Testing VPN speeds from our homes wouldn't yield data comparable to previous years and would introduce all sorts of messy variables. Our homes don't have the super-high-bandwidth internet connection we enjoyed in the PCMag Labs. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has meant that the entire staff of PCMag has been working from home since March 2020, and most continue to do so. (Editors’ Note: IPVanish and StrongVPN are owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company.)īefore COVID-19, we at PCMag ran back-to-back speed tests on all the VPN products we planned to review over the course of a week or two. We've arranged our list of VPNs by their download speeds, in order from fastest to slowest. Here are the services that perform best in our speed testing, followed by details of our test procedures (see how we test VPNs for even more detail) and the actual performance measurements we observed with each service. Rest assured, some VPNs affect performance less than others. But a VPN's drag on performance can so badly hamstring your online activities that you might make the ultimate trade-off and simply turn it off, sacrificing security for ease of use. VPNs create an encrypted tunnel for your web traffic, making it much harder to snoop on your network. This is especially true for VPNs, as using one almost invariably slows your uploads and downloads and increases the latency of your internet connection. Security tools often force users to make trade-offs between convenience and security. Since 1982, PCMag has tested and rated thousands of products to help you make better buying decisions. How to Set Up Two-Factor Authentication.How to Record the Screen on Your Windows PC or Mac.

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