VPNs protect your web traffic from being snooped on and make it harder for spies and advertisers to track you online. The problem is that the world of VPNs is confusing and chaotic, filled with grandiose claims and shady practices. But Mullvad VPN is different, focusing on protecting the privacy of its customers at a very affordable price. It is a radically transparent company that embraces offbeat methods to protect users. You won't get upsells, a huge variety of servers, or a breathtaking interface, but you will get better online privacy than the competition offers for surprisingly little money. That makes Mullvad our Editors' Choice winner for affordable VPNs.
How Much Does Mullvad VPN Cost?
Mullvad VPN breaks with the competition by offering a single price for access to its protection. There are no pricing tiers, no additional upsells, and no free versions. There's just one price: 5 euros per month, which at the time of writing is about $5.53. You can pay for your Mullvad VPN account with major credit cards, PayPal, Swish, and—at a 10% discount—bitcoin. The company also sells prepaid cards on Amazon, which makes it even harder to connect your payments to your Mullvad VPN account. Plus, they're giftable.
You can also pay via bank wire transfer or cash mailed directly to Mullvad VPN's offices in Sweden. While cash transactions are anonymous, the company notes that using a wire transfer makes it possible to trace your Mullvad VPN account directly to you. Editors' Choice winner IVPN has similar options, which are rarely seen in the industry.
The Best VPN Services for 2022Mullvad VPN no longer accepts new, recurring subscription payments. The issue, Mullvad VPN says, is that "subscriptions" meant that the company had to hold on to more personal information for longer. The company instead uses a pay-as-you-go model, where customers can fund their accounts for as little as a month or as long as they wish.
As a result, the company says it can store even less information about customers than before, thus improving customer privacy. This setup could cause headaches for everyday users, since it may be difficult to remember to add more funds to their accounts. However, Mullvad VPN's process for creating and funding new accounts takes only seconds. Also, should your account lapse, you can simply create a new one since Mullvad VPN does not collect any customer information like phone numbers or email addresses.
That 5-euro fee is significantly less than the average monthly price of the VPNs we've reviewed, which currently sits at $9.84 per month. Only a few for-pay VPNs, such as Kaspersky Secure Connection VPN, are cheaper. Many worthy VPN services do charge more than the average, but they balance that cost with extra features and excellent user experiences. Editors' Choice winners Surfshark VPN and NordVPN, for example, charge $12.95 and $12.99, respectively, per month, but they also offer a few additional privacy tools not found in Mullvad VPN.
If money is tight, there are a few free VPNs you might try, too. Some are good but all are limited. Editors' Choice winner TunnelBear VPN's free subscription limits you to 500MB per month (upgradable to 1.5GB per month), for example. Editors' Choice winner Proton VPN, however, has no data restriction on its free subscription, making it our top choice for free VPNs.
Except for Mullvad VPN—which, as mentioned, has no pricing deals or tiers—most VPNs offer longer-term subscriptions at a steep discount. Considering all the services we've reviewed, this works out to be an average of $66.28 per year, upfront. Spread over a whole year, Mullvad VPN still costs slightly more, at about $66.36—despite not offering any deals. With the elimination of subscriptions, you can fund an account for as long as you like. You can pay for a month and then extend your account for whatever amount fits your budget.
In any case, we recommend readers avoid long-term subscriptions—at least at first. Instead, consider using a free or short-term subscription to test a service in your home environment before you make a longer commitment.
What Do You Get for Your Money With Mullvad VPN?
For your relatively low fee, Mullvad VPN allows you to connect five devices simultaneously with a single account. That's the industry average, but a few companies have lately started offering more tempting options. Avira Phantom VPN, Atlas VPN, IPVanish VPN, Private Internet Access VPN, Surfshark VPN, and TunnelBear VPN all place no limit on the number of devices you can use at a time.
(Editors' Note: IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)
While Mullvad VPN will protect your connection with a VPN, it doesn't include additional tools for enhanced privacy and security. For instance, NordVPN, Proton VPN, and VPNArea provide easy access to the free Tor anonymization network through their VPN servers. You don't need a VPN to access Tor, however.
