Best Free VPNs (2026)
Free VPNs worth actually installing. Running servers costs money, so we say plainly how each one is funded, and which ones fund themselves with your data or your bandwidth.
Ranked by our editorial scores - how we rate providers. Updated August 20, 2026.
Best VPN for privacy, and the best free tier anywhere · Free tier, paid from $3.59/mo · 30-day money-back
Proton VPN is the strongest overall package for anyone who cares why they are buying a VPN: open-source audited apps, Swiss jurisdiction, and a free tier with no data cap and no catch.
- Every app is open source and independently audited, with the reports published in full
- The only genuinely good free tier: unlimited data, no ads, no logging
- Swiss jurisdiction outside every intelligence-sharing alliance
Best flexible pricing and best paid-tier free plan · Free tier, paid from $1/mo · 3-day money-back
Windscribe is the enthusiast's value pick: a genuinely useful 10 GB free tier, a pay-per-location plan nobody else offers, deep controls, and a company that talks to users like adults.
- Free tier gives 10 GB a month with unlimited devices
- Build a Plan lets you pay $1 per location instead of buying the whole network
- R.O.B.E.R.T. gives you DNS-level control over ads, trackers and whole categories
Best free tier that does not ask for your email · Free tier, paid from $2.59/mo · 30-day money-back
hide.me is an underrated all-rounder: audited, Malaysian-based, generous with protocols and features, and its free tier asks for nothing at all, not even an email address.
- Free tier gives 10 GB a month and needs no email address
- Unusually wide protocol support including SoftEther and SSTP
- Audited no-logs policy with a Malaysian base outside the Eyes alliances
Best self-hosted VPN for censored networks · Free
Amnezia turns a $5 VPS into your own censorship-resistant VPN with a few clicks. Excellent for access and for control, weaker for anonymity because the IP is yours alone.
- You own the server, so there is no provider to trust with your traffic at all
- AmneziaWG modifies WireGuard to defeat protocol fingerprinting in censored countries
- Free and open source, with a GUI that deploys a working server in a few clicks
Best VPN for beginners and nervous first-timers · Free tier, paid from $4.99/mo
TunnelBear turned annual public audits into an industry norm and wraps serious engineering in the least intimidating interface anywhere. Not for torrenting or streaming.
- The first VPN to commission annual public security audits, and it has kept doing them since 2017
- Free tier gives 2 GB a month on the full network with unlimited devices
- The friendliest interface in the category by a wide margin
Best free connection-privacy layer for everyday browsing · Free tier, paid from $4.99/mo
WARP is a free, fast privacy layer between you and your ISP, not a VPN in the geo-shifting sense. As an always-on default for a phone, it is superb.
- Free, unlimited, no account, and it makes many connections measurably faster
- Runs on Cloudflare's global edge network, so latency is excellent
- Open source WireGuard implementation and audited DNS privacy claims
Best cheap VPN with a usable free tier · Free tier, paid from $1.11/mo · 30-day money-back
PrivadoVPN pairs a genuinely useful free tier with one of the lowest paid prices anywhere, but it has no audit and a thin feature set, so it is a budget pick rather than a privacy pick.
- Free plan gives 10 GB a month across 13 locations, generous for a freemium tier
- Very cheap on the two-year plan
- Swiss jurisdiction outside the Eyes alliances
Best free tool for beating censorship · Free tier, paid from $4.99/mo
Psiphon is a censorship-circumvention tool, not a privacy VPN, and it is excellent at the job it was built for. Free, open source, and it works where commercial VPNs are blocked.
- Purpose-built for getting through national censorship, and very good at it
- Open source, with funding disclosed and a long record in the field
- Free with no data cap and no account required
Best for unstable connections and mobile broadcasting · Free tier, paid from $7.49/mo · 30-day money-back
Speedify is a connection-bonding tool that happens to include a VPN. For live video on flaky networks it is excellent; as a privacy product it is not the right category.
- Channel bonding combines Wi-Fi and cellular into one faster, more stable connection
- Genuinely useful for live streaming, video calls and unstable connections
- Free tier includes the bonding technology with a 2 GB cap
Best bundled VPN for existing Bitdefender customers · Free tier, paid from $2.49/mo · 30-day money-back
Bitdefender VPN is a rebadged commercial network with tidy apps and a good jurisdiction on paper. It is fine alongside the antivirus and unremarkable on its own.
- Romanian jurisdiction outside the Eyes alliances
- Cheap first-year pricing with 10 devices
- Free 200 MB per day tier bundled with Bitdefender antivirus
Frequently asked questions
What is the best free VPN?
Proton VPN. It is the only free tier with no data cap, no advertising and no logging, funded by paying subscribers, from a company whose apps are open source and audited every year.
How do free VPNs make money?
The honest ones cross-subsidize from paid plans. The others sell advertising, collect and sell usage data, or resell your bandwidth to commercial proxy customers, which is what Hola does.
Is a free VPN safe for banking?
A reputable one adds no risk over your normal connection. An ad-supported free VPN with a permissive data policy is a bad idea for anything sensitive. Stick to the top of this list.