Investigators traced more than 20 of the top 100 free VPN apps on the US App Store back to concealed Chinese ownership, and the FBI names six more that quietly turned users’ machines into exit nodes for a proxy network spanning 19 million addresses. The free VPNs worth installing are the few paid for by subscribers, and Proton VPN Free is the best of them: unlimited data, no ads, audited open source apps. PrivadoVPN Free is the runner up if you need to choose your country, and Windscribe Free is the one to take if more than one device needs covering.
The shortlist
The scoreboard
Here is what each free plan actually gives you, including the gaps. Where a provider has never published an outside review of its logging claims, the table says so.
| Product | Free data | Locations | Devices | Outside verification | At the limit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proton VPN Free | Unlimited | 10 countries, assigned for you | 1 | Audited, open source apps | No limit to hit |
| PrivadoVPN Free | 10 GB a month | 13, your choice | 1 | None published | Drops to about 1 Mbps |
| Windscribe Free | 2 GB, 10 GB after email confirmation | About 10 countries | Unlimited | Transparency reports | Stops until reset |
| hide.me Free | Unlimited | 5 to 8, your choice | 1 | No-logs audit, 2024 | Held at about 1 Mbps throughout |
| TunnelBear Free | 2 GB a month | 47 countries, assigned for you | Unlimited | Cure53 audit every year since 2017 | Stops until reset |
| Hotspot Shield Free | 500 MB a day | 1 US location | 1 | Audit covers browsing logs only | Resets next day |
Speed is the other half of the picture, and it is the number most easily misread. The figures below come from one round of independent testing by VPNOverview, kept together because results from different testers on different connections cannot be compared to each other. Tom’s Guide, testing on a much faster line, recorded free-tier results in the hundreds and even thousands of megabits. Both are true. What travels between test benches is the ranking and the caps, not the raw numbers.
| Product | Average download reported by VPNOverview | What the provider caps |
|---|---|---|
| Windscribe Free | About 234 Mbps | No speed limit, 10 GB of data |
| Proton VPN Free | About 185 Mbps | No speed limit, no data limit |
| TunnelBear Free | About 138 Mbps | No speed limit, 2 GB of data |
| PrivadoVPN Free | About 103 Mbps | Full speed to 10 GB, then about 1 Mbps |
| hide.me Free | About 1.3 Mbps | Held at about 1 Mbps at all times |
| Hotspot Shield Free | Not in this test round | Capped near 2 Mbps by the provider |
Every price in this article was checked in August 2026 and is the advertised rate and not the renewal rate. Providers move these figures without notice, so treat each one as a starting point and check the current page before paying.
1. Proton VPN Free
Best for: someone who wants a VPN they can turn on in the morning and forget about.
At a glance: Unlimited data, ten free countries, one device, no ads, Swiss company, open source apps.
What the testers found
VPNOverview measured around 185 Mbps on the free tier, second only to Windscribe in that round and far ahead of what most people’s home connections can use. Tom’s Guide, on a much faster line, has published free-tier results many times higher. Other testers working with ordinary connections report 15 to 25 Mbps on a 100 Mbps line, which is the honest picture for anyone connecting from a congested region at a busy hour.
The pattern across all of them is consistent: the ceiling is high, the floor depends entirely on how loaded the small free server pool is when you connect.
Privacy and audits
Proton runs the free plan on the same servers, protocols and no-logs policy as the paid one. The apps are open source, they have been through repeated outside audits, and the company publishes what it hands over when courts ask. Switzerland sits outside the Five Eyes and Fourteen Eyes arrangements, which matters less on its own than people think and matters a great deal alongside having nothing on file to surrender.
The part that makes this pick work is duller than any of that. Proton sells a paid VPN and a paid mail service, and the free tier exists to advertise them. No third party is paying for your traffic because none needs to.
Features
The free country list quietly grew from five to ten, so anyone who dismissed Proton Free a year ago over server choice should look again. What did not change is that you cannot choose which of those ten you land on. You press connect and the app assigns one.
Daily use
Reconnecting sometimes puts you in a different country than last time, which breaks anything that remembers where you are. P2P is off on the free plan. So is the television app, which needs a paid plan even though the phone and desktop apps do not.
