NordVPN vs Surfshark vs Proton VPN: which one is worth it in 2026.

Quick verdict

If we had to pick just one, no caveats: Proton VPN. It's the only one of the three whose apps are fully open source, the only one headquartered in Switzerland, and the only one with a free plan that doesn't sell you out in exchange. It isn't the fastest or the cheapest, and its free plan covers fewer countries.

Surfshark if you need to cover an entire household: it doesn't cap the number of devices, which is a real difference, not a sales pitch.

NordVPN if server coverage matters to you above everything else and you don't mind that it's the least transparent of the three about its code.

And before anything else: if what you want is to stop ads from tracking you, a VPN is not the tool for that. We explain why below, because it's the most expensive confusion in this entire category.

At a glance

Prices and server counts change every few weeks and with every promotion. We deliberately leave them out of this table: any figure we wrote today would be outdated by the time you read it. Check each provider's own site.

What a VPN actually does, and doesn't

A VPN encrypts the traffic between your device and one of the company's servers, and makes the sites you visit see that server's IP instead of yours. That's everything it does. Explained in detail in How a VPN works.

What it does deliver:

• Your ISP and whoever controls the airport Wi-Fi can't see which sites you're visiting.
• A site can't tell which country or IP you're connecting from.
• You can get around regional blocks and some forms of censorship.

What it doesn't deliver, no matter what the ad implies:

• It doesn't make you anonymous. If you log into your Google account, Google knows it's you. IP address is one identifying signal among many.
• It doesn't stop ad tracking. Cookies, browser fingerprinting and your own logged-in sessions are all still there. That's a job for a decent browser with a blocker, not a VPN.
• It doesn't protect you from malware. The add-ons sold as "threat protection" are domain blockers, useful but not an antivirus.
• It doesn't make an insecure site secure. The HTTPS padlock is set by the site, not the VPN.
• It doesn't save you from a scam. If you enter your card details on a fake store, you enter them just the same with a VPN on. What actually helps there is knowing how to spot the store.

You're trading your ISP seeing you for the VPN company seeing you instead. That's why everything from here on is about who you're trusting, which is the only question that actually matters.

Jurisdiction, the first thing to look at

A "no-logs" policy is only as good as the law that binds the company that signs it. If a judge can order it to start logging and to say nothing about it, the policy is an intention, not a guarantee.

Proton VPN is based in Switzerland. Outside the EU and outside the 14 Eyes agreements. Swiss law doesn't require VPN providers to retain connection data. It's the most favorable jurisdiction of the three, and not by a small margin.

NordVPN is based in Panama. Also no data-retention obligation, and not part of any intelligence-sharing agreement. On paper, a solid position.

Surfshark is based in the Netherlands, and this needs saying plainly because its own marketing skates past it: the Netherlands is part of the 9 Eyes, the core of the intelligence-sharing agreement. It relocated there from the British Virgin Islands. The company argues that with no logs there's nothing to hand over, which is a reasonable argument, but it isn't the same as being outside the agreement.

The fact almost nobody mentions: two of the three are the same company

Nord Security and Surfshark merged in 2022. They share an owner. They present themselves as independent brands, keep separate infrastructure and compete with each other on price, but the parent company is the same.

This matters for a specific reason: plenty of people sign up for two different VPNs to spread the risk, or compare the two believing they're independent takes on the market. If your selection criterion is provider diversity, here you're picking the same house twice.

It isn't a scandal and it doesn't disqualify either product. It's a fact that changes the comparison and that, strikingly, is missing from almost every "best VPN" list you'll find.

Proton VPN

Made by Proton AG, the Geneva-based company behind Proton Mail.

What sets it apart from the other two: the apps are open source, all of them, on every platform. Anyone can read the client and check what it sends and where. In a category whose entire product is "trust us," being able to verify instead of trust is the single biggest difference on the table. Neither NordVPN nor Surfshark open their full clients.

It has passed independent audits with published reports.

The free plan is real. No data cap, no ads, and it doesn't sell your traffic, which is exactly what most free VPNs do. In exchange it covers fewer countries and less speed. It's the only one of the three you can genuinely try without paying.

