Windscribe Review

Windscribe logs some data, which it says is necessary for maintenance purposes. This isn’t ideal, as true no-logs VPN services, like Private Internet Access, function without retaining anything. I wish Windscribe would do the same.

Crucially, none of the data Windscribe collects can be used to link you to your online activity. This was put to the test in February 2026, when Dutch authorities seized one of its servers and found no user data.

The provider also maintains a page documenting the 100+ law enforcement data requests it’s received since 2018. In every case, it had no sensitive user data to share.

This is all possible thanks to Windscribe’s diskless server network. Because its servers run entirely on RAM (volatile memory that’s wiped with every reboot), they can’t permanently store any data.

For additional privacy, you can pay with cryptocurrency if you’d rather not provide a name or address. I love this feature and think more VPNs should follow suit.

I’ve unblocked more Netflix libraries with Windscribe Pro than with any other VPN.

In my most recent tests, it unblocked 32 international Netflix libraries — including the US, UK, and Japan — which is easily the best result I’ve recorded and three times as many libraries as some of the biggest names in the industry, such as Proton VPN.

Windscribe is in a league of its own for accessing Netflix.

I can’t heap the same praise on its streaming quality, though, due to slight buffering and occasional drops in streaming quality. I suspect this happens because Windscribe has fewer VPN servers in many international locations.

The free version can’t stream US Netflix, but it remains an excellent choice for other regions. Most recently, it unblocked 5 Netflix regions, including the UK, France, and Germany.

Windscribe’s free tier works with UK Netflix.

Aside from Netflix, Windscribe is one of the best VPNs for accessing US streaming services from abroad. The Pro and free versions have worked with Hulu and HBO Max every time I’ve tested them. Unlike with international Netflix content, I didn’t experience any buffering, likely because Windscribe covers 30 US cities across 22.

Similarly, Windscribe almost always streams BBC iPlayer — a notoriously difficult platform to unblock — on any of its five UK server locations, though I suggest using the London – Custard server for the best quality due to its 10Gbps bandwidth.

Impressively, Windscribe is one of the very few free VPNs that reliably work with BBC iPlayer. Many other free VPNs I tested, like Hotspot Shield or TunnelBear, were either unreliable or didn’t work at all.

All of Windscribe’s free UK servers worked with BBC iPlayer.

Both versions of the VPN worked with every other UK streaming service I tested, including Sky Go, which has particularly strict VPN blocks.

On average, download speeds dipped by 3% when I connected to same-city Windscribe servers — among the best results of any VPN I’ve tested.

Over short distances, speeds were consistent from one test to the next, and I didn’t experience any connection drops.

But Windscribe’s international speeds are slower and less consistent. For example, I’ve measured a download speed loss of 20% connecting to South Africa and 16% connecting to Australia.

To put this in context, here are Windscribe’s international speeds compared to other top VPNs:

On the plus side, these speeds have improved a lot since Windscribe added the WireGuard protocol. Previously, using OpenVPN, my download speeds were four times slower.

Good Free-Tier Speeds but Not the Fastest

Windscribe’s speeds on free servers are impressive, but they fall short of the fastest free VPNs, like Hotspot Shield and Proton VPN. Both are over 8% faster on local connections, and Hotspot Shield is also 12% faster on average over international connections.

Both the free and paid versions of Windscribe allow you to choose between AES-256 encryption (via the OpenVPN protocol) and ChaCha20 (via WireGuard). Either method is secure and industry-backed, but I prefer WireGuard as it offers superior connection speeds.

Using Wireshark, a packet analyzer, I verified that Windscribe securely encrypts web traffic. It concealed my incoming and outgoing data packets:

Windscribe securely encrypts network traffic.

Alongside this, the VPN uses SHA-512 for authentication during the handshake. I’m pleased to see this, as it offers a higher level of data integrity than the SHA-256 standard used by many other VPNs.

Another standout feature is the “Firewall” setting, exclusive to Windscribe’s desktop apps. Unlike a standard kill switch, which only blocks your internet once it detects a VPN connection drop, the Firewall blocks all connectivity outside of the VPN tunnel.

Put simply, the Firewall makes it impossible for your real IP address to leak.

The VPN’s apps themselves include two excellent security features on desktop and mobile: open-source code and post-quantum encryption. The former lets anyone inspect the source code behind Windscribe’s apps so any vulnerabilities can be flagged and patched, whereas the latter offers stronger protection from future quantum cyberattacks.

Together, these features make Windscribe’s apps very well protected, both now and against future threats.

Unencrypted Ukrainian Servers

Although I rate Windscribe as a highly secure VPN, its security rating is hampered by a past server breach.

In June 2021, two of Windscribe’s servers were seized by the Ukrainian government. These servers were unencrypted as Windscribe incorrectly didn’t consider Ukraine a “high-sensitivity region.”

However, despite the claims of many other VPN review websites, there is no evidence that Windscribe user traffic was monitored.

For traffic monitoring to be possible, a user had to be connected to a Ukrainian server through a manual configuration file while using OpenVPN and a legacy DNS resolver. It’s very unlikely that all of these conditions were met.

Most of Windscribe Pro’s server locations are concentrated in Europe. Instead of offering joke locations, such as “Troll Antarctica,” I’d like to see servers in countries like Egypt and Pakistan.

Where Windscribe does stand out is city-level choice: it offers multiple cities in 14 countries — a total surpassed only by ExpressVPN. This allows you to select an IP address in a specific part of the country, rather than being limited to one location or assigned an IP randomly.

The provider also offers free IP addresses from far more countries than other highly rated free VPNs: 10 countries compared to rivals like Hide.me and ZoogVPN, which only cover 7 and 5 respectively.