Pricing
| Plan | Cost | What it adds |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Nothing, no card required | Unlimited data, 10 countries, 1 device |
| VPN Plus, 2 year | About $2.99 a month | Full network, 10 devices, P2P, Secure Core, NetShield |
| VPN Plus, monthly | About $9.99 a month | The same, with no commitment |
| Proton Unlimited, annual | About $9.99 a month | VPN plus the mail, drive, password and calendar apps |
The two paid rates above come from recent reviews. Confirm them on Proton’s own pricing page before paying. The old seven day trial and the one dollar introductory month are both gone. What remains is the permanent free plan, a month to month option, and a thirty day money-back window on paid plans, prorated to the time you did not use.
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: you cannot choose your country, and you get one device. For a reader who needs a particular location, that is a dealbreaker, and the fix is the next pick on this list, no subscription required.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: the default recommendation for almost everybody, and the only free plan on this list with nothing to run out of.
2. PrivadoVPN Free
Best for: readers who need a specific country and can live inside 10 GB a month.
At a glance: 10 GB a month at full speed, 13 locations you choose, one device, kill switch, Swiss company, no published audit.
What the testers found
VPNOverview recorded around 103 Mbps, the slowest of the four plans without a speed cap in that round, though still ample for anything a browser does. Tom’s Guide ranks Privado first among free VPNs overall, but its own numbers put Windscribe ahead on raw speed, around 1,594 Mbps against Privado’s 950 Mbps on a very fast reference line. A verdict and a stopwatch are not the same measurement. The fair reading is that Privado’s speed depends heavily on which of its small network of servers you land on and how busy it is.
The more useful measurement is what happens after 10 GB. The connection does not die. It drops to roughly 1 Mbps and keeps running until the next 30 day cycle.
Privacy and audits
Privado Networks is based in Zug and operates under Swiss data protection law, the same jurisdictional argument Proton makes. The difference is verification. Six years in, no independent audit of the no-logs claim has been published, which leaves the promise resting on the company’s word and its incentives.
Those incentives are at least the right shape. Privado sells cheap paid plans and uses the free tier to advertise them. Nothing in that model needs your traffic.
Features
Lite Mode separates this from every other capped plan here. Hitting the limit elsewhere means the VPN stops working. Here it keeps going slowly, which is the difference between an inconvenience and a dead app on the twenty-second of the month.
Daily use
The apps are plain and quick to learn, with fewer settings than Windscribe and fewer surprises than hide.me. The network is small compared with the paid giants, so a congested server is a real possibility on a busy evening. Unused data does not roll over into the next cycle.
Pricing
Long plans are among the cheapest anywhere, with the usual caveat that a first term at a promotional rate is not the same as a renewal.
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: no outside party has ever checked the no-logs claim. Everything else here is strong, and that single gap decides second place.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: the most capable free plan on paper, held back by the one thing a privacy product cannot leave unproven.
3. Windscribe Free
Best for: covering a phone, a laptop and a tablet at once without paying.
At a glance: 2 GB a month rising to 10 GB, around ten countries, unlimited devices, ad blocking included, Canadian company.
What the testers found
Windscribe took the top spot in the VPNOverview round at around 234 Mbps, and other testers on ordinary connections report 40 to 50 Mbps on a 100 Mbps line. The company is confident enough about this to have publicly baited a large paid rival with a speed test screenshot, which counts as marketing, but the independent figures do put it at or near the front of the free field.
Speeds vary by platform. At least one reviewer measured noticeably weaker results on macOS than on Windows, so test your own machine before relying on it.
Privacy and audits
Windscribe is founder owned and self funded, based in Ontario, and publishes transparency reports covering what it has been asked for and what it produced. Canada belongs to the Five Eyes arrangement, which is the honest mark against it, though a provider with nothing logged has nothing useful to hand over. Its apps use the company’s own DNS resolver, which matters if you run your own.
No published independent audit of the no-logs policy turned up in researching this article, only the transparency reporting, so treat its verification as weaker than Proton’s and stronger than Privado’s.
Features
Two details from the company’s own help pages that nobody mentions before you sign up. A new account starts at 2 GB, and the other 8 GB appear only after you confirm your email. And if you later unsubscribe from the promotional emails, the account drops back to 2 GB. People install this, run out in a week, and conclude the free plan is stingy.
