NordVPN Review 2024: A Top VPN Option Tested by Experts (2024)

NordVPN is one of the most popular VPNs right now, but choosing a VPN is not a popularity contest. You’re going to want to compare different VPN options in order to pick the one that can work best for you. That means looking at how the VPN hides IP addresses and encrypts data. It also means looking at other factors such as speed, reliability, availability of servers, and so on. We know; picking the best VPN isn’t easy. But it’s also not impossible, especially with us on your side.

We tested NordVPN ourselves for over a month on multiple devices and we’re going to discuss everything we learned about this popular VPN. One thing we can say upfront is that NordVPN was one of the fastest and most reliable VPNs we’ve tested. So if that’s what you’re looking for, it should definitely be on your short list.

NordVPN Quick Highlights

Editor's Rating

How Much Does NordVPN Cost?

Before everything else, let’s talk about NordVPN’s pricing, because you absolutely need a subscription to use this VPN. We found the pricing structure a little bit tricky. There are three different tiers, and for each tier, you can choose to pay on a monthly basis, every year, or every two years.

NordVPN Packages

Let’s unpack the three different tiers first. There’s the Standard plan, the Plus plan, and the Complete plan. Each plan actually offers the same VPN features contained within the NordVPN app. You’ll see what those features are in a minute. The Plus and Complete plans simply offer additional Nord Security software, because in case you didn’t know, NordVPN is just one of the different types of software offered by NordSecurity.

Here’s a breakdown of what’s included in each plan.

NordVPN Payment Options

Now, for the actual numbers. Keep in mind that all plans include NordVPN, so if all you want is a VPN, the Standard plan is just as good as the complete plan. If you also want a password manager or a secure cloud storage, though, we think the Plus and Complete plans offer good value for just a few dollars more than the Standard VPN plan.

As you can see, you get a better rate the longer your subscription gets. NordVPN’s Standard plan can go for as low as $3.99 per month on average if you buy a two-year subscription. And we know that two years is a long time, but NordVPN is virtually risk-free because it offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. You can cancel your subscription for any reason within the first 30 days of it and get your money back.

Also note that NordVPN offers deals and discounts, most frequently to customers buying a one-year or two-year subscription.

NordVPN’s Features

In this section, we’ll take you through NordVPN’s features and what it has under its hood. But bear in mind that this isn’t by any means an exhaustive list of all NordVPN features. The VPN always adds new functionalities. It’s among the most innovative VPNs we’ve tested. So to see how well NordVPN works, we focused on the most critical features, including the kill switch, split tunneling, and the elusive Double VPN.

Servers Around the Globe

We’re constantly keeping track of over a dozen VPNs, and among them, NordVPN’s server fleet is growing the fastest. Nearly a year ago, it had about 5,500. Today, it has over 6,200. NordVPN just keeps adding to its fleet.

Aside from that, though, it has physical and virtual servers in 111 countries. That’s the most of any VPN we’ve tested, although it’s just narrowly more than ExpressVPN’s 105 countries. And take note that NordVPN’s servers are a combination of physical and virtual servers. Here’s a quick explainer:

• Physical server: A physical server provides users IP addresses from the same country that the server is in physically. For example, if you connect to a physical server in the U.S., you’ll get a U.S. IP address.
• Virtual server: A virtual server provides users IP addresses from a different country than where the server is physically. For example, a server in Singapore that provides India IP addresses.

Each of those two types of servers have advantages and disadvantages, so it’s good that NordVPN offers both.

Virtual servers let you access IP addresses in countries where setting up a physical server might be impossible or impractical. For example, India has a new law that requires server farms to store sensitive data, which goes against NordVPN’s privacy policy. By setting up a virtual server in Singapore that provides India IP addresses, NordVPN gets around that law. It’s also useful for countries that don’t have good internet infrastructure, as putting up physical servers in those countries might cause slow connections.

Physical servers, on the other hand, are often more reliable in the IP address changing capability. That’s because they are physically located in the country, so they don’t have to rely on network switches and relays. That’s also good for speed. You know where the server actually is with physical servers, so you can choose closest to you. And as we’ve learned about VPNs, the closer you are to a server, the faster your speed is likely going to be. A VPN with a network of physical servers as wide as NordVPN (more than 60 locations) is a good VPN for travel.

Now let’s see how NordVPN’s server network compares to other top options.

It’s not just a competition in numbers, though. What matters is that the VPN you choose has servers in the locations you’ll most likely use. So before buying, take advantage of VPN free trials to see the exact locations of servers.

