PrivadoVPN Review 2024: Private, Fast, and Cheap

If you want a fast and secure VPN that’s also affordable (starting at about $2 per month), we recommend PrivadoVPN.

We like that PrivadoVPN works with Netflix and we didn’t have any issues with its interface, security features, or the speed and privacy tests we ran. We also recognize that PrivadoVPN is a newer VPN provider, but we think it could benefit from a larger server count and an independent audit of its no-logs policy.

Let’s dig into the details of our PrivadoVPN review to see if it’s one of the best VPNs on the market.

PrivadoVPN overview

Price	Free–$10.99/mo
Free version	Yes
Max # of connected devices	Unlimited
# of servers	Unlisted in 48 countries
VPN protocol	OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2, SOCKS5
No-logs policy	No logs
Headquarters	Switzerland
Netflix access	Yes
Details	Get PrivadoVPN

We last tested PrivadoVPN on October 15, 2024.

Our experience

Our experience with PrivadoVPN was overall very positive. The software is sleek, easy to use, affordable, and works perfectly 99% of the time.

When we first opened up the browser app, it was easy to understand how to connect to servers — just click the giant orange button that says Click to Connect.

If you want to specify which location you want to connect to, PrivadoVPN makes it easy by listing everything out by country in order of latency.

You can also choose different sorting options or just simply search for the country you're looking for. As an added bonus, you'll also be recommended the fastest server for your location right at the top and get the ability to favorite servers for easy access.

Connecting to servers was smooth and we didn't experience a lot of glitches throughout our testing. At one point, our Spotify broke and started skipping every song, but we were able to fix this by just switching servers.

When completing our hands-on testing, we didn't see any noticeable decline in speed, which is top priority. We were also happy with all the leak tests it passed, though the parental controls leave a bit to be desired. 

If you're looking for a reliable VPN that's based in a privacy-conscious country, has a robust no-log policy, and doesn't impede on your internet's performance too much — then PrivadoVPN is a good option that even comes at a pretty affordable price.

Who is PrivadoVPN best for?

• Recommended for someone who wants an affordable VPN that works with Netflix and doesn’t slow down their online activities.

The reasons why you should use a VPN vary by person. But, in general, VPNs help keep your online activity private and secure. They can also unlock opportunities to watch regional content on different streaming platforms.

With PrivadoVPN, we didn’t have any issues streaming regional Netflix content or masking our IP address and other information. We also felt secure with PrivadoVPN’s encryption and VPN protocols and with the available features, such as a kill switch and split tunneling.

Finally, we didn’t experience any significant drops in our internet speed while using PrivadoVPN, and the pricing is more than affordable. It’s hard to beat a price starting at about $2 per month, but you can always use the free plan, too.

PrivadoVPN prices and subscriptions

PrivadoVPN has three paid plans to choose from, including a one-month, a 12-month, and a 24-month plan. There’s also a free plan, which could help you save on VPN costs. And starting at about $2 per month, even the paid PrivadoVPN plans are affordable.

Compare this to the starting prices of other popular VPNs:

• Hotspot Shield: $6.66/mo (billed annually).
  
• ExpressVPN: $6.67/mo (billed annually).
• NordVPN: $4.49/mo (billed every two years).
• PrivadoVPN: $1.48/mo (billed every two years).

PrivadoVPN is the least expensive of these VPNs, costing less than five times the amount of Hotspot Shield per month. PrivadoVPN might not have the largest server network, but it provides fast speeds and can unblock Netflix at an extremely affordable price.

Plan	1 month	12 months	24 months
Price per month	$10.99/mo	$2.00/mo (billed annually)	$1.48/mo (billed every two years)

PrivadoVPN accepts a huge range of payments, including several types of cryptocurrency:

PrivadoVPN free plan

PrivadoVPN offers a free VPN plan in addition to its paid plans. The free plan limits you to 10 GB of data per month, access to 13 servers, and one device connection. You won't have access to Control Tower features, including the ad blocker, threat protection, and parental controls.

Note that it’s not very straightforward if you want to sign up for a free PrivadoVPN plan. Navigate to the homepage, open the Features dropdown, and you'll find an option for Free VPN.

Free plan testing

From our testing, we found we could access servers in these countries using a free plan:

• United States
• Mexico
• Canada
• Germany
• France
• United Kingdom
• Switzerland
• Argentina
• Netherlands
• Brazil

We had no trouble using a free plan to connect to a U.K. server and unblock Netflix regional content in the U.K.

