With the internet abuzz with privacy concerns and the potential changes coming to net neutrality, you’ve likely heard about virtual private networks, better known as VPNs. When used correctly, a VPN can greatly strengthen your online privacy, assist in keeping your personal information secure, and even spoof your location in the world—allowing you to access websites or services that would otherwise be off limits due to region-locking.
With the increased popularity of VPNs has come an increased number of VPN providers vying for your business. That makes finding the best one to suit your needs difficult. To help you sort out the right provider for you, we’ve committed to extensive research and testing of VPN services that cater to Mac owners.
VPN Gate is a fascinating experiment, and for those just looking to do some secure browsing without a ton of extra features, it’s a great fit. The Qualifications for Best VPN Service. Picking the best VPN for Mac OS X comes down to three things: Reliability: A VPN is no good if you can’t connect to it. The biggest issue with free VPN providers is they usually provide fewer servers or slower access speed. Best 5 LogLess VPN For MAC OS X October 28, 2016 October 28, 2016 techwibe A VPN is an abbreviated form of showing a virtual private network, which at first may seem quite a tedious thing to learn and understand but it is really quite an easy type of software to get and understand. Apple users can download the latest Mac OS X High Sierra for free. We upgraded shortly after Apple released the latest Mac OS X. It took about an hour and a half to download and install the new operating system on a MacBook. VPN.ac is another great Mac VPN and is a close second for the title best VPN for Mac OS. VPN.ac is run by a small team of network security professionals (Netsec Interactive Solutions), with a focus on security and overall quality.
If nothing but the best will do, check out our routinely updated list of category leaders.
The best VPN services for Mac 2019
NordVPN: Best overall [nordvpn.com]
Mullvad: Best for security/privacy [mullvad.net]
CyberGhost: Fastest VPN [cyberghost.com]
If you prefer to do your own shopping, we’ve got your back there, too: Each of the VPNs we test is thoroughly reviewed, allowing you to make an informed decision on which one to throw your money at. See complete summaries of our picks, and our full list of reviews below.
Update 8/28/19 to include our review of Mullvad, which excels in terms of privacy and anonymity, and earns our pick as the best VPN for privacy/security. Scroll to the bottom of this article for links to all of our VPN reviews.
Best VPN overall for Mac
NordVPN is a compelling option for VPN service due to a well-rounded set of features and mostly competitive pricing.
NordVPN is the best all-around VPN service for most Mac users. While it isn’t the fastest VPN service that we’ve tested, it’s not particularly slow, either. (Read our full review of NordVPN.)
NordVPN offers above-average data encryption to keep their subscribers’ data safe while tunneling. It’s got a large network of servers, too: over 3,000 servers spread across more than 60 countries, allowing you to spoof a wide number of locations and avoid server congestion.
Moreover, its software interface is easy to use, making even new VPN users feel like online-privacy experts. While it’s not perfect, NordVPN gets more right than any of the other VPN providers we’ve tested so far.
Best VPN for security/privacy on a Mac
Sweden-based Mullvad is an excellent choice for anyone whose top priorities from a VPN are privacy and anonymity. Mullvad makes it a point to not learn anything about you, with no email or password requirement. While it doesn't offer any special features, this no-nonsense VPN is a solid choice.
Mullvad is the ultimate choice for users who want to remain as anonymous as possible online. Mullvad runs its own VPN network and wants to know as little about you as possible. Users don’t supply a name and email address to create an account, and you can even pay in cash if you like. The service’s privacy policy is also top notch. You won’t find any special features such as a promise to work with Netflix. Regardless, anyone who cares about privacy and anonymity should seriously consider Mullvad. (Read our full review of Mullvad.)
Fastest VPN overall for Mac
CyberGhost's connection speeds make it a great VPN option for most people, but users who deal in sensitive information may wish to look elsewhere for greater privacy from government actors.