Mullvad VPN has multi-hop connections, which means your data travels through two servers before exiting to the internet, instead of just one. They can be used to circumvent VPN blocking and also to add a layer of security to your connection. We like that Mullvad VPN includes this feature, but accessing it is a bit confusing. The service does allow P2P and BitTorrent access, too.
Like the best VPNs, Mullvad VPN also includes split tunneling. This feature lets you designate which apps send their data through the VPN connection and is handy for accessing a service that blocks VPNs—such as your bank or Netflix. It's now available in Mullvad VPN's Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows apps.
Some antivirus companies have begun bundling a VPN along with their traditional malware-blocking software, and some VPN companies—such as NordVPN and Surfshark VPN—have started adding antivirus features to their VPNs. Although its VPN product remains the primary focus, Mullvad VPN recently partnered with the Tor project to release a secure browser.
The latest version of the Mullvad VPN app includes the ability to filter out some kinds of web content, including adult sites, gambling sites, malware, ads, and trackers. We're glad to see Mullvad VPN expand its offering, although we found the adult content filtering to be a little wanting. You can also access port-forwarding features through Mullvad's website.
VPNs are enormously powerful tools for improving your privacy online, especially when you're using public Wi-Fi. They cannot, however, protect against every ill. We still recommend that you use local antivirus, create unique and complex passwords with a password manager, and enable multi-factor authentication wherever possible.
What VPN Protocols Does Mullvad VPN Offer?
There are many ways for your VPN provider to create a VPN connection. OpenVPN was the go-to choice in the VPN industry for years, but the newer WireGuard protocol has seen wider adoption recently. Mullvad VPN was one of the first companies to fully embrace it.
Like OpenVPN, WireGuard is open-source and can be picked over for any potential vulnerabilities. Unlike OpenVPN, WireGuard uses newer encryption technology and tends to have less impact on your internet speeds.
WireGuard is available in all of Mullvad VPN's apps, but only Linux, macOS, and Windows support OpenVPN.
Where Are Mullvad VPN's Servers Located?
Mullvad VPN has servers in 42 countries. That's a decent offering, but it's below the average of 52 countries we've seen among competitors. Although the server selection is on the small side, Mullvad VPN has improved the diversity of offerings, with two server locations in South America and one in Africa—two continents often ignored by VPN companies.
A large distribution of servers is desirable since it gives customers more choices for spoofing their locations and also increases the likelihood of finding a nearby VPN server. For comparison, ExpressVPN covers 94 countries and HMA VPN covers 210 with the help of virtual locations (which we'll explain below).
Although Mullvad VPN's infrastructure is comparably modest, it should be commended on its transparency. The company's server page is a complete, sortable list of its entire server fleet and even indicates which are owned or rented and what ISP is used. This kind of information is almost unheard of among VPNs, who tend to tailor their server information pages for search engine optimization rather than useful information.
A single hardware server can play host to many software-defined virtual servers. A virtual location is a server configured to appear somewhere other than where it's physically located. Both are enormously useful, but we prefer that companies are clear about where their servers are located—whether they're virtual or not. This isn't an issue for Mullvad VPN, A company representative told us that it uses only dedicated servers that are located exactly where they say they are.
Some VPN companies have embraced diskless servers, which do not store any information on them. Mullvad VPN says it has no information in the first place, but has also embraced diskless servers. Currently, only eight of the company's 650+ servers still write data to hard disk. NordVPN and ExpressVPN have already deployed this technology.
How Does Mullvad VPN Protect Your Privacy?
When you use a VPN, the company potentially has access to all your web traffic. For all our reviews, we speak with the company and examine its privacy policy to see what efforts are made to protect customer privacy. The upshot is that Mullvad VPN does not appear to be up to anything malicious, although a definitive judgment is all but impossible—as is the case with all VPNs. If you don't feel you can trust a VPN for any reason, look elsewhere; there are plenty of options.
More specifically, Mullvad VPN tackles the thorny issue of privacy with radical transparency, setting an example for others to follow in its privacy policy. The company does an admirable job of conveying it all in plain, understandable language, but brevity is not its strong suit. Throughout, Mullvad VPN is emphatic that it does not log user traffic, DNS requests, any kind of connection timestamp, IP addresses, or bandwidth use. That's all excellent, and it edges out much of the competition in terms of how little information is gathered or stored.
