Surfshark VPN Review 2024: Features, Pricing & More (2024)

• Owned by Nord Security, Surfshark is an extremely popular name in the VPN space. If you frequent the same internet circles we do, you’ve probably been hit by more than one ad for the platform while watching YouTube.
• The Surfshark service itself boasts unlimited simultaneous connections and a number of features we expect out of a quality VPN, including split tunneling and a kill switch.
• While we like some of what the service has on offer, the myriad performance and connection troubles we had while testing make it difficult for us to fully recommend the service, especially with competition as stiff as any top VPN faces.

Quick Specs

Surfshark has all the expected features found in top VPNs. It has a kill switch, split tunneling and a sizable network of servers and server locations. The app’s multi-hop feature is unique in that you can select your own entry and exit locations, which isn’t the case for every provider offering multi-hop. It’s a cool feature but not a game-changer. While multi-hop can help further conceal your internet traffic, it’s not great for streaming or torrenting—two of the more common VPN use cases—due to the extra hit to performance that comes with layering one VPN connection over another.

Aside from that, there isn’t much that stands out about Surfshark as a VPN. That’s not to say that it’s a bad VPN. The unlimited simultaneous connections and large server network are great but don’t quite stand out compared to the rest of the pack. Unlike some competitors, it does offer Dedicated IP, which is nice if you’re someone who needs that for your job. Its features work when the app itself is working, but everything it does can also be found in one of its competitors. Overall, Surfshark is a good VPN, and it does what we want a VPN to do for the most part; it just isn’t necessarily unique in doing so.

Surfshark is available for month-to-month, one-year and two-year subscription service plans.

Customers can pay by credit card, PayPal, SOFORT, Google Pay, Amazon Pay and cryptocurrencies. We’ve outlined the VPN’s standard service pricing in the table below.

Surfshark Free Trial

Surfshark offers a seven-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. We didn’t encounter any issues with canceling within the 30 days, but some ex-users have reported struggling with getting a refund from the company in the past. As with all companies that offer a refund of this sort, it’s usually a good idea to try the monthly plan first; so if you don’t end up getting that refund, you’re only out $15.45 instead of the $40 to $60 that the longer-term plans could cost you.

Is Surfshark Worth It?

In terms of overall cost, Surfshark is on the higher end of the VPN spectrum. For the base monthly plan, $15.45 per month makes it slightly pricier than some of its competitors, such as IVPN, NordVPN or Mullvad VPN. It’s one-year plan, however, offers a competitive initial offer price of $3.49 per month.

The unlimited simultaneous connections make it feel a bit more affordable for families, people with a large number of devices, and businesses, however. The app’s connection and performance issues make it difficult for us to definitively say that it’s worth your money, but we think it is still cheap enough to be worth trying for one month to see for yourself if it’s right for you.

Surfshark offers over 3,200 servers in 100 countries. This is one of the highest server and server location counts across all the VPNs we’ve covered, which is great. It gives users a lot of options to choose from and can help prevent potential bottlenecking incidents during periods of high user traffic. A huge network of servers isn’t the most important factor for a VPN, but it is still nice to have.

When it comes to evaluating the security of a VPN, an independent audit is crucial. Since you’re using a VPN to make your internet connection more secure, you want to make sure your VPN is equally safe.

Surfshark Protocols

Surfshark currently supports the following protocols:

• WireGuard: An open-source VPN protocol known for its fast speeds. This is the current gold standard for VPN protocols, and it’s the one we recommend you use whenever possible.
• OpenVPN (TCP): OpenVPN is a free and open-source security protocol you can find supported by most VPNs. Being over 20 years old, it’s also one of the oldest protocols out there. OpenVPN most often uses one of two protocols. The Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) affects how your computer sends and receives data. When a device sends data out (called a network packet), TCP forces your computer to wait for confirmation that the packet was successfully delivered before sending the next packet or resending the current one in the event of a failure. This can lead to a slower but more consistent internet connection.
• OpenVPN (UDP): The UDP (User Datagram Protocol) is a protocol that basically tells your computer to not wait for delivery confirmation when sending packets. This can boost your internet speeds comparative to TCP but does make it less reliable.

No-Logs Policy

Surfshark claims a no-logs policy, which was independently audited by Deloitte in 2023. However, according to Surfshark’s privacy policy, it does “store information about [users’] connection to a particular VPN server (user ID and/or IP address and connection time stamps)” but that the information is automatically deleted after 15 minutes.

