VPN, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, ExpressVPN, and PureVPN all beat average in one category.
Note that we have not yet published our review of both IPVanish VPN and Malwarebytes VPN, and as such, we left them out of the final list. KeepSolid VPN Unlimited, ExpressVPN, and PureVPN have not cleared the top ten requirements.
While a lot of things have changed in the past year, we are confident that whatever standards we use will be in line with previous years. We will update this article as necessary.
Cheating and data compression
Since we report on how we test VPNs and because we use one of the most popular speed testing tools available, there is some obvious concern that a notorious company might try to tamper with the results. Perhaps a nefarious VPN company could detect when an Ookla test was run and return fake results.
We spoke with the engineers at Ookla when designing our tests, and they share our concerns about their testing practice. They tell us that the company is taking effective measures to deceive potential cheaters. We turn to the experts at Ookla to prevent companies from drawing conclusions.
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As we make our methodologies public, it’s also possible that VPN companies can tweak their networks to get better results. For example, a VPN company could seek to rent server space as close to our offices as possible, hoping that shorter distances will lead to better speed test results. There is not much we can do to prevent a company from doing this. However, the speed test is only a small part of our reviews, and even an outstanding speed test result won’t do much to raise the score of an average product.
Speed up your VPN
There are several ways you can offset the speed-down effects of using a VPN. First, it might be choosing a service with many servers (and we really want to confirm may be here) you are more likely to find someone who isn’t crowded with other people all trying to use the same bandwidth. Some VPN services will allow you to select specific servers and show the current load on those servers.
Having so many servers to choose from in different locations also means you’re more likely to find one that’s physically close to you, shortening the distance your data has to travel. This usually translates to lower latency, and possibly better overall performance. A few VPN clients include a ping to help you focus on the closest option, but it is unusual for a VPN client to do anything other than automatically select the closest server.
A word of caution, though: more servers aren’t necessarily better. Keep in mind that a VPN service likely needs more servers to support more subscribers, and we don’t know how those servers are allocated compared to these subscribers. This means that the size of the server fleet may simply reflect the company’s popularity rather than the quality of its services.
Split tunneling is the general term when a VPN lets you decide which applications are sending data through the VPN tunnel and which are sending data outside the tunnel. This allows you to separate more sensitive activities, such as web browsing or online banking, from normal but high-bandwidth activities, such as streaming music or playing video games. It’s particularly useful because Netflix blocks VPN use, as do other services. You can simply route these apps outside the VPN to avoid this issue.
Note that some VPN companies offer free versions that limit the number of servers available. We expect those servers that are available to free users to be congested and therefore generally provide slower speeds. ProtonVPN, for example, limits the number of servers available for free users but doesn’t specifically limit the amount of data a free subscriber can use.
It is also important which protocol the VPN service uses. OpenVPN and IKEv2 have long been the standard for the latest and greatest VPN technologies, but that is changing. More companies are starting to deploy WireGuard, a new open source protocol designed to provide greater security, easier deployment, and faster speeds. With more and more VPN companies rolling out WireGuard to customers, we’ll be looking to see if it can really deliver on the promised speed.
Is the fastest VPN always the best?
Simply put, speed shouldn’t be the only consideration when shopping for a VPN. For one thing, your internet experience will almost certainly be faster without a VPN. On the other hand, speeds depend a lot on the server you are using, where you are located, what your network environment looks like, when you use a VPN, etc. You may find that service as fast as lightning today hardly works tomorrow.
Instead of speed, our VPN reviews emphasize value and trust. We prefer VPN services with good geographical distribution of their servers. VPNs that are easy to set up and use for the first time and include a well-made local client go a long way toward gaining PCMag endorsement. We also pay…
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