Windscribe has two free UK servers.

Many of these locations, like the UK, are usually behind a paywall with other free VPNs. I’m also glad that Windscribe offers free servers in Hong Kong, to give non-paying users a fast choice when connecting from China.

Disappointingly, even when I contacted Windscribe directly, it refused to reveal the total number of individual VPN servers it maintains. It also wouldn’t say how many of its servers are rented, which could mean that Windscribe is entrusting your data to third parties.

The Windscribe website features an excellent page with real-time updates of server status and capacity. This is great when you’re trying to find a quick server or want to troubleshoot a slow connection, but it’d be good to see this added to the Windscribe app as well.

Windscribe’s apps use a consistent design across desktop and mobile, but the interface is starting to look dated. They’re functional, but unpolished.

Given its price and excellent performance in other areas, I wish Windscribe were more enjoyable to use day to day.

The app’s attempt at humor through notifications — like references to “Rebecca Black’s Friday” or “Unhinged Updates from Jordan Peterson” — is unfunny and feels extremely out of place for a paid product.

The more I used Windscribe’s free app, the more I got frustrated by its 10GB data cap. Having to keep disconnecting to save data detracts from the seamless experience many competitors provide.

Even with the paid version, the app feels more like a networking tool than an app you want to engage with.

Paywalled locations clutter the server list on iOS.

Ultimately, Windscribe’s apps get the job done, but unless you need a feature only it offers, there are more enjoyable VPNs to use every day.

You can trust Windscribe to hide your torrenting activity from your ISP. It doesn’t collect any personally identifiable logs and it encrypts network traffic using ChaCha20. There’s no way for a third party to see the torrent files you’re downloading.

You can only use the paid version of Windscribe for torrenting.

While Windscribe is undoubtedly secure, I’m disappointed to see it reinstate its older policy of blocking torrenting traffic in certain locations. This includes the following 11 countries:

• Albania
• Bosnia
• Cyprus
• India
• Indonesia
• Lithuania
• Philippines
• Russia
• South Africa
• South Korea
• Thailand

The situation is far worse for the free version, since it no longer supports torrenting on any of its servers.

Although Windscribe Pro supports port forwarding, I found that its torrenting speeds are slower than those of other top VPNs.

It’s also complicated to set up port forwarding using Windscribe. You have to configure it on Windscribe’s website, which took me more than 10 minutes from start to finish. With other VPNs, like Proton VPN, it took just a few seconds by checking a box in the app.

Here’s how long it took to download a 20GB torrent file with the paid version of Windscribe compared to other VPNs:

Windscribe’s apps share a similar layout across platforms, but not every feature is available on each one.

Here’s a summary of the key differences between Windscribe applications:

Windscribe does offer a separate DNS service called Control D. Though it’s discounted for Windscribe subscribers, it still requires its own subscription.

I’d like to see it included for free. This would vastly increase the number of devices that Windscribe could work with.

Alternatively, you can use Windscribe’s Secure Hotspot feature if you have a Windows computer. This allows you to create a virtual router within the app to share your VPN connection with other devices.

Many VPNs for China and Russia counter web censorship with obfuscation technologies that make VPN traffic harder for censors to identify.

Windscribe offers two ways to do this. Its Stealth protocol wraps OpenVPN traffic in an extra TLS tunnel so it looks like regular web traffic, and in March 2026 it built AmneziaWG, a censorship-resistant fork of WireGuard, directly into its apps.

To use AmneziaWG, toggle on Circumvent Censorship in the app’s connection settings, choose an AmneziaWG profile, and set your protocol to WireGuard. If that doesn’t connect, switch to the Stealth protocol instead.

It takes seconds to activate the anti-censorship mode.

I’ve seen it work firsthand in China, using a test server in Shanghai. Windscribe bypassed the Great Firewall 82% of the time over the past year. Many top VPNs, including NordVPN and ExpressVPN, can’t match that success rate.

Windscribe’s free tier also worked in China when connected to the Hong Kong – Victoria server.

With Windscribe, you can get a static IP address from 13 different locations. A static IP gives you the same IP address every time you connect. This comes with a few benefits like reducing the chance of websites blacklisting your IP.

Windscribe is one of only a few VPNs that offer a residential IP address. Although this costs an extra $96.00 per year, the US residential IP I purchased has always worked for streaming over years of testing.

ROBERT is Windscribe’s DNS-level ad and malware blocker, built into its apps.

ROBERT performed exceptionally well in my tests, blocking 80% of ads and 100% of analytics trackers. Using it, I blocked ads on many popular websites.

The only VPNs that blocked more ads were IVPN and TunnelBear, but these are inferior VPNs overall.

ROBERT is great, but I’d like to see it in the free app too. As it stands, you have to download a separate browser extension, which makes it less user-friendly and incompatible with mobile devices.

Available on desktop and Android, Windscribe’s split tunneling feature lets you customize which apps and IP addresses enter the VPN tunnel.

To reduce ping, I used split tunneling to bypass the VPN for Steam.

It’s simple to set up: turn it on in the app settings and choose whether to include or exclude the apps you select. I suggest using the “Exclusive” mode, as it keeps everything protected except the apps you choose to exclude.

The VPN includes a GPS spoofing feature to bypass geo-blocks that detect your location based on your device’s GPS. This worked well for streaming out-of-market NFL games and bypassing NBA blackouts, but is only available on the Android app and desktop browser extensions.

You need to activate developer mode to use the GPS tool on Android.

Apart from Surfshark, Windscribe is the only VPN to support this useful workaround.