NordVPN – fast VPN for privacy

The one name almost everybody recognises

Nord Security has spent enormously on making this the VPN people think of first, and unusually for that sort of campaign, the app underneath holds up its end. It’s built for the plain jobs: cover on a café wireless network, reaching your own country’s services from a hotel abroad, and leaving a tunnel running all day without feeling the speed go.

Connecting without reading a manual

One large button, a map behind it, and you’re through. What lifts it above the pack is the server list, which is organised by what you’re trying to do as well as by country, so the options for file sharing, obscured connections and double routing sit in the open instead of three menus deep. Protocol choice is exposed for anyone who cares about the trade-off between speed and getting through a fussy network, and it picks sensibly for everyone else. Throughput holds up well enough that watching something through the tunnel isn’t a compromise.

Why the outside audits count

Every provider in this category says it keeps no logs. Nord hands that claim to independent auditors on a repeating schedule, which is a different thing from a promise on a landing page, and it’s the strongest argument for choosing this over a cheaper unknown. The Android app is maintained properly too, with releases arriving steadily rather than annually. Split tunnelling, automatic connection on untrusted networks and tracker blocking come in the box instead of arriving as upsells.

The cost is the catch

Pay the advertised rate on a short term and this is an expensive habit, and the honest advice is that the value case rests entirely on catching one of the promotions that turn up constantly on the longer plans. Sign up at full rate and you’ll resent the renewal notice; sign up during a sale on a multi-year term and it reads as reasonable for what you get. That gap between the two numbers you might pay is the thing most likely to sour the whole experience, and it’s worth waiting a week for a better one.

Two smaller notes. The kill switch can argue with certain Android power settings, so test it at home rather than discovering it on a hostile network. And the security incident in the company’s past is fair to weigh, even though the response and the hardening that followed it were better than the category norm.

Buy it right and it’s a strong pick. The Play listing shows the current plans, and the button below goes there.