While it’s good news that the company deletes the logs, that does mean there is a time window where logs of some user activity are stored, even if it eventually gets swept away. The no-logs policy isn’t a lie, per se, as Surfshark makes all of this clear in its Terms of Service and privacy policy, but it does leave us a bit concerned.

Our Experience Testing Surfshark’s Security

As far as we can tell, Surfshark’s security features work about as expected. DNS leak protection tests run through the likes of DNS Leak Test and IP Leak showed no signs of any leaking. Split tunneling and the internet kill switch functioned when necessary as well. The latter especially worked well for us, as we encountered several connection drops while testing on Windows, Android and iOS. We did have trouble getting the CleanWeb ad blocker to successfully block ads on websites such as YouTube, however.

Most people who use a VPN find that their internet speeds slow down when the VPN is turned on. However, the actual speeds you experience when using a VPN will depend on a variety of factors such as your location, internet service provider (ISP) and the distance between your device and the server you’re trying to connect to. Arguably, the most important factor, however, is the protocol you use, which is why we tested all three of Surfshark’s protocols versus our internet speeds without a VPN to see how it stacks up.

Methodology: Our VPN speed comparison is tested on a Windows 11 machine using Cloudflare’s public speed test. Each protocol was connected to the nearest possible server and tested multiple times before we came up with these averages.

Overall, Surfshark is one of the fastest VPNs we’ve tested with speeds near or in some cases exceeding our results without a VPN. Our connection drop issues persisted during speed testing, but when we were able to maintain a connection long enough, it was fantastically fast. WireGuard is still the protocol we recommend for use. While UDP performed better, it was also the protocol that had the most trouble staying connected for the full duration of testing.

Surfshark allows you to connect to an unlimited number of devices at the same time without any limitations. This is a competitive offering since the majority of VPNs allow a limit of between five and seven devices.

Surfshark works with a variety of operating systems.

Our Experience: Surfshark on Windows

Reviewing Surfshark on Windows was a bit of a trial. After initial setup, we found that we were unable to connect to the VPN without significant delay, if at all. Thankfully, customer support was able to help us figure that out. However, even after that, the app showed some concerning performance issues.

In particular, we noticed several connection drops while testing, which you never want to see from a VPN and isn’t something we typically experience when reviewing VPNs. When the app wasn’t dropping connections, however, the rest of its features worked fine.

Our Experience: Surfshark on Mac

We had no trouble setting up and using Surfshark on macOS. The app works almost identically to its Windows counterpart with all of the same features you’d expect from Surfshark, minus split tunneling. Within minutes of downloading the software, we were up and running with selecting server locations, configuring settings and enjoying an undisturbed web browsing experience.

Our Experience: Surfshark on Android

We were initially impressed with how much Surfshark’s Android app carried over from the Windows client. Typically, mobile VPNs will have limited features or functionality in some way, but all the major features including the kill switch, split tunneling and multi-hop were there.

Unfortunately, our connection dropping woes continued on Android, which is around the point where we decided to check other VPNs on Android and Windows to see if it was a hardware issue or an issue with Surfshark.

We encountered no connection drops on Proton VPN, IVPN or Private Internet Access. Again, the app otherwise worked well enough, but a stable connection is arguably the most important part of a VPN and cannot be overlooked.

Our Experience: Surfshark on iOS

The iOS app impressed us in much the same way the Android app did, by retaining the same selection of protocols and the kill switch. Split tunneling isn’t available, however. At first, the app was working as expected, but once again, we lost connection to the VPN several times. While the app itself is good, our experience with it was disappointing.

VPNs can often slow down an internet connection, especially for an activity such as streaming. Of the VPNs we tested, Surfshark is among the fastest, which means that when it comes to streaming while using a VPN, Surfshark will likely be a solid option, depending on the platform you want to stream from.

Our Experience: Streaming Netflix With Surfshark

We got Netflix working pretty quickly on Surfshark. We were able to access exclusive content on U.K. Netflix and Netflix Japan without any issues. The streaming performance was also fine, though not spectacular.

Our Experience: Streaming Hulu With Surfshark

We couldn’t get Surfshark working on Hulu, unfortunately. When we tried, we were stopped at the login screen with a message informing us that Hulu was only available in the U.S. and that we can’t access it using an anonymous proxy.

