Best Free Trial VPNs

Most VPN providers that offer a free trial will allow you unlimited use of the service, however there are a few on the current market that restrict you to a limited amount of bandwidth. If you’re only planning to do a few quick tests this shouldn’t be too much of an issue, however if you wanted to try out streaming quality on several different servers you might run into some problems. For reference, 1GB is only enough to watch a 30 minute show on Netflix.

Make sure the free trial allows you to connect to servers in your preferred locations. In most cases, the servers on offer aren’t in the most popular countries, such as the US or the UK, which can limit your ability to access restricted content.

Do you watch Netflix or BBC iPlayer? Most free VPN services do not work with these apps. We continuously test whether each VPN is working with Netflix and other apps and share the results in our VPN reviews.

Almost every VPN will tell you it’s a “zero logs” VPN and doesn’t track your internet activity. In reality, delivering consistently high performance across a global server network isn’t possible unless you’re collecting at least basic connection metadata from your users. You could read through a load of privacy policies to find out exactly what’s collected or let us do that for you and just check the logging policy section of our review that explains this in plain English. Ideally you want a VPN that doesn’t collect any logs, but failing this, one that limits timestamp logging to just the date of your connection would be the next best thing.

Almost all VPN software will work on Windows, Mac and Linux machines, along with iOS and Android mobile devices. However, some VPN services are also compatible with other internet-connected items, such as routers, games consoles and streaming devices, such as the Amazon Fire Stick.

The sheer amount of VPN jargon can be overwhelming, even if you are pretty tech-savvy. Do look out for OpenVPN though, as this connection protocol offers the best overall blend of speed and security. Ignore talk of military or bank-grade encryption and just look for AES-256, as that’s the gold standard. Unless you know your DNS from your IPv6, a VPN killswitch is the main thing to look out for among security features as it will protect you from exposing your real IP address should your connection drop unexpectedly.

Lots of free trials will lower the amount of possible simultaneous connections, with some only allowing you to use the VPN on one device at any given time. If you’re planning to use the free trial for longer than a day or so and want to protect your family’s devices as well as your own, we’d recommend looking for a provider that offers multiple simultaneous connections.

No-one likes a clunky, confusing app. Look for a VPN with software that’s well-designed, simple and powerful and you will be much more likely to use it all the time. We share the results of our hands-on testing of each VPN app in the the Ease of Use part of its review. We spend all day testing VPN apps, so hopefully we know a thing or two!