Daily use
The apps are the least friendly here by a distance. Everything is configurable, which is the appeal for some readers and the problem for everyone else. The kill switch is absent on some platforms and split tunneling is missing on iOS, so check your own platform before trusting the feature list.
Pricing
Windscribe is the only provider here that lets you buy pieces of a plan instead of the whole thing.
| Plan | Cost | What it gives you |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Nothing | 2 GB, or 10 GB with a confirmed email |
| Build a Plan | From $3 a month | $1 per location, plus $1 for unlimited data and full ad blocking |
| Pro, monthly | $9 a month | Everything, all locations |
| Pro, yearly | $69 a year, about $5.75 a month | The same on a year’s commitment |
| ScribeForce | $5 per user a month | Teams of five or more |
Build a Plan is the interesting one. Two locations and unlimited data for three dollars a month is cheaper than most annual subscriptions, and the locations can be swapped mid month at no extra cost.
Pros:
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: the allowance is not what the marketing implies on day one, and the interface expects patience. Both are solvable in five minutes, which is why this sits third.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: the most generous free plan in the set once you know the two tricks that unlock it.
4. hide.me Free
Best for: a VPN you can use without handing over a single detail about yourself.
At a glance: Unlimited data at roughly 1 Mbps, five to eight locations depending on platform, one device, no email or card at signup, Malaysian company.
What the testers found
VPNOverview measured about 1.3 Mbps, which sounds like a failure until you notice it matches the cap the company applies deliberately. That is the whole test result: the free tier is not slow because the servers are bad, it is slow because the throttle is the product boundary. The paid tier from the same company posts speeds among the fastest in the market.
So treat the number as a design decision rather than a performance problem, and judge it on whether 1 Mbps covers what you do.
Privacy and audits
hide.me asks for nothing at signup. No email address, no payment method, no account. For anyone whose concerns include the VPN provider itself, that is a stronger position than any policy document, because there is nothing linking the traffic to a person.
The company sits in Malaysia, outside the Eyes arrangements, and had its no-logs claim examined by an outside firm in 2024, replacing a 2015 audit that had aged into a historical document. It also publishes transparency reports and holds a mobile app security assessment.
Features
Daily use
Around 1 Mbps is a browsing speed. Web pages, messaging and email are fine. Large downloads are not, so read the word unlimited as a description of the counter, never of what you can do with it.
One quirk is worth knowing before you install it. The free plan runs in 30 day blocks and has to be renewed by hand from the account page when a block ends. It costs nothing, but the VPN will stop one morning and leave you wondering why.
Pricing
Pricing here is unusually plain: the same features on every term, with no tier that renews at a surprise rate.
| Plan | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Nothing, no signup | Unlimited data at about 1 Mbps, 1 device |
| Monthly | About $9.95 a month | Full speed, 10 devices, full network |
| Annual | About $54.95 a year, roughly $4.57 a month | The same features |
| 26 month | About $69.95, roughly $2.69 a month | The same features, lowest rate |
The money-back window runs 30 days, and at least one recent review reports that it no longer voids itself if you use the service during that period. Confirm the current terms before paying.
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: the speed. Everything else about this pick is clean, and 1 Mbps decides what it can be used for.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: the strongest privacy posture at signup of anything here, sold at the price of speed.
5. TunnelBear Free
Best for: a first VPN for somebody who has never used one.
At a glance: 2 GB a month, 47 countries, unlimited devices, audited every year since 2017, owned by McAfee.
What the testers found
VPNOverview measured about 138 Mbps, comfortably usable and behind Windscribe and Proton in the same round. Speed has never been this product’s argument, and on a 2 GB allowance it barely matters: the cap, not the throughput, decides what you can do.
Privacy and audits
TunnelBear was the first consumer VPN to commission a public security audit and publish the findings, and Cure53 has returned every year since 2017. Nobody else in this category has that record, and the reports go out in full, findings and all, with no press release standing in for them.
What the audits do not cover is ownership. McAfee bought TunnelBear in 2018, the team stayed in Toronto, and the parent is a large American security vendor. An audit tells you the code was examined. It says nothing about the corporate structure above it, and both facts belong in front of anyone choosing on trust.
