Hello I'm Mauricio CEO of Cloudwards and in this video I'll be showing you
the best VPNs out there. Our team has tested over fifty of them over
ast few years, after paying for each out of our own pocket, and we feel
confident we can offer you independent expertise. Before we go on, I’d like to
just quickly share how we make money. This video is not sponsored by any VPN,
instead we get paid through affiliate relationships, but we’re dedicated to
offering you advice free from bias. If you sign up for one of the providers
mentioned in this video, we’ll earn a commission which helps us to
produce videos and in-depth reviews you’ll find on Cloudwards.net and
on this YouTube channel. Thank you for your support and with that disclaimer
out of the way, let’s get to our favorite picks. If you like the
videos that we're putting out on a weekly basis please subscribe and
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Virtual private networks are a great way to both protect yourself online, while
also unlocking streaming content from all over the world. Basically, VPNS are a
great double whammy in that they offer both security and entertainment, and we
recommend everybody use one when going online.We’ve divided this video into two
parts, with the first being a general rundown of our five top picks, and the
second part going into more detail on both providers and our criteria.
Hopefully, this will help you pick the perfect VPN for you. However, if you need
some more detail on anything I’ll discuss here, I’ve linked to our main
article in the description below which offers plenty of links to related
subjects as well as going into the nitty gritty of everything VPN. With all
our criteria in mind, we nominate ExpressVPN as the best VPN out there for
2020. It’s been in our top spot ever since we started reviewing VPNs at
Cloudwards about four years ago and for good reason. Besides being great
for streaming and having good protection, it has a cast-iron privacy policy,
fantastic speeds, and is extremely easy to use. It is, however, quite expensive, a
major con for many people. But If you sign up through our link in the description
below you’ll get 49% off and if you’re not happy there is a 30 day
money back guarantee. Hot on Express’ heels comes NordVPN, which offers about
the same level of protection and streaming comfort, but falls a bit short
in the speed department, being a tad inconsistent compared to most other
providers. It wins, however, in the price department, and also offers a better
torrenting experience, making it jump to first spot for people looking for a
budget option. If you sign up for 3 years the monthly price goes down to
under 3 dollars per month. Third on our list is
CyberGhost, which offers a great overall product much like Nord and Express do,
but falls yet another small step behind. That said, it’s cheaper again than Nord, so
it may be the perfect choice for you, especially if you’re in Europe where
most of its servers are located. Fourth on our list is VyprVPN, which actually
does a few unique things when it comes to security with its Chameleon protocol,
but fails when it comes to streaming.
However, at sixty dollars for a two-year sub, it’s the cheapest VPN out there and
has managed to dethrone our next and last pick as the best deal in the VPN
market. Last is Private Internet Access, or PIA for short. It's
been around for a very long time now, but has aged very well. We like PIA mainly
because no other quality service offers such a cheap yearly plan while staying
secure. However, it’s not great for streaming and it’s two-yea plan is 70
bucks. Okay, so that’s our quick top 5. But, you may wonder, how did we establish this
ranking? Well, over the years our team has gotten pretty good at gauging the worth
of a service using our set criteria. However, for the sake of not making this
video half an hour long while giving our editorial process away in the
meantime we'll just give you a rundown here so you can make your own
judgment. As I said in the introduction the two main criteria when choosing a
VPN are security and streaming. You can choose which one is the most important
for you, or even both, but we try to treat them about equally and derive our
other criteria from there. When it comes to protection, you generally want a VPN
that uses the Open VPN protocol and AES-256 encryption. There are obviously
other options out there, and most VPNs will let you change them, but we like
those two options as a baseline. Also important is that a VPN doesn’t leak
your location, and none of these five do. As for streaming, it’s getting harder and
harder to get through the blocks set up by Netflix
Hulu and Amazon, but Express, Nord and CyberGhost
all do a decent job of it. While you will be forced to switch servers regularly,
you’ll still be able to watch what you want, where and when you want it without
any real trouble. Simply put, you can say bye bye to the proxy error from now on.
We’ve published other videos on the nasty proxy error specifically for
Netflix which you can check out in the card above here. However,
another important criterion related to streaming is speed. After all, no
matter how well a VPN punches through the Netflix block, if you end up watching
the buffering circle for most of the time, it’s useless. We’re always checking
our favorite VPNs’ speed at Cloudwards, and as you can see here, ExpressVPN
is a clear winner, with PIA hot on its heels.
CyberGhost and Vypr are a bit more middle of the road, but it works out fine
in the end. NordVPN is also great, but we don’t
include it in our rankings as it very much depends on the server you connect to.
Some are lightning fast, while others are as slow as molasses. Luck seems to be
the keyword, here, and so we have a hard time recommending Nord for
its speeds. Next up is something that we call
user friendliness, which is the most subjective criterion we have. We really
like Express here because all it is is one big button to start and
stop it, plus a smaller button that lets you choose the location. It’s superbasic
but gets the job done. On the other end of the spectrum you have the
much flashier Nord, which offers an interactive map as well as a list-based
server selection. We like it a bit less, but Nord does have a better settings menu
to let you tweak things to your heart’s desire. CyberGhost
is kind of in the middle here, as is VyprVPN, offering simple apps with
windows that fold out if you need a bit more information.
PIA is the odd duck in that it only lets you work through a system tray icon,
which takes some getting used to. Now, all of the providers here
have great mobile apps for Android and iOS and they work in the same way as
their desktop counterparts. So you can browse securely on your iPad while using
a public wifi connection. A related issue is that of customer
support which with all five is decent though some are definitely better than
others. Express, Nord and CyberGhost all have good chat-based support that gets
back to you quick, while PIA’s only works via email and varies a bit. We’ve rarely
had trouble, but some of our readers have and reported that in our written reviews on
Cloudwards.net. However, if we had a “best improvement” award, it would go to VyprVPN.
Until about a year ago their support was slow to respond, and when they did
they were often rude and unhelpful. However, a new wind has been blowing at
Golden Frog and lately things are a lot better, up to the level of any
competitor. Lastly we’d like to talk a
bit about privacy policies. Of course, we’d never recommend a service that has
a poor track record in this to you, we leave that to others, and you’re safe to
go with any of the five providers we’ve mentioned here. Not only have we read
through the privacy policies, anybody can do that,
but we’ve also gathered as much data as we can from users to
see if there were any reports of breaches or other issues.
As far as we can tell, all services deal quickly and efficiently with problems
when it comes to security and privacy, and none sell your data to third parties.
As I said earlier, we’ve been doing this for a while and we’ve never received a
report about any of these five services that stood up under scrutiny. Nord, for
example, has suffered from a few small hacks,
but the team behind the service was always quick to jump on the issue and
fix it. Now, this video is running a bit long as it is, so I’ll leave it basically
to you. If you want more information on any of this stuff, make sure to check out
any of the articles linked below or even just visit Cloudwards.net.
and browse around. Also remember,we’ve got excellent discounts for our
for our top picks, so check them out in the description. If you liked this
video, please give us a thumbs up and if you’d like to receive more
like it, please subscribe. My name was Mauricio, and thank you
very much for watching. See you in my next video, bye bye