How We Test and Review VPNs

In today’s connected world, using the right digital security tools is essential to protect your privacy and sensitive information online. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) are crucial in safeguarding your internet activity from hackers, snoopers, and government surveillance. But with so many options on the market, it’s hard to know which VPNs deliver on their promises.

At VPNpro, we conduct thorough testing to ensure each VPN service meets key performance criteria, such as speed, security, and reliability. Our hands-on reviews provide detailed insights into how well each VPN handles streaming, geo-unblocking, and user privacy. In this article, we’ll guide you through our testing process and explain why you can trust our evaluations when choosing the best VPN for your needs.

Why You Can Trust Our Reviews

With so many cybersecurity sources claiming to be the most reliable, it’s difficult to separate truth from marketing. At VPNpro, we stand out because we base our reviews on strict testing frameworks and ensure that our findings are independent and unbiased. Here’s why you can trust us:

• Ethics and Transparency: Every review we publish is based on in-house testing conducted by our experienced team. We never rely on external sources or unverified data. We ensure that our testing process is thorough and compare our findings with those of trusted independent cybersecurity labs to verify the results. Plus, we use the exact same tools and testing methodologies for each VPN provider to ensure accurate results and comparisons.
• Review Process: Our reviews follow strict industry guidelines, and we use trusted tools like ipleak.net and dnsleaktest.com for IP and DNS leak detection, as well as Speedtest by Ookla to measure performance. We test VPNs for geo-unblocking across multiple IP addresses, ensuring that we assess their real-world capabilities. Additionally, we evaluate usability and customer support performance and compare findings with official claims for accuracy. Our use of publicly available tools means any third party can double-check our claims and ensure transparency.
• Up-to-date Information: Cybersecurity services change frequently. That’s why we regularly update our reviews to reflect new features, software updates, or changes in privacy policies, ensuring you always get the most accurate and relevant information.

What We Evaluate in VPNs

VPNs are very complex cybersecurity tools. The complexity, of course, helps to shield your privacy, but it also makes it quite difficult to test them thoroughly. However, we have our own methodology for VPN testing and always ground our evaluation on multiple angles. First, we evaluate a VPN’s foundational features, such as encryption, tunneling protocols, privacy policy, and other ground-zero features. Then, we proceed with our leak, speed, geo-unblocking tests, and a good look into the usability and reliability. Here’s a sample of what and how we test:

• Security and Privacy Features: Encryption is the basis of each VPN’s security, with the industry standard being the AES-256 encryption or its newer iteration, the ChaCha20 protocol. Anything older than that is deemed unsafe to use. Data logging policies are also of utmost importance when talking about VPNs because they’re meant to keep your data safe and anonymous and not hoard it and keep it up for grabs to onlookers and hackers. Lastly, the privacy policy should protect you instead of making the details of your private life available to governments and third parties. We analyze third-party audit reports to evaluate the company’s security infrastructure. So, before we evaluate anything else, we start with these three key points of security and privacy.
• Leak Protection and Kill Switch Testing: To test VPNs for IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks, which could expose your real IP address and compromise privacy, we conduct tests on ipleak.net and dnsleaktest.com websites. Those are reliable and trustworthy services that have become the industry standard for many VPN testing labs and reviewers. The same pages are used to check the functionality of a kill switch. In this case, we manually terminate our VPN connection in the task manager or force shutting the app. Then, we check whether the service turned off our network and whether the testing sites caught any leaks, such as real IP address exposure.
  
  

• Speed Testing Methodology: To test the actual versus advertised VPN service speeds, we must first determine our baseline download, upload, and latency speeds. For it, we use a tool called Speedtest by Ookla. Then, we connect to various VPN servers and compare our baseline speeds with those we get while connected. With each server we connect to, we also calculate the initial speed retention rate by using this formula [VPN speed (Mbps) / original speed (Mbps) * 100% = x%]. Lastly, to check for consistency and reliability, we perform similar tests not only with the nearest and the most popular servers, such as the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Canada, but also check the capabilities of servers located in niche locations, such as Bhutan, Nigeria, and Mongolia as an example. By testing both local and distant servers, we ensure the VPN delivers consistent speeds, regardless of where you are in the world. For P2P tests, we download the latest release of the Linux Ubuntu client using qBitTorrent and take note of the highest recorded download speed in Mbps, as well as the time it took to download the file. Only those VPNs that perform well at our tests and keep at least a 75% rate of initial speed retention make it to our recommendation lists.
  
  

• Unblocking and Bypassing Geo-Restrictions: The geo-unblocking and restriction bypassing tests are pretty straightforward – we connect to different servers and check whether they grant us access to various geo-limited online services. Naturally, we check the most popular platforms, such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, BBC iPlayer, Dazn, etc. We consider how many servers we had to switch before the VPN allowed us to enter these sites and keep tabs on how many libraries and services each particular VPN could unlock. Some services, like Netflix, employ strong VPN detection, making it challenging for many providers to unblock content reliably. Besides streaming sites, we also check the VPN’s capabilities to bypass restrictions certain governments impose on online publications, social media sites, and messaging apps. For places like Russia and China, where we can’t travel, we rely on the reviews of VPN users and share their insights on the particular VPN service’s efficiency in those countries.