Mullvad VPN is also very clear about its business practices and does not pay for reviews or support affiliate partners. The company confirmed to us that it only generates revenue from customer payments and not from selling user data. Mullvad VPN is organized under the parent company Amagicom AB, is based in Gothenburg, Sweden, and operates under Swedish law. Understanding what laws apply to your VPN provider is useful for understanding how your data is protected. Mullvad VPN goes far beyond others by offering up an extensive list of legislation that applies to the company.
The company says that while it would comply with a legal request for information by law enforcement, it would only do so after investigating the claim. The company even commits to "shut down the service" if it's ever legally required to spy on its users. We have never seen any other company make the same commitment. In April 2023, Mullvad VPN announced that Swedish police entered its headquarters with a legal search warrant but the company says it was able to successfully rebuff the order and the police left empty-handed.
That said, Mullvad VPN does not compile a transparency report of its interactions with law enforcement, nor does it maintain a warrant canary. A representative tells us that it does not maintain the personal information necessary to issue a transparency report. However, we think a simple log of interactions with law enforcement would be useful for consumers.
Many VPN companies have commissioned third-party audits to establish their trustworthiness. In general, it's a good development for the industry, although not all audits are equal. The company has released the results of several audits. Most recently, the service was audited by Cure53 in 2020 (evaluating the company's infrastructure), and again in 2022 by Assured AB. This is excellent, and Mullvad VPN has committed to annual audits, a promise. TunnelBear VPN has also made.
Mozilla has chosen Mullvad VPN to provide backend support for Mozilla VPN, a vote of confidence for Mullvad VPN.
Hands On With Mullvad VPN for Windows
Mullvad VPN offers apps for Linux, macOS, and Windows, with instructions on how to configure other devices to use the VPN service. We tested Mullvad VPN on an Intel NUC 11 (NUC11PHKi7C, 'Phantom Canyon') desktop running the latest version of Windows 11 and had no trouble installing the app.
Creating an account and logging in was a different story. Mullvad VPN eschews usernames and passwords and instead issues just one identifier: a very long account number. It's much simpler than a password and username but it is unfamiliar, and the process can be disorienting if you're not expecting it. IVPN uses a similar system.
On its website, Mullvad VPN espouses the privacy benefits of this system: "We ask for no email, no phone number, no personal information whatsoever." We thought this might make account recovery impossible, but we were surprised to find Mullvad has a variety of ways to get your account back. Most are time-sensitive, and many are more involved than simple password recovery. This could be an issue for anyone nervous about technology. TunnelBear VPN is a far better choice for security novices.
Mullvad VPN's website impressed us with its clean graphics, which are in a bit of a cartoony style. They’re more playful than NordVPN, but not as cute as TunnelBear VPN. We expected the app would offer a similar experience but we were disappointed.
The apps' large buttons and text would be great on a phone, which has a small screen held a good distance from your face, but this is a desktop app. Worse, the app is bolted to the bottom corner of the screen, but fortunately, you can rectify this before even signing in. The result is a cramped, almost claustrophobic experience. It's as if you’re looking at the application through a mouse hole in the baseboard, and you have to manipulate it with a long stick. A coherent design across platforms is great to strive for, but this app needs room to breathe.
When you launch the app, it always defaults to servers in Sweden in our testing, which is a bit confusing. You can disable this behavior in the settings. One handy tool is a Refresh button that lets you reset your connection if things aren't working correctly.
You click the Location button to find a server somewhere else. You're presented with a list of countries, which can be expanded to show cities, and cities in turn open to show the individual servers in the area. We appreciate the level of control it allows. If you find yourself blocked using one server, you can poke around and find a server that works. It would be better if the Mullvad VPN app included information about each server, such as its current user load. All the app offers now is a green dot (you can use it) or a red dot (better not). It would also be useful to be able to favorite those servers so you can come back to them later. We do like that you can now filter servers by the provider and whether Mullvad VPN rents or owns the machine. No other VPN we've seen offers this option.