Features
Daily use
The app is the friendliest here and asks nothing of the reader beyond pressing a button. Two things moved backwards recently. Free users lost the ability to choose a server at the start of 2026, so the app picks for you, and split tunneling moved behind the paywall. Neither is fatal on a 2 GB plan, but both narrowed what free means here.
P2P is not permitted.
Pricing
| Plan | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Nothing | 2 GB a month, unlimited devices, no server choice |
| Unlimited, monthly | About $9.99 a month | Full data, server choice, split tunneling |
| Unlimited, annual | About $4.00 a month | The same on a year’s commitment |
| Unlimited, 3 year | About $3.33 a month | Lowest rate |
| Teams | About $5.75 per user a month | Central billing for 2 or more users |
There is no standard no-questions refund policy. Refunds are considered case by case, worth checking before you commit to three years.
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: 2 GB does not go far, and the free tier lost features this year instead of gaining them.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: the best audit record in the category attached to the thinnest free plan worth recommending.
6. Hotspot Shield Free
Best for: unblocking one thing quickly on a network you do not care about.
At a glance: 500 MB a day, one US location, one device, ad funded, American company.
One thing to settle before the detail. This pick is here for access and not for privacy, and it is the single entry on the list that does not meet the standard set by this article’s title. It earns its place by doing one narrow job well, and the paragraphs below say what that costs.
What the testers found
This one sits outside the comparison round above, and the reason is instructive. Its paid product posts some of the fastest results in the industry thanks to the company’s own Hydra protocol, while the free tier is capped near 2 Mbps by the provider. The speed everybody praises is not the speed a free user receives.
Privacy and audits
Read the caveats before the features. Hotspot Shield is owned by Aura and operates from the United States, a founding member of the Five Eyes arrangement. Its policy retains more than the others here, including connection data and the locations you use, and free users have some information used for advertising targeting. That is the deal on offer: the ads and the data are what pay for the tunnel.
Its history includes a 2016 academic paper and a 2017 complaint filed with the American regulator over its handling of user traffic, both predating the current ownership. No reporting since has shown user logs being sold or surrendered, and the company has commissioned an audit covering its browsing-log claims. It sits last on the sum of those facts, and no single one of them would put it there alone.
Features
Daily use
The daily reset suits somebody who wants a VPN in short bursts. The single US location decides where you appear whether that suits you or not, the speed cap is well below the paid product, and the advertising is constant.
Pricing
Pros:
Cons:
The catch: it keeps more about you than anything else on this list, and the free version is paid for by advertising. If privacy rather than access is the reason you want a VPN, this is the wrong end of the list.
Pick it if:
Skip it if:
The verdict: functional and fast, with a funding model that puts it a long way behind everything above it.
The apps that made users the product
Every pick above is funded by people paying for a premium plan. That is the whole test, and here is what the other model looks like when investigators take it apart.
In 2024 the US Department of Justice dismantled a residential proxy service it described as likely the largest botnet ever assembled, spanning more than 19 million IP addresses across nearly 200 countries. Its supply came from free VPN apps. Six are named in the FBI’s own removal guidance, and people who installed them had their machines turned into exit nodes for other people’s traffic, including fraud that investigators tied to billions of dollars in false claims.
The FBI names six free VPN apps used to build the 911 S5 proxy botnet: MaskVPN, DewVPN, PaladinVPN, ProxyGate, ShieldVPN and ShineVPN. If any of these are installed on a machine you own, the FBI publishes removal instructions.
The second pattern is ownership you cannot see. The Tech Transparency Project reported in 2025 that more than 20 of the top 100 free VPN apps on the US App Store traced back through shell companies to Chinese ownership, several to a firm the United States sanctioned in 2020 over alleged military ties. Follow-up checks weeks later found most of them still listed. Two US senators wrote to Apple and Google about it that July.
The third pattern is the honest one, which is somehow worse. Big Mama VPN states in its own help pages that free users’ devices form a network its commercial clients route traffic through. Nothing is concealed. The terms say the product is your connection, and almost nobody reads them.
Leakage is the quieter problem underneath all three. Top10VPN, which tests free apps at scale, reports that the large majority of the free apps it examines leak identifying data, which means the app can be honest about its intentions and still hand you back to the websites you were hiding from.
