The Best VPNs for Australia

ExpressVPN gives you IP addresses from 113 countries and five cities in Australia: Adelaide, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth, and Sydney.

These are exactly the same cities NordVPN covers, but ExpressVPN lets you pick between different Sydney locations by hand, including one in the Woolloomooloo district.

It’s a small thing, though it gave me a second option to fall back on whenever a Sydney IP got flagged by a streaming platform.

What really caught my attention was connection time. Compared with every other service in this round of testing, ExpressVPN’s apps connected faster, and the gap was most obvious on my phone.

In just under three seconds it swapped my IP address for an anonymous Australian one, and my distance from the server made no difference to how long I waited.

On the security side, the entire network runs in RAM, so nothing is ever written permanently to disk.

This is especially important in Australia. Its two-year retention rules force ISPs to log activity data, but a diskless provider has nothing meaningful to surrender if it’s ever compelled to cooperate.

ExpressVPN’s ShuffleIP technology, which runs in the background, adds further protections by regularly rotating IP addresses without modifying your online location.

ExpressVPN has never let me down on streaming, and that reliability holds up in Australia just as well as it does everywhere else.

I tested it against every major Australian platform and the results speak for themselves:

Table showing ExpressVPN’s access to Australian streaming services.

Streaming Service	Unblocked?
7plus	Yes
9Now	Yes
ABC iView	Yes
Binge	Yes
Kayo Sports	Yes
Netflix Australia	Yes
SBS On Demand	Yes
Stan	Yes

ExpressVPN bypassed every Australian geo-block I put in front of it, and each stream held maximum picture quality with no buffering.

The great news is that the VPN has unblocked Kayo Sports consistently for months on end, putting its old problems with the platform firmly behind it.

It was the same story watching the NRL, the Australian Open, international cricket, and many other sports from abroad.

That reliability runs in the other direction too. If you’re based in Australia and want international content, ExpressVPN is just as strong.

I connected out from Sydney to its US, UK, and Canadian VPN servers and unblocked US Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Sky Go, Disney+, and HBO Max without a single hiccup.

ExpressVPN is also an excellent VPN for India, particularly for watching the IPL for free on JioHotstar.

All of which makes ExpressVPN a true two-way VPN for Australia: it gets you into Australian platforms from overseas, and it opens up international content from your living room in Melbourne.

Long-distance speeds to and from Australia have always been the hardest thing for a VPN to get right. ExpressVPN is one of the few that manages it.

All of the VPN’s Australian locations recorded just 17% loss connecting from abroad, the US and UK included.

Going the other way, connecting out of Australia, the slowdown improved to 15% across servers in Canada, South Africa, the UK, and the US.

Those numbers are impressive in isolation, but they’re even more impressive when you consider some of those connections covered more than 10,000 miles.

NordVPN is still marginally quicker on paper, but across weeks of everyday use I honestly couldn’t feel the difference.

Getting an Australian IP address with ExpressVPN is about as simple as it gets, thanks to apps that put the connect button where you expect it and keep everything else out of the way.

It’s also the most widely compatible service I’ve reviewed, with VPN apps for macOS, Windows, iOS, and Android.

There are also dedicated apps for Apple TV, Fire TV Stick, and Android TV, so you can stream movies, shows, and sports on your TV.

The apps follow a very similar design and user experience across all platforms. This is ideal for switching seamlessly from one to the other.

ExpressVPN’s browser extensions are also unique. They’re actively linked to the desktop software and therefore fully encrypt your browser activity, which no other VPN extension does at the moment.

ExpressVPN’s cheapest plan works out at $2.99/mo over 28 months.

That undercuts NordVPN, which comes in at $3.49/mo over 27 months, but it doesn’t match Surfshark’s $2.49/mo over 27 months.

In my opinion, ExpressVPN’s premium over Surfshark is justified by its performance.

You can also try ExpressVPN for free with its 3-day mobile free trial, then sign in with those same account details on every other app.

Three days is the shortest trial of my three paid picks, and it’s the only one that requires the mobile app store workaround. That said, having a trial at all still puts ExpressVPN ahead of most of the market.

Stack the 30-day money-back guarantee on top and you can test the service properly for up to 33 days at no cost.

NordVPN runs one of the largest Australian server networks, with 190 servers across the same 5 Australian cities ExpressVPN covers.

Its Australian fleet is smaller than ExpressVPN’s, but it makes up ground globally with IPs from 137 countries against ExpressVPN’s 113.

Connecting to each location took a handful of seconds every time I tried, with no sudden slowdowns, failed handshakes, or the endless CAPTCHAs that plague cheaper services.

If you want a VPN IP address that never changes, NordVPN offers dedicated VPN IPs from more locations than any other service, Sydney and Melbourne included. ExpressVPN’s token-based IPs are more private by design, but they cover fewer cities.

NordVPN’s servers are diskless too, and it adds one thing its main rival doesn’t: Double VPN.