VPN Performance Testing

After doing the groundwork on the core VPN features, we head straight to performance testing. Under the performance umbrella, we keep things like VPN connection speed and stability, server network, and compatibility with different platforms. Here’s what and how exactly we test and measure these things:

• Speed and Stability. VPN connection speed and stability are evaluated based on factors like download/upload speeds, latency, server load, and jitter (change in latency that might cause buffering or lagging). Speed is heavily influenced by VPN protocols, such as WirueGuard, which is faster, but OpenVPN, which is more secure. Other factors include server distance and congestion. A stable connection also depends on the VPN infrastructure, which affects whether the connection drops or slows down under load. All of this can impact user experience, as slower speeds can cause buffering when streaming or lag when gaming, while instability leads to frequent disconnections. So, before we evaluate speed and stability, we check all of these things. The speed is tested on the speedtest.net page, and regarding stability, the speed tests and general browsing experience are tested multiple times throughout the day to check the server functionality under different server loads.
• Server Network Evaluation. A huge server fleet isn’t just a number to impress and impacts user experience more than you might think. So, before ranking a service, we asses server coverage and distribution over locations. A good provider must cover all the most popular locations, such as the US, Canada, UK, and Europe, and offer well-functioning servers in less frequently demanded locations for a well-rounded experience. We favor RAM-only server fleets which provide greater user data security, and servers that can manage high user loads. Sometimes, a provider might have a less impressive server count, but if they tick the boxes on all other requirements, they make it to our recommended VPN lists, nevertheless.
  
  

• Cross-Platform Compatibility. A good VPN should work on all the most popular operating systems, such as Windows, macOS, Linux, and mobile devices, but a great VPN should also be compatible with iOS, Android, ChromeOS, tvOS, and Android TV operating systems. Additionally, we check whether the VPN provider offers any manual connection setups (routers, torrent clients, streaming devices) and browser extensions and test out the functionality on all available platforms. Therefore, even if a provider claims to be compatible with all of the above, we still test how well its dedicated apps perform on each of the operating systems, smartphones, and other devices.
  
  

User Experience and Customer Support

User experience is just as important as any other feature we evaluate, so we do not skimp the resources to check it thoroughly too. Thus, to evaluate the overall user experience of a particular VPN service, we take a deeper look into the following:

• Ease of Use: Before giving a good grade to any VPN provider, we review things like the user interface, installation process, and overall ease of navigating the VPN apps. The interface should be accessible to all levels of VPN users and made easy to understand and intuitive to navigate. The core features should be easy to find and manipulate, while advanced settings should all clearly explain their functionality. The installation process should not be complicated, and the fewer steps it requires, the more user-friendly we deem it to be. Lastly, the app should be made so that any user would find it quite effortless to use.
• Support Quality. VPNs are complex tools, and even the most experienced users are prone to run into some issues from time to time. So, we also first tested the availability of customer support and then their responsiveness and helpfulness. Our approach involves testing VPNs in both everyday scenarios and more complex situations to ensure they can handle a wide range of user needs. Of course, we check all available customer support contact methods, including live chats, emails, and ticketing, and mention which were the fastest in our reviews.
  
  

How We Assign VPN Ratings

Lastly, after all the testing is done, we assign each VPN service and provider a rating. The ratings aren’t groundless, and here, too, we have developed a strict scoring methodology:

• Factors We Consider. Privacy and security features, such as encryption, tunneling protocols, privacy policies, and the like, are the basis of our scoring system and give each score more than half its weight and importance. On top, we consider things like ease of use and the authority of customer support. The latter can be evaluated by considering response times and available support channels. Plus, we take into account the particular VPN’s actual performance – speed, stability, and consistency.
• Scoring System. We evaluate VPN services based on two rating systems: an overall score for the product and an intent-based score depending on use cases, such as streaming or privacy. We may use a different scoring system depending on the discussed purpose of the VPN; however, the general weight distribution is 30% security and privacy, 25% connection speed, 20% user experience and customer support, 15% additional features, and 10% geo-restrictions unblocking. So, while the overall score might be, for example, 9/10, the score by intent, like streaming, could be lower or higher than that. In any case, we still take in the key security, privacy, performance, ease of use, and customer service factors in mind, before assigning a score. However, the weight of each factor might differ depending on the intent.
• Updates and Reevaluations. To keep our reviews and recommendations relevant, we periodically check for software updates such as protocol improvements, security audits, or UI redesigns, changes in the privacy policy, added new features, and server network expansion of each VPN service included on our page. We also re-run our tests to check if those updates did change any particular VPN performance. New tests and data are cross-referenced with previous results to assess any improvement or decline over time, keeping ratings dynamic. After we are done with our tests and fact-checking, we update both the reviews and the final score of each provider, thus keeping the information on the VPNpro page always relevant and up-to-date.

VPNpro Tech Analysts-Writers Team

The VPNpro tech analysts-writers team consists of experienced professionals who specialize in VPN testing and cybersecurity topics. The team itself conducts every test, experiment, and in-depth research with the key goal of always providing honest, informative, and unbiased reviews.

Justė Kairytė – Barkauskienė
Senior tech copywriter

Justė is nearing a decade of experience in writing about various topics, including cybersecurity, fintech, and more. She specializes in VPN performance and privacy testing.

Djordje Djordjevic
Cybersecurity analyst and writer

Djordje started writing professionally around 2012 and is now a verified expert in VPNs, online privacy, cybercrime, safe torrenting, and bypassing geo-restrictions.

Chris Bluvhstein
Senior tech writer/analyst

Chris has been writing professionally since 2012 and started specializing in cybersecurity in 2017. Since then, he has analyzed various cybersecurity tools, their capabilities, and their performance.