NordVPN vs PIA: Speed
SUMMARY:
NordVPN and PIA are two of the fastest VPNs we’ve tested. Both use WireGuard and have speeds fast enough for the most intensive web activities, including gaming, streaming, and torrenting. NordVPN narrowly beats Private Internet Access for speed due to its almost lossless connection speeds on nearby servers.
Winner: NordVPN
We test NordVPN and PIA’s speeds four times every day. Each test is conducted using our scientific and unbiased speed testing methodology.
We use the VPN’s automatic protocol and report the results exactly as we see them. Both the testing and results are automatically generated, so we can’t edit any of the data after the fact.
The table below gives a quick summary of NordVPN and PIA’s speed performance.
You can read a more in-depth comparison of the speed results of both VPN services in the next few sections.
NordVPN beats PIA on short-distance connections
To test local speed performance, we connected to both VPNs using the automatic server selection feature.
NordVPN’s download speeds are faster than PIA on same-country connections. Our download speed dropped by just 1% with NordVPN but dropped by 6% when connected to a PIA server.
Both results are excellent, but NordVPN is marginally better. Our automated VPN speed test tool also shows similar results, which you can view yourself in the chart below:
For upload speeds, NordVPN is also faster, but the difference is more marginal. We recorded identical upload speeds for both NordVPN and Private Internet Access in our manual speed tests.
Our automated tool often finds NordVPN’s upload speeds to be around 5% faster than PIA’s. You can see the results from the past eight weeks below.
VPN speeds are tied on far-away servers
Fast international speeds are important for streaming geo-blocked streaming services. As you’ll often be connecting to a server on the other side of the world, a VPN needs to maintain fast download speeds across its server network.
We connected to NordVPN and Private Internet Access servers in four different continents and recorded our download speeds.
Here’s a summary of the results:
As you can see, NordVPN’s and PIA’s international download speeds are very similar.
Private Internet Access was faster in more locations, such as in the US and Australia. While this would usually mean PIA wins out in this category, it was over 62% slower than NordVPN on its Singapore server.
PIA is slightly faster for gaming
In our manual tests, both PIA and NordVPN enabled a local ping time that was fast enough for gaming. However, NordVPN slowed down our ping time a little more compared to PIA, which was faster.
Our tests were conducted on different days, so we’ve included our ping time without a VPN so you can easily see the difference the VPN made in each case.
With VPN: 14ms |
With VPN: 6ms |
We also tested the VPNs by setting them up on our router and playing a variety of console and PC games, including Fortnite, Minecraft, and CS:GO.
Although the latency difference wasn’t noticeable in most games, PIA was better when playing fast-paced competitive games, like CS:GO.
Despite their speed differences, both VPNs qualify for our list of top-rated VPNs for gaming.

Online games were more responsive using PIA compared to NordVPN.