![]() ![]() VPN pricing has gotten increasingly complicated in the past few years, and NordVPN is no exception. Apps available on: Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Android TV, Fire TV.Available payment options: Credit/Debit Card, AmazonPay, Google Pay, ACH Transfer, Cryptocurrency, Cash (via retail store).Price: $79 for the first two years or $60 for the first year (then $100 per year afterwards) or $12 a month.Cost: Decent introductory prices spike after initial term We recommend OpenVPN anyway because it's the current standard-bearer of VPN protocols, and it offers an excellent balance of speed and security, so seeing higher speeds on the OpenVPN protocol was a convenient surprise. But when connecting through the NordLynx protocol, speeds were approximately 50 Mbps less across the board than what we got through OpenVPN. We also tested speeds through NordLynx - NordVPN's proprietary WireGuard-based protocol - which the company says is the fastest protocol it offers, to see how those speeds stacked up against speeds we achieved through OpenVPN. Having more servers in more locations can ensure users have servers close to their physical locations and can help ensure lighter load on the servers - both of which can help improve overall speeds. While it's not the smallest network, it falls short of other top players in the space like ExpressVPN (94 countries) and Surfshark (95 countries). ![]() ![]() It would be nice to see NordVPN expand its relatively meager network of 59 server locations. We didn't experience any erratic speed fluctuations you might experience with other providers. Overall, we found NordVPN's speed performance to be remarkably consistent throughout our testing. Our speeds through NordVPN's servers in Australia and Singapore - as expected - averaged the slowest at 260.81 Mbps and 305.34 Mbps, respectively. Unlike with some other VPNs, like IPVanish, NordVPN doesn't provide a real-time view of the current load on each server, so there's no way to manually connect to the server with the lightest load if you want to try to improve your VPN speeds. However, New York is a location that consistently sees heavy VPN traffic, so server load may have had a bit of a hand in the slightly slower speeds there. When connecting to New York - the closest server we tested to our physical location - NordVPN averaged 343.12 Mbps, which was somewhat surprising considering we achieved faster average results when connecting to servers much farther away in the UK (351.41 Mbps) and Europe (345.70 Mbps). Our average internet speed without the VPN clocked in at 368.07 Mbps and averaged 321.28 Mbps across our tests when connected to NordVPN servers. We tested NordVPN's speeds while connected to the VPN's servers via OpenVPN in New York, the UK, Australia, France, Germany and Singapore. That makes it one of the fastest VPNs we've tested so far, and puts it into second place behind ExpressVPN, which registered a miniscule 2% speed loss in April. However, NordVPN only slowed our regular internet speeds down by 13% in our latest round of tests. During those tests, NordVPN registered an average 53% loss in speeds - which is on par with what VPN users can generally expect to lose through a VPN connection. We conducted our latest round of NordVPN speed tests over the course of three days in July and August and were thoroughly impressed with how the VPN provider's speeds improved over previous tests conducted in 2020.
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