From the app's Settings menu, you can enable local network sharing, change the VPN protocol, and enable the Kill Switch, which cuts off your internet connection in the event the VPN disconnects accidentally. You can also toggle the malware, adult content, and gambling filtering tools with the DNS Content Blockers control. In our testing, we blocked adult content and Mullvad VPN successfully prevented us from accessing some naughty sites. However, looking for adult images by search engine is allowed, and we were able to access blocked sites by using a web proxy. We're happy to see tracker and malware filtering come to Mullvad VPN, but those seeking to block certain content would be better served with parental control software.
We were pleased to see that Mullvad VPN's split tunneling feature was extremely easy to use. Once activated, select an app from the list and its traffic will be routed outside the VPN. We confirmed split tunneling worked as expected. Although well-implemented, other VPNs are more flexible and some even let you route URLs and IP addresses in addition to apps.
We prefer VPN services that support multi-hop connections, so we're happy to see it included in Mullvad VPN. However, other VPN services let you select the path that your data takes, passing through two or more VPN servers. Not so with Mullvad VPN. Here, you just toggle a switch. You can control where your data exits, but that's it.
For a VPN to be useful, it needs to keep your IP and DNS information safe from prying eyes. Using the DNS Leak Test Tool, we confirmed Mullvad VPN does not leak DNS requests and does change the public IP address. Note that he only tested one server in Mullvad VPN's fleet. Others may be incorrectly configured.
Unfortunately, Mullvad VPN has some issues working with Netflix. In testing, we found that Netflix was not blocked. This might not last, however. We've found that a VPN that works today may not tomorrow, and vice versa. It seems Mullvad VPN is far more concerned with providing a secure and affordable VPN service than one that will let you watch, say, the BBC for free. For some people, that's just fine, but if accessing region-locked content is your goal, Mullvad VPN may not be the best choice.
How Fast Is Mullvad VPN?
A VPN makes your internet traffic jump through more hoops, which almost always means a hit to performance. To try and get a sense of that impact, we use the Ookla Speedtest tool to find a percent change with and without a VPN. You can read more about our testing in How We Test VPNs.
(Editors' Note: Speedtest by Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)
In our most recent testing, Mullvad VPN performed extremely well. It reduced download Speedtest results by just 15%—a strong score—and reduced upload Speedtest results by just 4.9%, which is the second-best score for this test. It didn't perform as well with latency, however. We found that Mullvad VPN increased latency by 93.2%. We configured Mullvad VPN to use WireGuard for our speed testing.
The chart below shows the most recent speed test results. Our VPN testing protocols mean that it will be updated throughout the year.
Keep in mind, these results are only accurate for a particular time and place. They're useful for comparison, but your experience using them will almost certainly differ. Also, we maintain that speed should not be a major factor when choosing between VPNs. Privacy and value are far more important.
Hands On With Mullvad VPN for iPhone
Since our last review, Mullvad VPN has improved the appearance of its iOS VPN app and beefed up the blocking features included with the VPN. For this test, we used an iPhone XS running iOS 16.4.1.
Mullvad VPN’s simple user interface includes an interactive map. Users can choose the city and server when making their VPN connection. A green bar at the top of the app window indicates whether the device is connected to a VPN. At the bottom of the window is a maroon button for connecting and disconnecting from the VPN server.
Mullvad’s iOS app is different from other iOS VPN apps we’ve reviewed because it contains content blocking, similar to popular parental control applications. However, VPN content filtering is limited, so look elsewhere if you want total control of available content.
The filtering toggles, located in the Settings menu, turn off access to known adult content websites and gambling sites. We put the content moderator to the test by visiting a few sites using the Firefox Focus browser app. We found that Mullvad VPN for iOS blocked access to well-known virtual “dens of iniquity” such as Betfair and Pornhub, but lesser-known gambling hubs and porn sites were still accessible.
Mullvad’s feature list is pretty bare-bones. The iOS app lacks features found in other Mullvad VPN apps, such as a Kill Switch, split tunneling, or advanced network settings. The Proton VPN iOS app has a Kill Switch and advanced settings, but also lacks split tunneling.