Our Experience: Streaming Disney+ With Surfshark

Disney+ didn’t work for us either. Instead of blocking us at the login screen, however, it simply displayed a blank screen when we tried to access the website. Generally, if you can’t get it to work for Hulu, it’s a likely bet Disney+ won’t work either.

Our Experience: Streaming Max With Surfshark

Surfshark worked on Max with no trouble whatsoever. We simply had one of our U.K. team members connect to a U.S. server, and they were able to access the service like normal. Along with Netflix, the speeds while streaming were solidly in the middle.

Surfshark’s customer support options are as expected. It has the usual knowledge base, a chatbot and, if you’re persistent, actual human support agents. On the knowledge base’s landing page, the “Chat With Us” option takes you to the chatbot, which is just working off the knowledge base, making it more or less a glorified search engine. When attempting to actually submit a support request, you’re asked to click on the category that best describes your problem. Once you do that, you’re taken to a tutorial page that attempts to teach you how to troubleshoot the problem yourself. If the tutorial still doesn’t help, you can then submit a support ticket.

We actually really liked the tutorial page conceptually. It’s a fairly elegant way to help users fix whatever issue they’re having without asking them to waste five to 10 minutes talking to a bot before finally being redirected to a real person. It didn’t help us with our specific issue, but customer support was able to resolve the issue once we were able to get in touch with them. It was one of the more positive customer support experiences we’ve had while reviewing VPNs.

While Surfshark is one of the most popular VPNs on the market, the right VPN for you will depend on your specific needs and preferences. To help you make an informed decision, we’ve compared some of the key features with those of its competitors. The chart below will help give you a sense of how Surfshark stacks up in terms of price, the number of servers, support and other important features.

Surfshark vs. Private Internet Access

PIA and Surfshark are fairly close in terms of star ratings, pricing and overall quality as products. PIA’s exact server count isn’t available, but its 91 countries is close to Surfshark’s 100. On top of that, their one-year plans are within a few dollars of each other, though PIA’s yearly plan is slightly cheaper. Overall, we think these two are pretty much dead even.

Surfshark vs. Proton VPN

Proton VPN and Surfshark as products are about even. Proton VPN has a cheaper monthly plan, but Surfshark has a significantly cheaper annual plan. Ten simultaneous connections versus unlimited simultaneous connections all depends on how many devices you really need hooked up to a VPN at any given time. That said, we do give Proton VPN a slight edge over Surfshark. This mostly comes down to trustworthiness. We’re not altogether comfortable with Surfshark’s no-logs policy as written, and Proton VPN has a stronger privacy track record. We don’t think you could really go wrong with either service, however.

Surfshark vs. IVPN

Surfshark possesses a number of advantages over IVPN, having more features, such as Dedicated IP, and having more simultaneous connections. While Proton VPN’s 10 simultaneous connections were enough to make that comparison a bit of a wash, IVPN’s max of seven is comparatively low. In terms of pricing, IVPN holds the edge on monthly subscriptions, but Surfshark’s initial discount makes it more affordable on an annual subscription. That price does go up by quite a bit after the first year, whereas IVPN’s stays the same. While Surfshark does have a lot going for it, IVPN’s stronger privacy commitment makes this an overall draw in our eyes.

Surfshark VPN is an affordable, feature-rich VPN app with a lot going for it, but the performance issues we encountered during testing leave us unable to fully recommend it for either business or personal use.

Surfshark for Personal Use

Surfshark is mostly fine for individual users. If you’re just looking for a VPN to help access region-locked content or surf the web with a bit more peace of mind for your privacy, Surfshark’s a good pick. All the connection drops and initial issues connecting on Windows make us hesitant to give it the full thumbs up, but our experience won’t necessarily match your own. If you can try it at a discount or use the 30-day money-back guarantee, we believe Surfshark is worth a shot.

Surfshark for Business Use

We don’t fully recommend Surfshark for business use. The inclusion of Dedicated IP, as well as being able to connect an unlimited number of devices, make it pretty enticing, especially for small businesses looking for cost-effective solutions. However, that appetizing product isn’t worth much if it can’t actually perform when necessary, and while connection drops are annoying for individual users, they could be costly for businesses. That said, the service is cheap enough and has enough going for it that we don’t see any harm in giving the one-month plan a try and getting your money back if not satisfied.