Best Free VPN for Torrenting

You absolutely need a VPN for torrenting. Torrenting without a secure VPN service leaves you exposed to all sorts of privacy risks. The most effective torrenting VPNs are paid, but there are some good free options, too.

If you don’t use a VPN while torrenting, your IP address, along with everyone else’s in the torrent “swarm”, is exposed. This means that your ISP, as well as any other potential snoopers or hackers, can see exactly who you are and what you’re downloading.

Some ISPs have will even detect users taking part in high-bandwidth activities (such as throttling) and intentionally reduce their connection speeds to even out bandwidth usage across the rest of the network. This could bring your torrenting to a halt.

The only way to prevent this from happening is to install a trusted free VPN – our recommendations above are a good place to start. Alternatively you can check out our overall best free VPN recommendations.

Generally, though, you will get a better torrenting experience with a paid VPN that guarantees your privacy, has no data cap and is well optimized for P2P traffic.

How a Free VPN Protects Your Privacy While Torrenting

A trusted free VPN protects your privacy while you torrent in three different ways:

1. Hides your torrenting activity from your ISP

   Using a VPN means that your ISP is unable to see what you’re doing online, whether that be torrenting or anything else.

   This will prevent them from monitoring or throttling your internet traffic, meaning your speeds won’t suffer as a result of what you’ve chosen to do online.

2. Prevents other torrenters from seeing your IP address

   If you use a site like BitTorrent, everyone using the same torrent file is connected in a ‘swarm’, meaning each user can see the IP addresses of all the other devices that are also connected.

   Your IP address can be used to determine your ISP and approximate physical location, which is often how torrenters end up receiving copyright violation letters from online trolls.

   Using a VPN will mask your IP address so that the other users in the swarm can only see the IP address of the P2P server. If your VPN uses shared IP addresses, as most do, it would be virtually impossible to trace torrenting activity back to a single user.

3. Protects you from any potential hackers

   The fact that a VPN hides your true IP address will also protect you from any hackers that could otherwise use it as a backdoor into your system to find out your confidential personal information.

   Because all of your traffic is routed through the VPN’s servers, rather than those owned by your ISP, all of your data is encrypted to a high standard and impossible for anyone else to view.

Using a free VPN to torrent privately is incredibly easy – just follow the simple steps below:

1. Choose a free VPN service that allows torrenting

   Simply choose the VPN service you’re going to use, install it onto the device that you’re going to torrent on and enter your login information.
   

2. Check the privacy settings and kill switch

   Before you connect, check that the VPN kill switch and any leak protection is enabled on your VPN. This will keep your personal information out of the wrong hands should the VPN connection fail for any reason.

3. Choose a VPN server location

   Now connect to the closest VPN server to your physical location for the best speeds, and begin torrenting securely. Keep an eye on the data cap, if applicable, to ensure you don’t run out unexpectedly.

Not all free VPN services are safe for torrenting. Here’s our top three free VPNs to avoid, although this is by no means an exhaustive list.

1. Hola Free VPN

   Hola Free VPN claims to be a ‘VPN service,’ but it is in fact an insecure peer-to-peer proxy network that doesn’t provide any encryption whatsoever.

   Hola is no good for torrenting as it monitors absolutely everything you do online, including all the websites you visit, and has even been known to sell user bandwidth without consent.

   Sadly, it’s one of the most popular free VPN services out there, but we’d advise you to avoid Hola at all costs.

2. VPN Proxy Master

   VPN Proxy Master is an incredibly unsafe free VPN for torrenting as the company has a sketchy history of sending confidential user information across to China.

   Not only this, but your IP address is collected and stored for an indefinite amount of time, plus there’s no way of telling how VPN Proxy Master is encrypted.

   The apps are full of pop-up ads, too – VPN Proxy Master is definitely a free VPN to stay away from.

3. Thunder VPN

   No question about it, Thunder VPN is one of the worst free VPN services you could possible use for torrenting.

   Not to mention it’s only available on Android, Thunder VPN uses an insecure connection protocol, lacks any security features whatsoever, and ignored our questions about encryption.

   ThunderVPN also claims to be no-logs but actually collects a ton of information, such as your IP address, ISP, server location, and loads more.

What’s the Best Free VPN for Torrenting?

Currently, the best free VPN for torrenting is Windscribe. It provides the best all-round P2P experience without many major compromises. It’s fast, secure, and will hide your torrent IP address.

The main downside of Windscribe is that it has a 10GB monthly data cap. This is the most generous allowance we’ve seen from a free VPN that allows torrenting, though. You won’t get more than that from a safe free VPN.

If you don’t need to torrent large files, but need a diverse server network, then a good alternative is TunnelBear VPN. It has in fact P2P-enabled servers in 23 countries.

However, TunnelBear limits data transfers to 500MB per month, which isn’t much at all, let alone for torrenting.

On the whole, it’s definitely worth paying for a top torrent VPN to experience fast and unrestricted torrenting. The best paid VPNs for torrenting have a wider range of P2P-friendly servers with no data usage restrictions whatsoever.

As of January 2021, our current top five paid VPNs for torrenting are:

1. ExpressVPN
2. PrivateVPN
3. NordVPN
4. IPVanish
5. AirVPN

Are Free VPNs Safe for Torrenting?

You’re using a VPN to keep you safe and private online, and that’s no different when you’re torrenting. Using a secure VPN is perhaps the most effective way to protect yourself while torrenting: it masks your true IP address and it encrypts all your web traffic.

To keep yourself as safe as possible while torrenting, make sure to choose a free VPN with:

1. Strong encryption cipher (preferably AES-256)
2. Secure VPN connection protocol (OpenVPN is our favorite)
3. No-logs (or minimal) logging policy
4. VPN kill switch

You also need to make sure your free VPN allows P2P traffic, as several popular free VPNs will block this kind of traffic.

Are Free VPNs Legal?

Using a free VPN service to protect your privacy is 100% legal in almost every country around the world. There is a small number, however, where unauthorized VPN use is restricted or banned. These are:

• China
• Russia
• Turkey
• Iran
• Oman
• UAE (United Arab Emirates)

Using an unauthorized VPN service in any of these countries could result in a heavy fine, or in some cases, even a prison sentence.

There’s also a handful of countries where all VPN services are completely banned:

• Belarus
• Iraq
• Turkmenistan
• North Korea

Being caught using a VPN service in any of these locations could lead to an unspecified fine and land you in some serious trouble.

Take a look at our guide Are VPNs Legal? for more information on countries with VPN restrictions and advice on using a VPN service safely.

You can also check out our best VPNs for China (and other high-censorship countries) here.

Is Torrenting Illegal?

Torrenting itself is completely legal, but it’s copyright restrictions that you have to be careful with. The act of torrenting, however, is in itself legal. In fact, you can torrent legally in countries like the US, UK, Australia, Canada and India.

But, if you download content that is in breach of any copyright rules, you are breaking the law, regardless of how you do it. For example, downloading or sharing copyrighted content is illegal in Australia, Canada, the US, and the UK.

If you’re concerned about the legality of torrenting certain files, familiarize yourself with the copyright laws in your country.