We visited DNSLeakTest.com and ran an extended test to see if Mullvad VPN was leaking our real IP address or DNS requests. We didn’t find any leaks during the test, but we only tested one server in Stockholm.
The iOS app’s speed was adequate, and we watched Twitch streams and YouTube videos without interruptions while connected to a server based in Singapore.
Hands On With Mullvad VPN for Mac
We tested Mullvad VPN's macOS VPN using a MacBook Air (M1, 2020) running Big Sur version 11.2.2 in 2021.
The app is not available in the Apple Appstore, but you can download it from Mullvad's site. Once we signed in with the Account Number, the app displayed the last VPN server from our iOS test as the primary option, suggesting it synced user information across platforms.
Mullvad's macOS app is very easy to use. You log in, select a location, and then click the big green button. You have plenty of choices when it comes to server locations, as the app lets you choose the country, city, and specific server through a series of menus. The app itself is fairly small. The app has settings for VPN protocols and Bridge mode, and it displays your WireGuard key.
When we tested the macOS app for DNS leaks, it did not divulge DNS information. It also had little performance impact in normal usage. Even while using a VPN server located in Madrid, Spain, we had no trouble watching YouTube videos without lagging or interruptions. We even watched a few BTS videos on Weverse for good measure without experiencing any streaming slowdowns or stutters.
Hands On With Mullvad VPN for Android
Mullvad VPN's Android app is missing a lot of the fun yet functional elements found in many competitors' Android apps, such as TunnelBear VPN’s elaborate and cute animated maps or Proton VPN’s real-time traffic charts. That said, it's still a capable app those who want to use a VPN without reading through technical jargon or viewing complicated graphics. We tested the app on a Samsung A71 5G model, running Android 13.
The Mullvad VPN Android app has added split tunneling since our last review, and you can enable it from the Settings>Advanced menu. There's also the option to turn on auto-connect or enable local network sharing. The app also lets you choose the country, city, and individual VPN server you want to connect to.
Using DNSLeakTest.com, we determined our real IP address was hidden, and our DNS information was not being leaked. Please note that we only performed this test on one server located in Toronto; there may be leaks with other Mullvad VPN servers.
We had no trouble accessing Twitch and YouTube and watching live streams and videos while connected to the same Canada-based server.
Hands on With Mullvad VPN for Chrome OS
We tested the Mullvad VPN ChromeOS app on a Dell Chromebook, running ChromeOS 113.0.5672.114. After downloading and opening the app, we notification informed us the app was designed for mobile use and that’s why users cannot resize the app windows. We didn’t feel the need to resize the windows during testing, however. The interface is uncluttered, and the text is easy to read. The Mullvad VPN ChromeOS app looks like a horizontal version of the Android and iOS apps, so it has the same simple, easy-to-use interface featuring clearly labeled buttons and toggles.
The Mullvad VPN ChromeOS app includes split tunneling, enabled from the Settings > Advanced menu. As in the Android and iOS apps, users can choose the country, city, or individual VPN server they wish to connect to.
After navigating to DNSLeakTest.com, we determined our real IP address was hidden, and our DNS information was not being leaked. Please note that we only performed this test on one server located in Brussels; there may be leaks with other Mullvad VPN servers.
We connected to a Mullvad VPN server in Tokyo for our Youtube and Twitch streaming tests. On Youtube.com, we were able to watch videos without interruptions. Twitch.tv took longer to load, but after the initial wait, we were able to watch a streamer play through The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom.
An Excellent, Iconoclastic VPN
Mullvad VPN pushes back on the idea that we should expect half measures from inexpensive privacy products. It's peerlessly transparent, providing information we rarely see from any company, with an excellent stance on consumer privacy and security. True, it doesn't offer a ton of features, the slickest app, or a massive global server footprint, but given that Mullvad VPN offers rock-solid basics at a fraction of the price, it's hard to argue against its approach. We suspect many consumers will be willing to tolerate its rougher edges in exchange for secure, inexpensive protection. That makes Mullvad an Editors' Choice winner for affordable VPNs, standing alongside other top options including IVPN, NordVPN, Proton VPN, Surfshark VPN, and TunnelBear VPN.
It's Surprisingly Easy to Be More Secure Online