Headquartered in Panama

Though NordVPN operates worldwide, its headquarters are in Panama. That’s a big plus for us because Panama falls outside of Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and 14 Eyes jurisdiction.1

For all the VPN newbies out there, those are surveillance alliances among countries. Depending on a VPN company headquarters location, government entities could force a company to give up data it gathered about its customers. For instance, governments can ask VPN companies to provide IP address logs for use in criminal investigations. While we don’t condone cybercriminals, it’s a huge red flag in our book if the government can willy-nilly access user logs of VPNs. And that’s why we love NordVPN. It’s outside the jurisdictions of government bodies that can do that.

Kill Switch

No VPN is perfect. Even the best VPNs can sometimes have spotty connections. Case in point: While watching Netflix with NordVPN, an error occurred out of nowhere. The root, as it turned out, was that NordVPN timed out unexpectedly, revealing Netflix our real location and prompting it to stop the movie we were streaming because it wasn’t actually available in the U.S. We used a VPN to stream Netflix and get around its region-based content restrictions.

We were lucky that’s all we were doing. If, for example, we were using a VPN to torrent, our ISP would have caught on the moment our VPN connection dropped and we could have possibly gotten another piracy notice although we were downloading a non-copyrighted file.

Fortunately, even if something like that happened, NordVPN has a kill switch. The kill switch is a necessary feature for stealthy VPNs. Apps with a kill switch offer better protection because they are able to stop your device’s internet connection in case the VPN gets disconnected.

In the example above, rather than revealing our browsing activity, a dropped connection would have just stopped all internet traffic. Nothing goes in, nothing goes out. There’s no better contingency measure than that.

Data Usage

If you’re worried that NordVPN might hold your internet browsing back, let us assure you based on our experience that it won’t. It has fast speeds and unlimited VPN data.

NordVPN lets you do what you normally do on the internet, but with more privacy. You can browse, download, and stream all you want. As a nice little side-effect, you can even change your Netflix region to access shows not available on Netflix U.S. by connecting to a server in a different country. We’ve tried that and it works.

Minimal Logging

Using a VPN means entrusting your data to the VPN provider. The VPN encrypts your internet traffic to hide it from your ISP and others who might be trying to track your online activities, but at the same time, the VPN can decrypt the very data it encrypted. If they choose to, VPNs can easily log your online data and possibly profit from it.

That’s why we always check how much data a VPN logs, and when it comes to NordVPN, we were pleased with what we found. In fact, we deemed NordVPN as the best no-log VPN service out there. First and foremost, whatever you do while connected to the VPN is not recorded. NordVPN doesn’t know which websites you visited, what you’ve downloaded, and what you streamed. It also doesn’t know your original IP address.

However, NordVPN logged some data, but these types of data weren’t related to our online activities. For example, it logged contact and personal information necessary to maintain our accounts, such as email addresses. It also remembered our default payment information.

As for the VPN usage itself, NordVPN logged things like timestamps of our last session, information we provided customer support whenever we contacted them, and some information about the NordVPN app we were using (version, device ID, etc.). We were fine with NordVPN collecting those types of data as they help improve the company’s VPN service and because the data can’t be tied back to us specifically.

Now, we couldn’t verify what they actually logged ourselves, but NordVPN is always transparent and willing to go through security audits and spot checks. Back in 2018, it was one of the first VPN companies to submit itself to a third-party audit, and since then, it has gone through numerous checks.

• It was audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers Switzerland in 2018 and July 2022.
• It was audited by VerSprite in June 2021.2
• It started 2023 with a policy audit by Deloitte, which they repeated to end 2023. The latest audit report was released in January 2024.

Strong Encryption

The main point of using a VPN is to hide your online activities from the prying eyes of ISPs, government agencies, and hackers. To do that, VPNs like NordVPN encrypt all your online traffic to scramble the data and keep it private.

NordVPN uses the highest encryption standard available to VPNs today: 256-bit AES encryption. Just to show you how secure it is, 256-bit AES is otherwise known as “military-grade encryption” because it’s what the U.S. government uses to encrypt top-secret communications.

We also saw the same encryption standard when we reviewed Surfshark, another high-rated VPN, which means it’s what the leading VPNs use. Though we felt secure using both Surfshark and NordVPN, we did notice that SurfShark offered fewer servers than NordVPN, making connection times a bit slower depending on our location. Read our comparison of Surfshark and NordVPN if you wish to learn more.

In addition to 256-bit AES, NordVPN uses ChaCha20 to encrypt connections made through NordLynx, a proprietary VPN protocol (more on that below). ChaCha20 is widely regarded as a secure encryption standard that is lightweight and easy to use on mobile devices. It may not be as unbreakable as 256-bit AES, but it’s the optimized encryption standard for WireGuard, a VPN protocol on which NordLynx is built.

