VPN Comparison 2020 | Which of 150+ Providers is Best?

No hype, no BS, no pressure.  Just facts that let you figure out which VPN to use. 

The detailed VPN comparison below lets you see the features of each and every VPN service on the market today side-by-side and lets the numbers speak for themselves. 

You can sort and filter VPN services by any feature column. You can also search or show fewer VPN services than the default view (the default view is to show 25 entries, but you can also select 5, 10, 50, 100 or All). 

And don't forget to use the horizontal scroll​bar at the very bottom of the table to see the rest of the columns (it's a wide table!).​

VPN Comparison Table

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What Each Column Means in the VPN Comparison Table

Below you can read about what each column means as used in the VPN comparison table above.


Our rating out of 5 stars based on all the factors you can see in the table and read about below.  The more stars our of five, the better the VPN. The very best VPN services are rated as 5 stars. 

Min. Cost (Minimum Cost)

This refers to the minimum monthly cost you can get with a subscription for the VPN. This usually means paying for an annual subscription in advance. The longer the period of the plan you take, the lower the price you pay. 


This is the savings you get expressed as a percent when you buy the VPN at its minimum cost versus paying month-to-month. This discount includes any special discounts extended especially to Cogipas readers. 

The longer the period of the plan you take, the better the discount you get. Some VPN services now offer 2-year, 3-year and even "lifetime" plans for the biggest discounts around.

Try Free

Expressed in number of days, this column captures any free trial periods or money-back guarantee periods offered by the VPN.

While a free trial differs from a money-back guarantee, the end result is the same - you can try the VPN risk-free to make sure it's good for you - so it makes sense to present this information in the same column as the number of days.

A true or "pure" free trial means you should not have to provide any payment details (such as a credit card number or PayPal acount) to use the VPN for a specified period. In contrast, a money-back guarantee usually means that you initially pay for the service, but can ask for your money-back without hassle for a specified period of time.

HQ (Headquarters)

This means where the VPN service is based and has it corporate headquarters. Generally speaking, this means the legal jurisdiction to which it is subject. 

Some people prefer to avoid VPN services based in the United States or any countries that have cooperative spying arrangements such as the so-called "Five Eyes" countries or broader international intelligence-gathering networks known as Nine Eyes & Fourteen Eyes.

  • Five Eyes: Australia, Canada, New Zealand, United Kingdom and United Station 
  • Nine Eyes: Five Eyes above plus Denmark, France, the Netherlands and Norway.
  • Fourteen Eyes: Nine Eyes above plus Belgium, Germany, Italy, Spain and Sweden.


The maximum number of devices you can have connected to the VPN service at the same time.

For instance, if a VPN service allows "5 simultaneous connections" this means you could connect to the VPN service at the same time on your desktop computer, a tablet, a couple of smartphones and a gaming console. 

We would say 3 is the absolute minimum number of connections these days, but the more connections you get means better value for money if all other things - especially price - remain equal.


The number of different countries in which the VPN service has servers.

A high number of countries may be especially important for those wishing to stream local content that is available around the globe.  The more countries the VPN service offers, the more options you have for "geo-spoofing" your location and accessing local-only content.

You will sometimes see a VPN service advertise that they have a higher number of server locations than they do countries. That simply means that they offer more than one location in the same country. For example, it is common for a VPN service to offer many different VPN server locations (think cities) in larger countries such as the US and UK. 


The number of actual VPN servers in total that the VPN provider operates. A VPN service could have a single VPN server in a country or location or have hundreds of them.

This number is difficult to independently verify and is based on information provided by the VPN services themselves.

# of IPs (Number of IP Addresses)

The number of virtual IP addresses the VPN service has at its disposal. Generally speaking, the higher number of IP addresses in the available pool, the better as each time you connect to the VPN you have a higher likelihood of obtaining a brand new IP address which helps obfuscate your online presence and prevent the tracking and profiling of your activities. 