The latest version of Romania-based CyberGhost maintains its edge in overall average connection speeds, making it superior to any other VPN we’ve tested so far. If you’re interested in connecting to VPN servers located within the continental United States, CyberGhost is the one to beat. (Read our full review of CyberGhost.)
Fastest VPN for other countries
If you are interested in connecting to servers in other countries, we’ve found the following to be fast options:
UK: TorGuard welcomes P2P file sharing on its VPN servers with open arms and offers the best connection speeds to servers in the United Kingdom that we’ve seen so far.
Europe: While TunnelBear gave us pause in the areas of user privacy and its ambiguous server numbers, the Canadian VPN provider takes first place when it comes to European connection speeds.
Asia: While we weren’t thrilled with its logging policies and the fact that it only allows P2P file sharing on a single server, Israel’s SaferVPN gets top marks when it comes to connecting to servers in Asia.
Oceania: If you want to connect with VPN servers down under, CyberGhost is the way to go.
How we tested VPNs
What are the best speakers for a mac. For each VPN service we review, we conduct tests at three different times of the day: morning, afternoon, and evening, using Ookla Speedtest. We start by measuring the speed of our unprotected internet connection before testing the upload/download speeds of the VPN service. These tests are conducted to servers located in North America, the UK, Europe, Oceana, and Asia over an ethernet connection with a service provision of 100Mbps.
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To test upload and download speeds, I closed down all background internet processes on my Mac, using TripMode. The only traffic on my system able to upload or download any data was Ookla. I used this setup to ensure that the numbers that Ookla produced were not stymied by anything else that my computer may have been doing at the time. The speeds Ookla captured were then averaged, providing us with a final numeric score.
I then used those scores to calculate a percentage of difference in speeds, which is what you’ll see in our reviews. Since internet speeds change constantly based on server load, how fast your connection is, and a gazillion other factors, we feel this provides a better picture of what you can expect from a service, on the whole, than merely quoting the exact upload/download speeds we encountered during testing.
Speed isn’t the only quantifiable metric that we look at. The number of countries that a VPN offers servers in, total number of servers worldwide, and how much it’ll cost you to connect to those servers on a monthly or annual basis are also taken into consideration when recommending a VPN service to you.
Additionally, we conduct hours of research into the VPN providers to find out who owns them, where they’re based, what they do with subscriber information, and whether the provider has a track record of questionable business practices.
If you access your computer remotely, then services like Apple's 'Back to my Mac' have their conveniences; however, this and similar services are useful for individual machines only. On the other hand, if you have more than one device on your home network that you might wish to directly access, then using a virtual private network is beneficial as it places your system on your home's network so you can communicate with devices as if you were at home.
Often the implementation of this is to use a hardware-based VPN (likely built into your home router) to configure the remote connectivity to the network, or use a server software package like Apple's OS X Server to set up a VPN service. However, starting with 10.5 Leopard, the client version of OS X also contains a VPN server that can be activated and configured to manage remote connections to your network.
The VPN service in OS X is the 'vpnd' daemon, that can be configured using the OS X Terminal and access to various hidden files in the system; however, there is a third-party utility called VPN Server Configurator that will allow you to set up the VPN service on OS X 10.5 or later.
Best Vpn Service For Mac
While this and many more server features can be implemented in current Mac systems by purchasing the OS X Server package from the Mac App Store for $20, currently only the Mountain Lion server is available so if you have an older version of OS X (for example, on an older Mac that you would like to use as a VPN server) then you might find it difficult to purchase and install the OS X Server software.
The VPN Server Configurator contains a number of options for setting the VPN ports, IP address ranges, what users accounts on the current system are authorized to access the VPN service, and many other details. It also has a quick auto-config button that will analyze your LAN settings and give you a starting VPN configuration to work with.
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VPN Server Configuration is a $9 purchase, so for OS X 10.8 users it may be worth some conveniences over Apple's $20 OS X Server package, but will likely be very beneficial to those wishing to set up older Mac as local VPN servers.
Best Vpn Service For Torrents
Best Vpn Service For Mac
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