APRIL 2020 PCWorld 81NordVPN
PROS- Excellent speeds.
- Enough features to appeal to power users and
novices. - No logs policy.
CONS - Expensive.
- Still not transparent enough about management.
BOTTOM LINE
NordVPN offers a lot with its service. There are
specialized servers for multi-hop connections, P2P
file sharing, and dedicated IP addresses at an extra
cost. It also offers a ton of country connections, and
the ability to drill down to a specific server if you
want. It also works with Netflix (though not
consistently) and has malware and ad blocking,
NordVPN is expensive, but you get a lot of options
with this service.
$84
The company also recently published a
blog post (go.pcworld.com/ndbl) detailing
how it plans to prevent vulnerabilities like the
one that occurred in 2018 (it was only
reported in 2019). The new plan includes
penetration testing, a bug bounty program,
the new infrastructure audit, vendor
assessments, and the aforementioned
diskless servers.
That’s a lot of effort to get users to trust
NordVPN, but we’ll feel a lot better once the
founders and management go public.
Anonymity for the people running a company
that is supposed to be all about trust just
doesn’t sit well with us. Especially when the
service has a poorly understood parent
company based on the other side of the
globe from NordVPN headquarters.
PERFORMANCE
Wow, is all we have to say about NordVPN’s
speeds. In our tests over multiple days,
NordVPN was able to maintain 60.40
percent of the base non-VPN speed. That’s
still a little bit shy of our current speed
champ, HotSpot Shield (go.pcworld.com/
hshl). Nevertheless, NordVPN is fast enough
that you can use its connections to do pretty
much anything reliably.
BOTTOM LINE
So what do we do with a problem like
NordVPN? It’s a fantastic service that keeps
getting better. The price is on the high side,
but you get a lot more for that money than
with other services. Still, we can’t bring
ourselves to trust it as much as we do Mullvad
(go.pcworld.com/mull) or OVPN given the
secrecy behind it. Once this situation changes
we will re-evaluate.
Nevertheless, NordVPN’s excellent
service can’t be ignored. For that reason,
we’re creating a new category and calling
NordVPN “the best full-featured VPN.” If you
want something that appeals to power users,
has multi-hop, solid speeds, and hopefully
works with Netflix, then NordVPN is a solid
choice. If, however, you want to remain as
anonymous as realistically possible with a
VPN, we suggest you look elsewhere for the
time being.