Like the Servers number above, this is based on information provided by the VPN providers themselves. 

Allows p2p (Torrent File-sharing)

This indicates whether the VPN service allows peer-to-peer (P2P) torrent file-sharing on its service. Not all VPN providers allow P2P activity, so it is important to pay attention to this element if you want to protect your torrent downloading with a VPN.


According to its privacy policies and practices, does the VPN service keep records (or "logs") of its customers' activities when they are connected to the VPN?

We highly recommend you choose a no-log VPN service (sometimes called zero-logs or zero-logging). Also be aware that a VPN service may say they have a no-logging policy, but may keep logs or turn them over to authorities in certain cases. This is why we recommend choose a VPN service whose no-logging claims have been confirmed or otherwise verified. 


Does the VPN service support the OpenVPN protocol? This is the safest available open-source VPN protocol in wide use today.


Does the VPN service accept Bitcoin or other "anonymous" payment methods such as gift cards?

Very privacy-conscious consumers may wish to pay for their VPN service without having to provide any personal information to the VPN service (such as credit card or PayPal information) and keep their identity hidden. 


Indicates the level of encryption employed by the VPN service. At a minimum, look for 256-bit levels of encryption. 


Does the VPN service support a feature that cuts off your Internet connection when the VPN connection drops? This feature is also referred to sometimes as network lock.

This is a feature which prevents your true IP address from leaking in the event the VPN disconnects for whatever reason. Read more about VPN Kill Switch features.

DNS Pro. (DNS Protection)

Another feature supported by some VPN services that prevents your true IP address from leaking while using the VPN.

Learn more about DNS Leaks and how to prevent them. 

TOPS Score

This column refers to a score for VPN services derived from That One Privacy Site (or ‘TOPS’ for short).

To arrive at these figures, we downloaded TOPS' Simple VPN Comparison Chart and then transposed the Simple Comparison portion of it into a new spreadsheet via Paste > Values. This kept the raw scores intact.

Here are the range of scores per Category from best (green cells in the TOPS table) to worst (red cells in the TOPS table). As you will note, the lower the raw score, the better. 

  • Under the PRIVACY umbrella, score varied by Category as follows: Jurisdiction from 0 to 5, Logging from 0 to 7 and Activism from 0 to 5.
  • Under the TECHNICAL umbrella, scores varied by Category as follows: Service Config from 0 to 6, Security from 0 to 4 and Availability from 0 to 5.
  • Under the BUSINESS umbrella, scores varied by Category as follows: Website 0 to 17, Pricing 0 to 8 and Ethics 0 to 7. 

You could question why the Website category is given so much more weight with a score up to 17 (for example, that’s twice as much weight as the logging factor) but we are not here to question the wisdom of ThatOnePrivacyGuy. His credentials and reputation are beyond reproach.

We then took an aggregated score; basically we summed up the individual Category scores to come up with an overall total. The best possible score was 0 (i.e., if a VPN received the best awarded score in each Category) and the lowest possible score was 64 (if a VPN was awarded the lowest score for each category). We then calculated a percentage score based on the following formula % = (64-X) / 64 where X was the VPN’s score. 

In other words, the higher the % score in this column, the better as assessed by TOPS.


This rank comes from simply ranking the VPN services by sorting them from best score to worst, so they were ranked from first to one hundred eighty-fifth. 

Our Review

A link to a detailed, in-depth review of the VPN service, either on our website or to another review we trust. 


This column of the VPN comparison table contains any additional notes of interest about the VPN service. For example, if the VPN is recommended by privacytools.io, we will highlight this important fact in these Comments.


Is our VPN comparison table perfect? Probably not.

But it has a lot of information that lets you easily compare and contrast different VPN services very quickly.

If you see anything you think is inaccurate, leave a Comment below and include the source of your corrected information such as a link to the VPN service's website with the data or a trusted source of VPN information. Thanks! 

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