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.
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.
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Tourguard is another best VPN software for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android. It provide unlimited speed and secure connection. It allow up to 5 connection simultaneously. In addition it support IP tunnel, SSH encryption for extra support. It offer a very genuine cost of $ 5.95 per month. Tourguard also support bitcoin as an option for payment.
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.)
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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
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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.
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.
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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.
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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.