Internet Protocols

In addition to strong encryption, NordVPN uses some of the best VPN protocols for speedy and secure delivery of online traffic. These protocols are OpenVPN and WireGuard.

OpenVPN has long been the gold-standard of VPN protocols. It’s fast and incredibly secure, as it seamlessly supports 256-bit AES encryption. It’s also versatile, allowing different kinds of data packets to pass through. It’s the VPN protocol we recommend to most desktop users.

Alternatively, users can opt to use WireGuard in the form of NordLynx. WireGuard is newer compared to OpenVPN, but it’s quickly gaining attention because of its speed. Unlike OpenVPN, WireGuard is great for mobile users because the protocol itself is lightweight, meaning, it won’t eat up much processing power and battery juice.

Aside from those protocols, NordVPN offers IKEv2/IPSec, an older and less secure protocol, but useful in niched applications, such as high-speed downloads or online gaming that requires stability.

Split Tunneling

By default, NordVPN encrypted all of our web traffic automatically and routed it through a secure VPN server. This is known as a full-tunnel mode. But did you know that NordVPN also offers split tunneling?

Split tunneling allows for some traffic to pass through the VPN tunnel and others to pass through normal, unencrypted networks. How exactly is that beneficial?

Picture this: You’re using a VPN to access Netflix U.K. on your commute to work. However, since you’re using full-tunnel mode, all your apps are connected to a U.K. server, even your weather app, and that means you’re seeing the weather in the U.K. and not in your local city. With split-tunneling, you can force your weather app to use the normal network so it fetches your city’s weather information.

Double VPN

NordVPN also employed a double VPN, meaning that our data went through multiple servers to gain multiple layers of encryption. This concept, known as VPN server chaining or multi-hop, enhanced our security so that absolutely no one knew what we were up to.

Even if, let’s say, a hacker managed to get through one layer of encryption, a second encryption layer would stand as extra protection. Most VPNs only use one server, so we felt good knowing that our data had twice the encryption protecting it before it reached its final destination.

Dedicated IP Address

While NordVPN uses shared dynamic IP addresses by default – meaning, multiple users can share the same IP address and address changes every time you connect – dedicated IP addresses are also available as add-ons at checkout. With a dedicated IP address, NordVPN will assign you a server IP address that only you can use.

There are several advantages to having a dedicated IP address, one of which is that you’re less likely to have to fill up CAPTCHAs. Websites can see when multiple users are connecting to them using the same IP address, and that’s a red flag to them. That’s why you may notice an increased occurrence of CAPTCHAs when using a VPN with shared IP addresses. With NordVPN’s dedicated IP addresses, no one else will be using the same IP address as you, so online services are less likely to flag down connection requests from you.

NordVPN has dedicated IP addresses in the United States, Italy, United Kingdom, Netherlands, France, Germany, Canada, and Japan.

Speed Tests

VPNs will sometimes slow down our internet speed, as the traffic has to go through an encryption server on top of a public network’s server. Regardless, we still wanted to see fast internet speeds while we were connected, so we made sure to test NordVPN ourselves. We used a MacBook Pro and an Acer Aspire 5 running Windows 10.

Lots of factors determine speed, like distance to the server, the device’s make and model, and the operating system, so keep in mind that there are a lot of things at play aside from the VPN itself.

In our results, NordVPN worked much faster on our Acer Aspire 5 than on our MacBook Pro.

On our MacBook Pro, our download speed was about 25 percent slower while using NordVPN, while speed only decreased by eight percent on our Acer Aspire.

Our upload speeds were slower on our Mac than on our Windows, but download speeds on the Mac still excelled. For instance, when we needed to download a few files to share with our team, our Mac handled the task in just a couple of minutes.

Although NordVPN worked better on our Windows, it still held its own when we used our Mac, making it a versatile option no matter the device.

We should also note that NordVPN uses the NordLynx protocol, an adaptation of the Wireguard VPN protocol. Wireguard averaged 59 percent faster than OpenVPN in download speed tests.4 The NordLynx switchover hadn’t happened yet at the time of our NordVPN tests, but it’s safe to say that NordVPN’s download speeds have improved in recent years thanks to the NordLynx protocol.

» Learn more: About Our VPN Speed Tests

DNS Leak Tests

DNS stands for Domain Name System, which is like yellow pages to the worldwide web. It’s a directory that converts domain names to IP addresses and vice versa, so that when you type in a domain name (e.g. Google), your traffic knows to go to the right IP address. We put all the VPNs we review through a test to make sure that they are hiding our DNS when we connect to them. Fortunately, the company passed our evaluation, meaning that there were no DNS leaks when we connected to NordVPN.

