- For years,
I've been using NordVPN to secure my internet connection,
to tunnel past internet censorship in China,
and to bypass Netflix geo-blocking while living abroad.
Over the past few years since my last NordVPN review,
they have exploded in popularity
and they've spent literally millions of dollars on
a marketing blitz that has put all other VPNs to shame.
So they've paid a bunch of influencers,
a lot of money to say great things about their service.
Big deal!
But is NordVPN really that good?
That's what we're here to find out.
Welcome to another video from All Things Secured.
My name's Josh and my goal is to provide a clear review
of NordVPN based on my years of using their service
and try to make it as unbiased as possible.
Over the next few minutes,
I'm gonna show you the desktop and mobile software.
Can I explain a lot of the features that they offer,
compare them against other VPNs in the market,
and finally share with you my concerns.
Let's start by moving over to my computer here
to explore the NordVPN desktop app.
One of the first things you'll notice when you open up
the NordVPN software is this huge map that they have.
It makes it really easy actually
to understand what you're doing.
You're connecting to a server in a different country
and you can scroll the map
and choose exactly where you wanna connect.
So if I wanna connect to the United States,
I just click that country and it's going
to connect to the fastest available server in that country.
And there are multiple servers in every single country.
So as you can see here on the left side,
I've got a list of all the different countries
that are available.
And if I can even go in and look at the different servers
within that country that I could choose from.
In most cases that doesn't make sense,
except for let's say,
in the United States where I can choose a specific city
that I wanna connect to
if that's something that's important to you.
Now depending on the type of connection,
the type of protocol,
you're gonna have a number
of specialty servers that you can choose from.
You can do double VPN,
which is something that allows you to do two VPNs at once.
I'll explain that a little more later.
Obfuscated servers,
which are basically servers that make your internet traffic
on a VPN look like it's just normal traffic
in those cases where maybe you've got a government
or you've got a company that's trying
to minimize the use of VPNs.
You have Onion Over VPN.
There's a couple different options there
as well as peer to peer, P2P servers.
And they've got a number of those
that you can choose from.
Now like I said,
those change based on what kind of protocol
that you're connecting to
and the preferences that they have here are not that robust.
We can auto launch,
we can choose to use their CyberSec technology,
which I'll explain in a little bit to block ads and malware.
And then of course we've got these VPN protocols.
I would recommend at least open VPN,
but they do have this new NordLynx,
which uses the WireGuard system.
And that's something that they're touting a lot now.
And again,
that's something I'll explain here in a little bit more,
you can choose to help them improve.
I tend to keep that off.
But now it's just, you can choose trusted networks,
the specific appearance.
They're obviously gonna tell you all of their different apps
that you can choose from as well.
And then of course my account information.
What you're gonna notice absent here
is any ability to turn off a VPN kill switch.
It is on the app and it's automatic and it's always on,
but you can't turn it off.
That's something that maybe you might find frustrating,
but actually it's really a good thing for you.
You want to have that kill switch on at all times.
But other than that,
it's a pretty basic, pretty easy to understand software
that anybody could use.
Great.
Now I'm gonna pull up my iPad
to give you a look at the mobile application.
As you can see here,
the user interface for NordVPN's mobile app
is very intuitive.
You can zoom in,
you can choose a specific country,
you can choose a server in that country
or quick connect to the fastest one in that country.
If you're looking at the United States,
you can look at all the different cities
that you could choose from,
or again, quick connect to the fastest server,
or you can ask NordVPN to find
the very fastest server available and connect to it.
And you can see this green bar here indicates
that I am connected to a VPN,
in addition to the VPN notification here.
Now on the left side here,
you can see I've got all the different countries
that I can choose from if I wanted to go that direction,
I've got favorites.
And then of course we were talking
about the specialty servers.
In this case right now you would be,
protocol that I'm using,
I only have access to P2P, peer-to-peer servers.
But let's say if I wanna go up here in the top right
and look at my settings,
I can change my protocol from NordLynx
to let's say open VPN.
And when I do that,
you're gonna see that my specialty servers,
now I have the ability to choose a dedicated IP,
a double VPN, the obfuscated servers,
Onion Over VPN and P2P.
So make sure as you're using the mobile app that you realize
that this choice of a VPN protocol is extremely important.
You've got the open VPN has been the standard
for most of the time,
but you can also choose this new NordLynx,
which uses the WireGuard protocol.
So that's what you have here on the side.
You can favorite,
you can use recent connections as well.
As far as the settings are concerned,
you also have the ability to turn on CyberSec,
which I'll again, describe in a moment.
VPN protocol, which we already talked about.
You can auto connect based on WiFi networks,
or just always auto connect whenever you're on.
And then you can reset your VPN profile.
There's not too much else.
