Hello and welcome back to Cloudwards.net.
My name’s Maurcio, and in this video, we’re going to talk about the fastest VPN services
for 2020.
We have our top five ready to go, and although there are some familiar faces on this list,
there are some newcomers, too.
Before jumping in, make sure to click subscribe and hit that bell icon to be notified whenever
we upload.
Testing every VPN on the market is a fool’s errand, so we limited our selection to 14
services.
We took the top 10 from our VPN reviews, as well as 4 other services that tout speed above
all else.
To maintain consistency, all of our tests were done with OpenVPN with UDP as the transport
protocol.
We also used AES-256 encryption for all of the tests.
Instead of testing a single location, we tested three: New York, Amsterdam, and Japan.
Also, we ran three trials for each location and averaged the numbers.
This way, we can get as clear of an idea as possible about which VPNs perform well and
which VPNs are just a flash in the pan.
On screen, you can see our final results for the average download loss percentage for each
service at each location.
If you want the raw numbers, you can find our speed test spreadsheet linked below.
With a bit of methodology out of the way, let’s talk about services.
In first place, we actually have two providers: ExpressVPN and NordVPN.
Out of all of our tests, ExpressVPN returned the lowest numbers out of any service at any
location.
NordVPN was slightly slower in New York, but beat ExpressVPN in Amsterdam and Japan.
When it comes to speed, you can’t go wrong with either of these services.
ExpressVPN is faster when tunneling close to home, but NordVPN is more consistent around
the globe.
NordVPN does have the NordLynx protocol, though, which performs much better than OpenVPN, so
keep that in mind and you can find out more about that in our NordVPN review which I’ve
linked here.
Next, we have a much less established VPN service, Surfshark.
With only a few years on the market, Surfshark has no business being as fast as it is.
Compared to NordVPN, Surfshark is slightly slower across the board.
In our testing, though, that never translated into a laggy browsing experience.
Moving on, TorGuard is our next pick.
It’s a fast service overall, but it stands out from our top three with incredible flexibility.
Unlike NordVPN, ExpressVPN and Surfshark, you can choose what specific cipher you want
with TorGuard.
That has little impact on modern computers, but it can help a lot with dated machines.
TorGuard’s numbers are great, but it could still be faster.
We noted a lot of inconsistency across trials, particularly in New York and Amsterdam.
The averages still worked in TorGuard’s favor, but with a little more tuning, it could
go toe to toe with ExpressVPN and NordVPN.
Our last pick is StrongVPN, another relatively small VPN service.
Honestly, we’re shocked that it’s here.
StrongVPN is a solid service overall, but it could improve slightly in just about every
area.
Speed isn’t a problem, though.
During our tests, StrongVPN not only proved itself as fast, but also consistent.
We had similar download rate losses no matter if we were tunneling to New York or Japan,
which is always great to see.
We gathered a lot of numbers for these tests, so if you’re curious about how a specific
VPN performed, make sure to look at our spreadsheet.
Below, you’ll also find links to sign-up for all of these services, as well as our
written reviews.
Out of all of the services we tested, though, NordVPN and ExpressVPN are in a league of
their own.
Surfshark is really impressive too but below that, there’s a significant drop in performance.
Those are the three we’d recommend for speed, and in the case of ExpressVPN and NordVPN,
for streaming, too.
Thank you for watching this video all the way through.
Make sure to leave a comment below about what you look for in a VPN, and click the thumbs
up button if you liked this video.
I’ll see you next time here at Cloudwards.