Considering you’re limited to 10 GB of data per month on a free plan, we wanted to see what this meant in terms of how much streaming you could do before getting cut off.

So we left a show on Netflix running while connected to the VPN to see how much data a short episode might use. Granted, we also did some Google Chrome browsing while the episode ran.

We ended up at 9.5 GB left of our 10 GB allotment after finishing a 20-minute episode of a Netflix show and doing some light Chrome browsing. That’s about 40 minutes of streaming per GB, or a little over 6.5 hours of streaming total, according to our rough calculations.

Free vs. paid plans

Feature	Free Plan	Unlimited VPN
Data	10 GB per month	Unlimited
Number of servers	13	Unlisted
Number of countries	10	48 countries
Number of device connections	1	Unlimited
Ad blocker
Threat protection
Parental controls
Details	View plan	View plan

PrivadoVPN features

We tested PrivadoVPN using the Windows desktop app on a PC from a physical location in Canada. We also used the Google Chrome browser to access our PrivadoVPN account and use PrivadoVPN’s different features.

The PrivadoVPN Windows app was easy to install and use, with a user-friendly minimalistic design and helpful features, like a kill switch and a split tunneling option (called SmartRoute).

We thought the option to go through a tutorial at our initial app launch was a helpful feature, especially if you’re new to using VPNs.

Overall, we had no glaring issues using the PrivadoVPN app or any of the features we tested. We think the PrivadoVPN server network is smaller than some competitors, but it’s also hard to beat Privado’s low prices.

Server network

• Unlisted in 48 countries

PrivadoVPN doesn’t publish its exact server count, but its website mentions the number is in the hundreds and spread across 48 countries and 66 cities. For both its server count and the number of available countries, PrivadoVPN falls a bit short of what the competition has to offer.

For example, in a comparison of Surfshark vs. PrivadoVPN, Surfshark has 3,200+ servers in 100 countries. Privado could be slightly behind because the company is only a few years old. So don’t be surprised if more servers are added to the PrivadoVPN in the future.

In some cases, certain servers could experience heavy loads if many users are connected, which could slow down your connection speed. But you can simply switch to another server with a lower load if you have plenty of servers to choose from.

Having more countries to choose from gives you more opportunities to stream regional content from around the world. If that’s important to you, it’s worth considering which countries are available with different VPN providers.

No-logs policy and headquarters

• PrivadoVPN logs policy: No logs
• PrivadoVPN headquarters: Switzerland

PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland and has a strict no-logs — or zero-log — policy. According to Privado’s privacy policy, PrivadoVPN doesn’t log your browsing history, traffic destination, data content, IP addresses, or DNS queries associated with PrivadoVPN connections.

This type of no-logs policy generally means that there shouldn’t be any information recorded about your connection or activity that someone could trace back to you, providing you with a high percentage of privacy and anonymity.

And since PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland, you’re protected by Swiss privacy laws, which some consider among the best in the world.

Switzerland isn’t part of the 5, 9, or 14 Eyes Alliance, a global intelligence organization that monitors internet activity in certain countries. This, combined with the no-logs policy, means PrivadoVPN likely wouldn’t turn any user information over to police or government officials, especially since PrivadoVPN shouldn’t have that information to begin with.

Note that we couldn’t find any information about PrivadoVPN having had an independent audit of its no-logs policy, which is common practice among top VPN providers to ensure the VPN app truly abides by its no-logs claims.

Kill switch

PrivadoVPN has a kill switch feature in its app. VPN kill switches are typically designed to stop your internet activity if you lose your VPN connection. This could help prevent your IP address or other information from leaking to your internet service provider (ISP) or someone else if your VPN is disconnected.

All you have to do to enable the kill switch functionality is hit this handy little button underneath your server connection:

Split tunneling

Split tunneling lets you exclude certain apps or programs from your VPN connection. This could be helpful if you don’t want your VPN to slow down your connection while playing an online game or still want to browse local content on your web browser while streaming foreign content using a VPN.

The PrivadoVPN split tunneling feature is called “SmartRoute,” and it’s located in the app settings.

We added Google Chrome to the list of applications excluded from the VPN and then checked our IP address using Chrome and Microsoft Edge. Chrome showed our actual IP address, while Edge showed the VPN IP address (in the U.K.), indicating that the split tunneling was working.

We also opened Hulu in Chrome while the VPN was connected to a U.K. server and it worked just fine, which likely wouldn’t be the case if SmartRoute wasn’t working.

