NordVPN vs ExpressVPN

Real-life legal cases have stress-tested the privacy policies of both VPNs.

While ExpressVPN handed over nothing to Turkish authorities, NordVPN complied with a warrant in Panama, providing payment-related data and verifying a user’s email address.

Though this is not enough to link your online activity back to you, we’d prefer if NordVPN shared nothing at all. As such, we trust the claims in ExpressVPN’s privacy policy a lot more than NordVPN’s.

ExpressVPN retains slightly more information than NordVPN to maintain and improve its service. It logs the date of connection, server location, and the total amount of data transmitted during the network session.

Ultimately, none of this can be used to compromise your anonymity, as your usage pattern is one of thousands of the ExpressVPN customers that connected that day.

Here’s a table showing what information NordVPN and ExpressVPN log:

Even if either VPN service did log your data, their respective diskless servers makes extraction impossible.

Diskless servers are based on RAM: volatile memory that wipes your activity data following a server reboot.

Many of NordVPN’s paid add-ons, like Meshnet and dedicated IP, have individual privacy policies that tend to be far more intrusive.

Most notably, its dedicated IP feature directly links your online activity to your user account. This is a huge privacy risk and defeats the purpose of using a VPN in the first place.

Compare this to ExpressVPN, which uses a token-based system to anonymise dedicated IP sign-up. This extra care makes all the difference and reassures us that our personal data will be kept private.

ExpressVPN looks, feels, and performs more smoothly than NordVPN on every platform.

There’s virtually no learning curve required: click the large central power button to connect, and click again to disconnect.

NordVPN is less intuitive. Its connect button is hidden in the corner on desktop and disconnecting requires you to first ‘pause’ the VPN. We found this immensely frustrating, as we’ve never encountered a situation where we needed to pause our VPN.

When comparing the home screens, the difference felt even more stark. ExpressVPN only displays the essential (a connect button and server list), whereas NordVPN overwhelmed us with extra features like Threat Protection and Dark Web Monitor.

We didn’t like seeing these paywalled features take up half the screen, and would’ve preferred a more streamlined interface.

Here’s a video of us connecting to both NordVPN and ExpressVPN side-by-side:

Most of ExpressVPN’s features are baked into its software, which means you don’t have to toggle an extra setting or connect to a specific server.

This lets you have a “set-and-forget” experience, where you can just leave the VPN running in the background while you carry on as normal.

In contrast, NordVPN requires you to configure its apps to match your use case, adding unnecessary steps.

NordVPN makes you connect to a P2P-optimized server, before you can begin torrenting.

This difference was most obvious to us when we tried to torrent. While ExpressVPN lets you torrent on any server, NordVPN requires you to connect to a specific P2P server which is separate from its standard server network.

Not only did this add an extra step, but we resented that some server locations didn’t allow torrenting like Argentina and South Korea.

Unlike NordVPN, and every other VPN, ExpressVPN has a dedicated router app. This makes ExpressVPN compatible with every internet-connected device.

The router app’s interface looks and feels like any other ExpressVPN app, letting you quickly connect to a server, switch protocols, and toggle settings.

No other VPN provides a dedicated router app with a GUI.

Our absolute favourite part of the app is its unique device group feature that lets you assign devices to specific server locations. For example, you can connect your mobile to your home country, your TV to an overseas server for streaming, and your PC to a cheaper Steam region, all at once.

With NordVPN, there’s no router app to use. Instead, the installation process is complicated and you’ll have to download a new file every time you want to change server location.

Both VPNs include a Smart DNS Proxy with every subscription, which you can use on devices that don’t support VPNs (like Smart TVs and game consoles).

However, we discovered that ExpressVPN’s proxy (named MediaStreamer), is much better than NordVPN’s.

MediaStreamer works with several streaming services and changes proxy servers depending on which one you access. For instance, it redirects you to a UK DNS server for BBC iPlayer and a US one for US Netflix.

By contrast, NordVPN’s Smart DNS only works with American streaming services and streams just two content platforms. You can see how both services compare in the table below.

The VPNs have price matched each other, with the only discrepancy appearing on two-year plans where ExpressVPN costs 40¢ more (outside of seasonal discounts).

However, NordVPN’s prices increase significantly once your initial subscription period expires. For instance, its 12-month price increases from $4.99/month to $11.59/month after the first year.

This is far more expensive than ExpressVPN’s 12-month renewal price of $8.33/month.

Both VPNs offer a genuine seven-day free trial when signing up on Android. ExpressVPN also offers this on iOS, whereas NordVPN does not.

Although the VPN free trial can only be activated on mobile, we discovered that you can use your sign-in details for other platforms, like PC and Fire TV.

NordVPN and ExpressVPN also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, which can be initiated on any device. It’s a no-questions-asked policy, which essentially becomes a VPN free trial.

You can make the most of the refund policy to effectively use ExpressVPN for free and try NordVPN without paying.