Best free VPNs

If you don't want to spend a penny on a VPN then you have plenty of options, but be careful to avoid those that want to harvest your data

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Finding a good free VPN can be a minefield. Fortunately, most of those mines are visible. As a rule of thumb, avoid whatever floats to the top of VPN search results on your phone's app store. While they include reputable services such as those reviewed here, you can also encounter malware or apps that primarily exist to harvest data for app-ranking services such as Sensor Tower (owner of Luna VPN) and App Annie (owner of Phone Guardian VPN).

So our recommendations for free VPNs are taken from the same pool of well-established, privacy-conscious providers as our paid-for VPN recommendations. Three of the VPNs we've reviewed this month have free tiers, while CyberGhost provides a free trial. Each requires you to create an account before you can access the service, but all you'll need for this is an email address - there's no requirement to hand over any payment data or other personal information.

We've tested each of these services' free tiers, rather than simply reusing data from our paid-for reviews. That's because the free user experience in most cases differs from what paid users get. We'll explain those key differences below, but generally you won't get access to extra features such as manual configuration profiles, servers optimised for video and the ability to connect multiple devices.

Proton VPN