You can help them improve by sending data anonymously.
I always tend to not wanna do that like I said before.
And then once you're connected to a VPN server,
I tend to just keep, close out the app
and let it work in the background.
In my opinion, NordVPN continues to offer
one of the best pieces of VPN software on the market.
It's easy to install and incredibly user-friendly,
even for those of you who may not be tech savvy.
But design only takes you so far.
So let's dive into the various features that NordVPN offers.
As with any review that I do here on All Things Secured,
I wanna differentiate between those standard features
and those that are unique to the service itself.
Marketing copy can make military-grade encryption
sound like an amazing feature,
but the reality is that it's standard across the industry.
And so I don't wanna praise them for it.
These features include,
at least at the time of this recording,
AES 256-bit encryption,
over 5,500 servers spread across 59 countries,
zero-log policy, VPN kill switch,
email and live chat customer support,
dedicated apps for all the major platforms
and a 30-day money back guarantee.
Now mind you,
none of the features on this list are particularly special.
This is what you should expect with any VPN
that you're looking at right now.
So what NordVPN features are unique?
We'll start with simultaneous connections.
NordVPN offers six simultaneous connections,
which means that you can have six different devices
connected to their servers at the same time.
The industry standard's between three and five.
So NordVPN comes out on top here.
Double VPN.
For those of you who want an added layer of security,
NordVPN offers you the ability to connect
to two VPN servers, changing your IP address twice.
Now this is something that a few other VPNs offer
such as Surf Shark that I've reviewed before,
but it's not very common at all.
NordVPN gives you P2P and Onion Over VPN servers,
which if those terms don't really make much sense to you,
it's probably not gonna be a feature that benefits you.
But if you do,
then you'll understand why that's valuable.
CyberSec, which is a combination ad blocker
and malicious site blocker
that gives you just another added layer of security
as you browse the internet.
And finally NordLynx,
which is just a fancy name
for NordVPN implementation of WireGuard.
Now, this is a protocol that's still under development,
but it's touted as one of the fastest
and most secure VPN protocols on the market today.
These are the features that make NordVPN unique,
but how do they stack up against competitors
like ExpressVPN, Surf Shark, IPVanish, and others?
The truth, despite all the marketing you're gonna see
on the internet is that there's really not that much
that differentiates the top VPN providers.
They all claim to have military-grade encryption,
they all claim to have zero-log policies
and they all have thousands of servers
spread across the globe.
Honestly, despite a few minor features here or there,
it really just boils down to pricing,
user-experience and trust.
And NordVPN tends to be highly rated across the internet
because it's done very well balancing
both pricing and user-experience.
I mean, you saw the apps earlier in this video,
they're excellent.
The only concern worth pointing out here
is that issue of trust.
The reason for this is twofold.
First, it's not entirely clear who owns and runs NordVPN.
I mean, we know it's based in Panama
and owned by a company called Tefincom S.A.
But that's really about all we know.
And this is a little bit of a red flag for me personally,
since basically what we're doing is we're securing our data
by routing it through the servers of an unknown entity.
Now to be fair,
this same accusation can be leveled
against most popular VPN services with few exceptions,
such as VyprVPN or IPVanish.
VPN companies tend to be
extremely vague about their ownership.
The second concern regarding trust has to do with a breach
that happened on a server NordVPN was leasing back in 2018.
And as you can imagine,
a security company being hacked garnered a lot of press.
Based on my research,
you might find it ironic that this security breach
doesn't concern me quite as much as the opaque ownership.
You see the breach itself
did not compromise any user-privacy.
And in the end,
it resulted in a number of internal and external audits
on the NordVPN servers that have probably made
the NordVPN network probably one
of the most reliably secure available today.
As of this recording,
they offer a bug bounty reward
to maintain that high level of security,
which is something I don't see other VPNs doing.
So what's my final verdict on NordVPN.
Well, it's an amazing piece of software that ticks
all of the boxes of the features that you expect
to have with a VPN.
As far as security is concerned,
NordVPN is probably ahead of its competition in the way
that it's adopted nude protocols like WireGuard,
as well as how it's gone about auditing its server network
and security protocols.
My only concern here,
and it's the same one that I have for most of the top VPNs
is that I have no idea who owns and runs the company.
And there's just no level of accountability there.
When it comes to your data security and online privacy,
the truth is that you're really stuck between
the devil you know versus the one that you don't.
As for me,
I use NordVPN on my desktop and mobile device,
but you'll have to make that decision for yourself
whom you trust with your data.
If this review of NordVPN has been useful to you,
why don't you take that easy step of clicking the
like button or using the affiliate links in the description,
I'll do my best to answer
any question you have in the comments.
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where I'll have more great reviews like this
and tips for online security.