None of this makes every free VPN dangerous. It means the question is never how good the app looks. It is who pays for the servers.
How we ranked them
Softoto does not run labs and does not operate a test bench, so nothing here is presented as our own measurement. Where independent testing exists it belongs to the people who did it: Cure53 for TunnelBear’s annual audits, Securitum for hide.me’s 2024 assessment, Proton’s published audit reports, and the speed figures cited above, which are VPNOverview’s and Tom’s Guide’s, never ours. Those findings are named as theirs throughout.
The VPN category has no equivalent of the antivirus labs, so there is no protection score to lean on. What can be checked instead is documentary, and that is what the ranking weighs, in this order:
A missing audit costs a pick real ground even when everything else is strong, which is exactly why PrivadoVPN sits second with the most capable free plan on the list. A funding model that touches user data outweighs raw speed, which is why the quickest pick here finished last.
What to look for in a free VPN
Four questions settle almost every case, and they work on any app, not only the six above.
Who is paid, and by whom. If the provider sells a premium plan, the free tier is a shop window. If it sells nothing at all, the money comes from advertising, data brokerage or bandwidth resale, and one of those three is happening whether the listing mentions it or not.
Has anyone independent checked. A published audit from a named firm, carrying a date, is a different object from a no-logs promise on a marketing page. Audits go stale as infrastructure changes, so a report from a decade ago is a historical document, no longer a current assurance.
Can you find out who owns it. A company with a real address, a named team and published transparency reports is answerable to somebody. An app whose listed developer is a holding company in one jurisdiction, owned by a shell in another, is answerable to nobody you can reach.
What happens at the limit. Some plans cut the connection, some drop into a slow lane, some keep going in exchange for advertising. This decides whether the plan is usable in month two, and it is almost never on the pricing page.
Then verify rather than trust. Once connected, run a DNS leak test and a WebRTC leak test, and check that the address a site sees is not your own. Confirm the kill switch exists on your platform, because several providers ship it on desktop and not on mobile. And check the P2P policy for the free tier specifically: sources disagree about which of these plans permit it, the providers change the rules quietly, and the answer that matters is the one in the app you installed.
Which one is right for you
What to watch over the next year is the direction these plans move. TunnelBear took server choice away from free users at the start of 2026 and moved split tunneling behind the paywall. Proton went the other way and doubled the free country list. Free tiers are marketing budgets, and marketing budgets get cut, so the plan you install today is not a promise about next year. If one of these becomes the tool you reach for daily, that is the moment to decide whether it is worth paying for while the free version still works.
Are free VPNs safe?
The reputable ones are, and the category as a whole is not. A free tier from a company selling a paid plan behaves like the paid product with limits attached, because its job is to advertise the paid product. An app offering unlimited everything for nothing, from a developer you cannot trace, has to cover its server bills somewhere, and the documented cases show exactly where. Judge the funding model, not the rating on the store listing.
How do free VPNs make money?
Five ways. Advertising inside the app. Collecting and selling data about what users do. Reselling users’ bandwidth as residential proxy capacity, which is the model behind the botnet cases. Bundling other software, sometimes malicious, into the installer. And running the free tier as a loss leader for a paid subscription, which is the only one of the five where your traffic is not the revenue. Every pick on this list uses the fifth.
Which free VPN has unlimited data?
Two here. Proton VPN Free has no cap and no artificial speed limit, which makes it the practical choice for daily use. hide.me Free also has no cap but holds the speed at roughly 1 Mbps, so it is unlimited in the sense that the counter never stops, without being unlimited in what you can do. Everything else is capped: 10 GB a month for PrivadoVPN and Windscribe, 2 GB for TunnelBear, and 500 MB a day for Hotspot Shield.
Is a free VPN better than no VPN at all?
A good one, yes, in the situations a VPN actually helps with: an untrusted network, a blocked page, hiding your address from a site you do not trust. A bad one is worse than nothing, because it moves everything you do from an internet provider that is at least regulated to a company whose name you cannot establish. The gap between the best and worst free VPN is far wider than the gap between the best free one and a paid subscription, which is why the choice matters more than the price.