Encryption

PrivadoVPN uses AES-256 encryption, which is often recommended as one of the best and strongest encryptions available. This is the type of encryption used by the U.S. government and many other organizations worldwide.

As an example of how strong AES-256 encryption is, it’s calculated that it would take billions of years to crack with our current technology.

VPN protocol

PrivadoVPN uses OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2 as its VPN protocols. These are common and strong protocols that many popular VPNs use, including NordVPN, though Nord also uses NordLynx, which is a next-generation protocol built around WireGuard.

The Privado site also like SOCKS5 as option, which must be used through a site-to-site transfer client instead of the PrivadoVPN app. It only changes your IP address and doesn't put all of your online activity through an encrypted tunnel.

Control Tower

PrivadoVPN paid plans provide access to Control Tower, which offers ways to block ads, protect yourself from online threats, and set up parental controls. You can access your Control Tower settings by logging in to your PrivadoVPN account using a web browser.

Some of the online threats you can protect against with Control Tower include:

• Ads
• Crypto scams
• Malware
• Phishing attempts
• Ransomware
• Third-party trackers

Parental controls

You can also use Privado Control Tower to set up certain parental controls, including blocking:

• Websites that sell legal or illegal drugs
• Adult content (sexually explicit content)
• Social media platforms, including separate controls to block Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube

We tested the parental controls by turning on the option to block YouTube and the option to block sites that sell drugs. We had no issues loading YouTube or a vape shop website while the parental controls were on and the VPN was off.

We then turned the VPN on and tried to load the same websites. We couldn’t load YouTube at all, but the vape shop website loaded just fine. So it seems like some aspects of the parental controls work, but it doesn’t seem foolproof.

Privado Sentry

You can add antivirus protection to your PrivadoVPN plan by purchasing Privado Sentry. Privado Sentry provides real-time protection against cyberthreats like virusus, ransomware, trojans, and other cyberthreats.

The following features are included with Privado Sentry:

• Always-on protection for 24/7 security
• Cloud scanning to detect emerging threats
• Deep scanning to inspect all files on your device
• Custom scanning for scheduling or only reviewing select files
• Ability to quarantine any harmful files found during scans

Privado Sentry can be added to ongoing subscriptions for $1.99/mo or bundled with your annual or two-year plan. It can only be purchased for the Windows app at this time.

PrivadoVPN test results

We tested PrivadoVPN with speed, DNS leak, WebRTC leak, and kill switch tests to see if it provides fast speeds while protecting your privacy and security. We also tested PrivadoVPN to see if it works with Netflix.

We ran these tests using the PrivadoVPN Windows app on a desktop PC running Windows 11 from a physical location in the U.S.

PrivadoVPN passed all of our tests successfully.

Speed tests

• Speed test results: PrivadoVPN saw an average download speed difference of 10%, which is 

We ran speed tests with PrivadoVPN to see if its VPN service significantly slowed down our internet speed. It’s common to see a slight decrease in speed that could grow larger depending on the VPN server location, but you typically shouldn’t see a huge decrease in internet performance.

We ran a speed test before connecting to PrivadoVPN to establish a baseline speed. We then connected to different PrivadoVPN servers worldwide and ran speed tests for each server we tested.

This was our baseline speed: 307.70 Mbps download speed / 380.84 Mbps upload speed / 13 latency (ping)

Test type	No VPN	US to US	US to CA	US to EU	US to AU
Download speed	307.70 Mbps	293.06 Mbps	274.56 Mbps	256.48 Mbps	280.81 Mbps
Upload speed	380.64 Mbps	357.73 Mbps	345.62 Mbps	230.11 Mbps	345.13 Mbps
Latency (ping)	13 ms	68 ms	59 ms	129 ms	173 ms
Download speed % difference	N/A	-4.76%	-10.77%	-16.65%	-8.74%
Upload speed % difference	N/A	-6.02%	-9.20%	-39.55%	-9.33%
Latency % difference	N/A	+423%	+354%	+892%	+1,231%

Overall, there were only minimal decreases in speed when connected to different PrivadoVPN servers. The most our speed slowed down was with the Canadian server, by over 16%.

But we expect to see a bit of a slowdown in internet speed while using a VPN, especially as the VPN server gets farther away from our physical location in the United States.

Netflix test

• Netflix test results: PrivadoVPN passed its Netflix tests.

You can watch Netflix with PrivadoVPN, which is great if you want an affordable VPN for streaming.