It also has Secure Core, which routes your connection through a second server in a country with favorable laws before it reaches the internet. It costs speed and only makes sense if your threat model is an adversary watching the network, not a video platform's catalog.

Being honest about Proton: in 2021 Proton Mail handed over an IP address to Swiss authorities under a court order in a French case. That was Mail, not VPN, and the company couldn't refuse a valid order in its own country. It changed the wording on its site after the backlash. We mention it because a comparison that only says nice things about its own pick isn't useful for deciding anything.

NordVPN

By far the best known of the three, and the one that spends the most on advertising. Headquartered in Panama.

Very wide server network, which is its strongest argument: if you travel or need to exit through a specific, less common country, it has the best odds of having it.

It uses NordLynx, its implementation on top of WireGuard. WireGuard is fast and modern but, as-is, keeps the user's IP on the server for the duration of the connection; NordLynx adds a translation layer to avoid that. It's a real technical fix for a real problem, not a marketing name.

RAM-only servers: nothing is left written to disk on reboot.

It has passed several independent audits of its no-logs policy.

What you should know: in 2018 an attacker accessed a rented server in Finland through an insecure tool belonging to the data center's provider. The whole network wasn't compromised and there's no evidence any user traffic was accessed, but a TLS key was exposed. What did the real damage wasn't so much the breach itself as the delay in disclosing it: it became public in 2019. Nord responded with audits, a bug bounty program and RAM-only servers. It's a mark against it, and also more than most of its competitors can say, since they simply have never disclosed anything at all.

Surfshark

Netherlands, same owner as NordVPN since 2022.

Its real selling point is device count: it doesn't cap it. Neither of the other two does that. If you need to cover a whole family with two phones each, a couple of laptops and the TV, the per-device price gap stops being a footnote.

It's usually the cheapest of the three on long contracts, and the usual warning in this category applies here too: the promo price is for the first term only. Renewal is a different price. Check it before signing up for two years.

RAM-only servers and independent audits, same as the other two.

Against it: the jurisdiction already covered, and that its clients aren't open source either.

Audits and real incidents

All three being audited sounds like a tie, and it isn't. It's worth knowing what a VPN audit actually means:

• It's not a permanent certification. It's a snapshot of a specific moment. A 2024 audit says nothing about today's infrastructure.
• It's almost always a review of policy and configuration, not a mathematical proof that nothing is logged. The auditor checks what the company shows it.
• What genuinely carries weight is repetition. A company that gets audited every year and publishes the full report is accepting a real, recurring cost.

That's exactly why Proton's open source counts for more than an audit: it doesn't depend on anyone showing you anything.

Which one for each type of user

You want real privacy and can give up some speed
→ Proton VPN. Switzerland, open source and a free plan to try it without paying.

You want to cover the whole family without counting devices
→ Surfshark. Knowing about the Netherlands and the renewal price.

You travel a lot and need to exit through unusual countries
→ NordVPN. That's where the wide network shows.

You just want secure public Wi-Fi
→ Proton VPN's free plan covers you. Don't pay for this.

You want to stop ads from tracking you
→ None of the three. You need a browser with a content blocker, not a VPN. It's the single most common buying mistake in this category.

You're a journalist, an activist, or live in a country with censorship
→ Proton VPN, for jurisdiction, auditable code and evasion protocols. And a VPN alone is not a complete security plan.

The recommendation

Proton VPN, for a reason that isn't about performance: it's the only one that lets you check instead of trust. The entire product a VPN sells is believing what a company that sees all your traffic tells you, and of the three it's the only one that publishes its code, sits in the best jurisdiction, and lets you try it free indefinitely.

If your case is covering a lot of devices on a tight budget, Surfshark is a reasonable choice and there's no need to pretend otherwise. Just make it knowing where it's based and who owns it.

And if you're not sure what you actually need it for, the honest answer might be that you don't. For most people, a properly set up password manager and two-factor authentication prevent far more trouble than a VPN. We cover the first one in Best password manager 2026.

Frequently asked questions