Double VPN routes your traffic through two countries for an extra layer of separation. Australia isn’t currently available as an entry or exit node, though.

NordVPN’s unblocking record in Australia and worldwide is almost as strong as ExpressVPN’s.

Here’s how it performed against Australian platforms:

Table showing NordVPN’s access to Australian streaming services.

Streaming Service	Unblocked?
7plus	Yes
9Now	Yes
ABC iView	Yes
Binge	Yes
Kayo Sports	Yes
Netflix Australia	Yes
SBS On Demand	Yes
Stan	Yes

After years of testing, NordVPN still accesses every Australian streaming platform, from every Australian server, on every attempt.

Streaming out of Australia is where the gap opens up slightly. NordVPN covers fewer international platforms than ExpressVPN: 102 versus 115.

To be fair to it, that’s a harsh way to frame a service that remains a superb choice, particularly for British TV.

One thing I’m certain of: when it comes to watching BBC iPlayer from any country, no VPN does it better.

It’s also a reliable VPN for Netflix, Hulu, Peacock, and Prime Video.

NordVPN’s Australian servers performed as well as its other endpoints around the world.

Connecting into Australia from New York, Los Angeles, and London, average speeds dipped by only 16%, a fraction better than ExpressVPN’s 17%.

Connecting outward told the same story, with international speeds dipping by 14% against my baseline and again narrowly beating ExpressVPN.

The margin between the two is small enough that it won’t change your streaming experience, but it’s the reason NordVPN earns the “fastest” label.

NordVPN has apps for macOS, Windows, iOS, Android, Fire TV Stick, Apple TV, and Android TV, and you can run it on 10 devices at once.

It isn’t a hard app to use by any measure, but I enjoyed using ExpressVPN more, and the reason comes down to a couple of things.

On desktop, the user interface still feels a touch bloated, with Threat Protection Pro and Dark Web Monitor sitting below a visual map and server location controls. These could live elsewhere in the app.

The Pause function compounds my slight grievances, adding an extra step to disconnecting and making you scroll past several timing options just to reach the off switch.

Set against its strong performance results, NordVPN is good value at $3.49/mo over 27 months.

It’s still the most expensive of my three paid picks, though, and the renewal price climbs steeply once the initial term ends.

NordVPN’s free trial now runs to a generous seven days, which should give you enough time to fully test the product. It’s available through the website, so there are no workarounds needed, unlike ExpressVPN.

Proton VPN’s free tier runs on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Apple TV, and Fire TV.

The apps are simple to use and don’t require any payment details on registration. They all use AES-256 or ChaCha20 encryption with OpenVPN and WireGuard protocols, and include a kill switch that passed all my leak tests.

On Android and iOS, there’s also an Always-on VPN setting that keeps the connection alive in the background, which is rare in a free service.

Proton VPN doesn’t monitor or collect any activity data that can identify you. Being based in Switzerland helps too, since the country’s privacy laws sit outside the EU’s reach.

All that unlimited data comes with a big caveat: you can’t use it to get past streaming geo-restrictions.

The free tier only connects you to the nearest free location, so you won’t be able to unblock specific content you want to access.

Even when I did land somewhere useful, the free servers aren’t equipped to beat streaming blocks. They failed against Disney+, HBO Max, and Prime Video in my tests.

Those servers also actively block P2P connections, so torrenting is off limits, too.

The other major limitation is that Proton VPN runs no free servers in Australia.

In practice that means no Australian IP address, and no access to Australian content platforms from overseas. If that’s what you came here for, one of my paid picks is the only route.

The app connects you automatically to the fastest of 10 countries: Canada, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Mexico, Poland, Romania, Singapore, Switzerland, and the United States.

From inside Australia, that usually means a VPN server in Japan, Singapore, or the United States.

Windscribe’s free servers span 10 countries: Canada, France, Germany, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Norway, Romania, Switzerland, the UK, and the US.

It’s one of the broadest free server networks available, and it opened up the doors to BBC iPlayer, HBO Max, Hulu, DAZN, Sky Go, and even 5 international Netflix libraries (the US library is no longer among them, sadly).

The Android app also includes a free built-in GPS spoofer, which changes the location data your phone or tablet reports. Finding it in a free tier is unusual.

There are free Chrome and Firefox extensions too, and they worked just as well for region-locked content in the browser.

Every Windscribe app uses AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption, with a choice of OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2.

Its Firewall kill switch stopped my real IP and DNS data escaping every time I forced a connection drop.

Combine that with a privacy policy that collects very little, and I’m confident Windscribe is safe to use in Australia.

Windscribe’s biggest limitation is the 10GB monthly bandwidth cap. At HD quality, I burned through it in roughly four hours of video.

That allowance works if you use a VPN in short bursts. If you want it running permanently, switch to Proton VPN or upgrade to one of my top-rated VPNs.

Windscribe has also dropped P2P support on its free servers, which I’m disappointed to see. For torrenting with a VPN in Australia, a paid VPN is now the only realistic option.