The Best Free VPN of 2025

Top pick

Proton VPN’s free subscription shines because it is one of the few that don’t limit your data.

In the shady world of free VPNs, Proton VPN stands out with its trustworthy reputation and lack of a data cap. This is a free VPN you can rely on and use every day. Although the free subscription doesn’t give you all the features of paid plans and limits you to the server locations the app suggests, it remains our top pick.

Proton VPN doesn’t limit how much data you can use for free. Most free VPNs from reputable companies are really feature-limited trials, and many limit the amount of data that free subscribers can use. Proton VPN has no data cap, so you can actually use it all the time without risk of going over an allotment.

Proton VPN isn’t the only free VPN that places no limits on data. Hide.me, Hotspot Shield, Opera VPN, and a handful of others let free subscribers browse as much as they like. But Proton VPN still bests those competitors with its reputation for security, ease of use, and a straightforward subscription structure. Proton also offers other services, such as encrypted email and cloud storage, for free along with its VPN.

You won’t miss most of the features from paid subscriptions. Multi-hop connections, which route your web traffic through two VPN servers to ensure that your data is secure even if one server has been compromised, are limited to paid subscriptions, as is the ability to route your traffic through the Tor network. Both are good tools but overkill for most people, and they greatly slow down web browsing.

Free subscribers also can’t use Proton’s NetShield feature, which aims to block ads and trackers (but we recommend using ad and tracker blockers in your browser instead anyway). Nor can free subscribers use the Profiles feature, which lets subscribers set rules for how the VPN connects. Proton VPN also limits the use of BitTorrent to specific servers that aren’t available for free use.

Proton VPN additionally limits free subscribers to just one simultaneous connection per account. That means you can use only one device at a time, which is easy enough to manage.

Proton VPN has a good track record for security. We found that its privacy policy was easy to read, and we appreciate that the company maintains a transparency report showing interactions with law enforcement. The company clearly states that it does not log the content of your web traffic, the sites you visit, your IP address, or how long you’re connected to its service. To back up its no-log policy, Proton has also released third-party audits, which include the auditors’ examination of Proton’s servers. The most recent audit was in 2025.

In 2021, Proton acknowledged that it was compelled by Swiss authorities to record the IP address of a suspect who had used Proton’s encrypted email service. The company clarified that VPN customers could not have been targeted in the same way, and that the company had no other data to provide authorities.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

The new server limitations are frustrating. Proton VPN has always limited free subscribers to certain servers, which are currently located in Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the US. But now, Proton VPN no longer allows free subscribers to choose their preferred location. Instead, the app routes you to what it thinks is the fastest server, which might be in your neighborhood or on the other side of the globe. You can change your location by tapping a button, but once it connects you’ll have to wait before you can switch again; a countdown timer shows when you can do so. This waiting period usually lasts less than a minute, but we’ve seen it go as high as 20 minutes.

Proton told us that the change is to better manage available bandwidth on its free servers, and that makes sense. The company also said that wait times for changing servers is typically 90 seconds, but that the company temporarily reduced the time to 45 seconds because of high demand. Still, it’s hard not to see these changes as a not-so-subtle nudge toward buying a subscription.

We still think that Proton VPN’s free subscription works well enough as a privacy tool. If you just want to protect your browsing from your ISP and other snoopers, it doesn’t matter too much where you’re connected. But routing your traffic through a different country could lead to enduring longer loading times and having some sites, such as banks, flagging your activity as unusual. Using a far-away server might also mean that you see sites in a different language than the one you speak, since to them you appear to be somewhere else.

Although the countries available to free subscribers are likely good choices for evading censorship, the most marginalized and vulnerable people who need this type of service likely have a better understanding of the threats they face and would be better served with greater choice in server location. Wirecutter has not evaluated any VPN for its ability to subvert government surveillance, which can entail personal risk.

We think that Proton needs to provide more choice for its free subscribers, perhaps in the form of some preset options that prioritize location or anti-censorship over other concerns. We don’t think it’s an unreasonable expectation to connect to a server in the same hemisphere as you, let alone the same continent.

Limited servers can sometimes limit performance. As we explained above, herding many people to a few VPN servers can degrade those customers’ web-browsing speeds. We saw this effect in our testing but found that it was highly inconsistent: Sometimes our connection was fine, and other times it was terrible. Proton VPN’s app does its best to connect you with a server that has as little load as possible, but doing so can be tricky with only so many servers available to free subscribers. However, we appreciate that Proton VPN adds more free servers during elections and other periods when there’s likely to be increased demand for its VPN.

It’s fine for privacy but less useful for unblocking content. Using a VPN can help spoof your location by making your web traffic appear to come from the VPN server rather than your computer. Some people use this ability to access streaming content that’s available only in certain regions. With only five regions available, Proton VPN’s free subscription provides few options for spoofing your location.