We tested PrivadoVPN with Netflix by opening Netflix in a Chrome browser while connected to different VPN servers. While connected to different VPN servers, we checked to see if Netflix gave us any errors, wouldn’t load content, or had issues with lag or video quality.

We had no issues watching regional Netflix content while connected to PrivadoVPN servers in these locations:

• Dallas (U.S.)
• Manchester (U.K.)
• Toronto (Canada)
• Sydney (Australia)

	US to US	US to UK	US to CA	US to AU
Did it work with Netflix?

We didn’t see any specific servers optimized for streaming, which typically means you can use any available server and it should work. We found that was the case with the servers we tested for Netflix.

DNS leak tests

• DNS leak test results: PrivadoVPN passed its DNS leak test.

We ran domain name system (DNS) leak tests to see if private information leaked through our internet connection. We used the DNS Leak Test tool from BrowserLeaks for these tests.

Without turning on the VPN and running the test, we could see our IP address, the IP address of our ISP, and the general location of our ISP.

After turning on PrivadoVPN and running the test again, our private information was hidden. We could only see an IP address and ISP information linked to the VPN server, so the leak protection was working.

WebRTC leak tests

• WebRTC leak test results: PrivadoVPN passed its WebRTC leak test.

We ran a WebRTC leak test to see if our IP address was exposed while using PrivadoVPN. We used the IP Address tool on the BrowserLeaks website to run these tests.

With the VPN off, we could see our IP address and associated ISP information. With the VPN on, we could only see an IP address and other information associated with the VPN.

Kill switch

• Kill switch test results: PrivadoVPN passed its kill switch test.

To test the kill switch, we opened up IPleak.net and switched servers while the site was running. In order to pass, we don't want to see our real IP address show up between the first server and the second server.

Luckily, PrivadoVPN passed with flying colors. When we switched from a Mexican server to a Canadian server, our real IP address didn't show up:

PrivadoVPN compatibility

PrivadoVPN supports these devices, operating systems, and mobile apps:

• Windows
• macOS (Mac)
• iOS (iPhone and iPad)
• Android
• Android TV
• FireTV
• tvOS

Note that while PrivadoVPN might not provide dedicated apps for other devices or operating systems, you can still use PrivadoVPN on Linux and certain routers.

PrivadoVPN customer support

PrivadoVPN offers 24/7 email support and online help guides.

Email support

If you wish to email support, you can find the option to create a ticket on their support site.

Overall, we found the email support helpful. We asked about torrenting and streaming capabilities and whether any servers were optimized for either feature. We received an email response in a little over 20 minutes after sending our query, which is quite quick.

The response confirmed that PrivadoVPN works with torrenting and we were given a link to torrenting setup guides for different clients.

Unfortunately, the email response didn’t address anything about optimized servers or whether PrivadoVPN works with different streaming services. But a live chat rep told us PrivadoVPN works with Netflix, Peacock, Discovery+, BBC iPlayer, and mlb.tv.

Support guides

The online guides are useful, but not super comprehensive. For example, the article for downloading the PrivadoVPN iOS app doesn’t do much more than give you a link to the applicable App Store page.

Live chat

When we tested this product in May 2023, we were able to find the live chat feature after a bit of a wild goose chase. A rep told us it’s usually 24/7 service unless nobody is available, which should only be the case if reps are already helping other people. So we wondered if the functionality disappeared while no one was available, which is why we couldn’t find it at first.

Upon fully retesting PrivadoVPN in 2024, we were unable to find the live chat functionality anywhere, even at different times of day. It's possible they may have removed this feature and settled for the email and guides being good enough.

Top alternatives

If you're on the fence about PrivadoVPN, there are plenty of options for you to think about. Here's some top examples that you can compare to what you like and don't like about PrivadoVPN:

FAQs

Bottom line: Is PrivadoVPN good?

PrivadoVPN makes sense if you want a fast and affordable VPN that works with Netflix.

PrivadoVPN is a fairly new VPN service (founded in 2019) compared to longtime favorites like NordVPN (2012) and ExpressVPN (2009). It hasn’t yet completed an independent audit of its no-logs policy. Still, it provides fast speeds and high levels of security, so it’s worth a look if you want rock-bottom prices (starting at about $1.48/mo (billed every two years).) 

See how it stacks up against some of the best VPN apps: 

• PrivadoVPN vs. NordVPN
• PrivadoVPN vs. Surfshark