Best free VPN in 2024

Proton VPN tops our list, and earned the highest rating of the services we evaluated. It offers high-speed servers (up to 10 Gbps), generous unlimited data allotment even on the free plan and a powerful traffic encryption method. Proton VPN encrypts all network traffic with AES-256, the same advanced standard that the U.S. government relies on to encrypt its traffic.

Proton VPN also includes the NetShield Ad-blocker, which uses DNS filtering to shut down intrusive ads as well as:

• Preventing trackers from monitoring your internet activity.
• Blocking malware — malicious software that can infect your computer and steal your data or reduce efficiency.

An added benefit of NetShield blocking these non-essential parts of a website from loading is an overall increase in browsing speed.

To inject an even greater boost of speed into its service, Proton VPN uses what the company calls VPN Accelerator. It’s a proprietary piece of software that aims to overcome CPU limitations that can slow down your PC’s ability to process network data while simultaneously reducing latency and network congestion.

Learn More: Read our full Proton VPN review.

Don’t let TunnelBear’s adorable mascot fool you—this is a serious VPN with a full suite of features designed to keep your internet browsing anonymous and secure. One of its most appealing features is dubbed VigilantBear. While many VPNs will continue to transmit data over your standard ISP connection if the VPN connection is interrupted, potentially exposing your online activity, VigilantBear can be set to automatically stop all traffic until the client reconnects.

TunnelBear also features some powerful tools for users who want to dig down and fully customize their browsing experience. The most important of these is SplitBear, which allows you to choose which apps or websites send data through TunnelBear and which aren’t protected by the VPN. This is a welcome feature as an increasing number of sites and services now automatically detect and restrict any traffic that’s routed through a VPN.

On the other end of the spectrum, TunnelBear is designed to serve the needs of those who just want a VPN they can set and forget. For those users, there is Fastest Tunnel. Flip it on and TunnelBear will find and connect to the closest location to you every time it’s loading up, ensuring your data has the shortest possible distance to travel.
It is important to note that free users are fairly restricted on TunnelBear’s platform, as the free tier currently only allows users 2 GB of data per month.

Learn More: Read our full Tunnel Bear VPN review.

Like TunnelBear, hide.me leans into its clever name and fun presentation; also like TunnelBear, it offers a full-featured VPN, even at the free tier. While at earlier phases during hide.me’s development, data caps for free users were quite scant — at 2GB or 10GB — the company now allows for unlimited data even at the free tier. This is a significant improvement in an era where you could easily blow through 2 GB of data streaming, even just part of an episode of your favorite show.

Hide.me also promises to never collect any logs of your online activity, so even if an outside agency demands that it reveals user data, no such data exists to hand over. Hide.me even hired a third-party security analyst from DefenseCode Ltd. to certify its claims that it never monitors or logs any of its users’ online activity. This emphasis on user privacy extends to its free account sign-up, which requires neither credit card details nor even a user’s email to complete.

Hide.me also strives to provide the fastest connection possible through its proprietary software, Bolt. Bolt promises to attack two of the most common issues that slow VPN traffic: UDP traffic and ISP throttling. The result is faster connections and fewer dips in speed, particularly on Windows platforms.

Learn More: Read our full hide.me VPN review.

With advertisers constantly looking for new vectors to get their products into your eyeline, a great ad-blocker can be a godsend. Windscribe has one of the best blockers on our list, designed to filter out not just ads but also to eliminate the risk of malware, defeat trackers and allow users to block content on a domain-by-domain or IP basis.

Called R.O.B.E.R.T., the blocker is built from the ground up to be accessible and easy to use without skimping on functionality. Any changes are applied immediately and don’t require you to disconnect and reconnect to the VPN, and even at the free plan level it will block malware and ads and let you set up to three access rules.

Like the hide.me free plan, Windscribe caps data for free users at 10 GB, though the free plan does allow access to ten countries across an unlimited number of devices. If you do upgrade to a premium plan, Windscribe offers a list of over 60 countries and 100 cities where users can connect.