WebRTC Leak Tests

We liked WebRTC because it allowed all the things we had going, like Netflix, video chats, and files we had to download, to use less bandwidth. However, WebRTC comes at a cost: the devices know each other’s private IP addresses, a big no-no for us. We conducted a WebRTC test to make sure that our IP addresses didn’t leak when we were using NordVPN. Luckily, NordVPN passed with flying colors on both Windows and Mac, showing different IP addresses than the real ones on our computers.

NordVPN Apps

When you’re buying a subscription, keep in mind that NordVPN has a device limit. Only six devices can connect at a time, although you can set up the VPN app on multiple devices. Six is more than enough for most users, but if you need to connect more, you can buy multiple subscriptions using different accounts. That’s probably not going to be practical, though, so check out Private Internet Access. Private Internet Access subscriptions offer unlimited simultaneous connections.

Back to NordVPN, the brand offers a VPN app for different systems. It has Windows, macOS, and Linux apps for desktops and laptops as well as Android and iOS apps for smartphones. Recently, they also released an Apple TV app following tvOS 17’s update allowing support for native VPN applications. NordVPN’s Apple TV app is available from the App Store, and it’s currently our top-rated VPN for Apple TV. Besides Apple TV, NordVPN has apps for Android TV and Fire TV.

Each app works a little differently. The desktop and smartphone apps provide the most functionality, such as split tunneling (except on macOS and iOS), multi-hop, and Threat Protection. On the other hand, the Apple TV app offers none of those extra features mentioned. It won’t even let you change your VPN protocol. The Apple TV app connects you to a VPN server and changes your IP location, but that’s it.

For this review, we tested NordVPN on Windows and macOS. If you’re buying a VPN for a specific device, make sure to test NordVPN within the first 30 days so you can use the money-back option in case it doesn’t pan out.

24/7 Customer Support

NordVPN offered several options for its customer service, like 24/7 live chat, email support, and an in-depth database of submitted user questions to leaf through. When we wanted to dig into the details on what data the VPN logged, for example, we navigated to NordVPN’s support page. While NordVPN doesn’t provide a phone number in case we wanted to talk to a human, we still had access to plenty of resources on NordVPN’s support page.

Video Review

In our video review, we take you through what it’s really like using NordVPN. You’ll get a better sense of exactly how this service works to help choose a VPN for you. And we’ll take you along on our process of testing NordVPN for speed and leaks.

In Summary

Overall, we give NordVPN a 9.7 out of 10 rating based on the numerous factors we measured like features, reliability, performance, and cost-value correlation. It’s currently our highest-rated VPN.

Is NordVPN the only good option? No. Some other VPNs come close to NordVPN. For example, here’s our ranked listing of NordVPN competitors:

• Surfshark: 9.5/10 (2nd place)
• Private Internet Access: 9.4/10 (3rd place)
• UltraVPN: 9.2/10 (4th place)

However, if what you’re looking for is a versatile option with a global reach and first-class software, NordVPN definitely deserves to be one of your top considerations.

We loved that NordVPN’s headquarters is in Panama because that meant we didn’t have to stress about the possibility of the government seeing our data. We were also more than happy to see its set of features, which includes rare ones like DoubleVPN, Dedicated IP, and a proprietary VPN protocol in NordLynx. Lastly, NordVPN passed all of our speed and security tests with top marks, making us confident that it could protect our privacy while we used the internet however we pleased.

NordVPN FAQs

Since NordVPN is one of the most popular VPNs, here are the most common questions we get about it.

• Is NordVPN a good VPN?

  NordVPN is a good VPN. Its headquarters is in Panama, which isn’t part of any international surveillance alliances. It won’t track anything about the user’s web activity or IP addresses, encrypting both with AES-256.

  NordVPN allows for Netflix and torrenting use, and it has fast speeds on our Mac computer. However, we saw a lot of lag with our Windows Acer Aspire, so NordVPN may be a better option for Mac users over PC users.

• Is NordVPN legal in Australia?

  NordVPN is legal in Australia; Australia doesn’t ban the use of VPNs. However, torrenting copyrighted content is still illegal, even while using NordVPN. Australia’s Telecommunications Amendment Act, which regulates data retention, requires internet service providers to collect users’ metadata and store it for two years, so many Australians have turned to VPN usage to maintain their data privacy.

• Is NordVPN owned by China?

  China does not own NordVPN. Rather, NordVPN has a parent company, Tefincom S.A., that is based in Panama. It also has offices in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

• Can ISPs and governments track you while you're using NordVPN?

  ISPs and governments cannot track you while using NordVPN. As the company is in Panama, governments can never force NordVPN, legally, to hand over customer data. Plus, the company doesn’t log your real IP address or web activity. So while your internet service provider will be able to see the IP address that NordVPN gave you, thousands of NordVPN users share this address, making you anonymous online.