While not as privacy sensitive as hide.me, Windscribe does also promise not to store any logs that can directly identify you, including connection logs, IP timestamps and session logs. The company also claims it doesn’t monitor any of your online activity, though it does store when you last used the VPN and the total amount of bandwidth used in a 30-day period.

Learn More: Read our full Windscribe VPN review.

While download speeds didn’t top TunnelBear, Hotspot Shield was undeniably one of the fastest VPNs in our testing. This is largely due to its ominously named Hyrda technology, which the company says combines a number of different methods to ensure the highest transfer speeds and fastest connections possible, including:

• Automatically choosing the best server for you.
• Disguising traffic over its VPN to pass as standard traffic.
• DNS acceleration to reduce latency.

Unfortunately, free users aren’t able to access all that appealing speed-enhancing technology, as free accounts aren’t optimized for streaming or gaming. Free users are also limited to connecting a single device at once.

On the upside, the free plan does allow for unlimited data usage and gives users access to all 800+ fast VPN servers. That said, if you do decide to upgrade to a premium subscription, Hotspot Shield is one of the more expensive at $12.99 per month.

Hotspot Shield also offers a smart tunneling option by way of Smart VPN. It allows users to choose which apps or websites are routed through the VPN, similar to TunnelBear’s SplitBear service.

If you don’t want to completely shut down or disconnect the VPN each time you want to use a website that blocks traffic it detects as originating from a VPN source, Smart VPN is a good solution.

Learn More: Read our full Hotspot Shield VPN review.

Atlas VPN offers a fairly generous free plan, allowing users an unlimited number of simultaneous connections and devices with no speed limits, backed by a number of useful features. However, it should be noted that the free tier is capped at 5GB of data a month, so if you need to route a significant amount of data through a VPN, Atlas VPN may not be the choice for you. Unfortunately, at $11.99 per month, the premium plan is one of the more expensive of the VPNs we tested as well.

The free plan does, however, offer access to four widely-spaced locations: the Netherlands, Singapore, and in the U.S., Los Angeles and New York. It also guarantees military-grade encryption and streaming optimization on the NY and LA servers.

To further guarantee your online safety and privacy, Atlas VPN uses a technology it calls Multihop+. It tunnels your connection through multiple rotating connections to make it as obscure as possible to any entities attempting to track your location or monitor your activity.

Atlas VPN also offers a tool called Shield, its answer to the ad and malware blockers offered by many of its competitors. Shield not only blocks malware and sites that Atlas has identified as dangerous, but it also blocks third-party trackers and even builds a list of trackers that you encounter online, so you can see who’s attempting to track your behavior.

Urban VPN is truly a tale of two apps. The desktop version, as its website very visibly and proudly proclaims, is completely free and doesn’t require so much as a registration to begin using. It’s the only peer-to-peer network on our list, which means that users take advantage of other users’ unused bandwidth for routing (and thereby concealing) their internet traffic. The desktop version has no data cap, allows for unlimited connections and offers access to more than 80 servers.

One red flag raised by the desktop version is tucked into the company’s privacy policy, however. While the policy claims up front that Urban isn’t interested in discovering your identity, it later states that some of the data it collects is “information that identifies an individual or entity or may with reasonable effort identify an individual.”

The policy page also states that the VPN may collect data about your internet usage habits, including type of browser, operating system, access time and date and approximate geographical location.

If you’re comfortable with those potential privacy issues the desktop VPN is a reasonable free option, particularly given its generous attitude toward data caps and connections. The Android app is a different story, however, and feels like a completely distinct offering from the desktop version.

It does offer a premium version for $4.49 per month or $27.99 per year and only offers 100 MB of data a day at the free tier. Also, the premium version removes the peer-to-peer element of the free and desktop versions. Urban VPN may be a good option if you’re looking for a free desktop solution but is more difficult to recommend as a mobile VPN.