If you spend any time online, you’ve probably heard about virtual private networks (VPNs) – but depending on your cybersecurity knowhow, you may not know exactly what a VPN can do for you.
As the name suggests, VPNs create a private connection to the websites and content you access, using a secure tunnel and strong encryption to ward off prying eyes and online trackers. The best VPNs offer a range of server locations in dozens of different countries, which makes your activity harder to trace. This has the bonus effect of unblocking region-locked content on services like Netflix or Spotify.
These days, even the best cheap VPNs offer many more features than simply privatizing your connection. As VPN tech has gotten more advanced, providers have steadily improved and expanded their feature sets and app portfolios.
According to Security.org, around half of US netizens use a virtual private network for personal use, business cases, or both. That’s an increase of ten percentage points compared to 2024. And as TechRadar reported in 2025, VPN usage is increasing in the UK. With VPNs getting more popular, and understanding of the benefits they bring can make it easier to decide which of the best VPNs might work for you.
Here at TechRadar, our VPN team has 15 total years of experience – we use the best VPNs daily at work and at home. Keep reading for our breakdown of the best VPN benefits.
The three best VPNs in 2026
VPN advantages
When I chat with family and friends about VPNs (after they innocently inquire after my work day), they'll often wonder why they'd need a VPN – especially if they're not getting up to anything shady online. It's a good question that I hear all the time so, keep reading, and I'll run through the main benefits of using a VPN.
1. Protect your privacy
As you scroll and swipe through the internet, you leave digital footprints that anyone with the right tools and knowledge can trace. These can include the type of device you’re using, your approximate location, your IP address, and browsing history. Legitimate companies can use this data to serve you annoyingly accurate targeted advertising, but there’s also the chance that bad actors could get ahold of this data for malicious reasons.
One of the basic functions of a VPN is to hide your IP address by routing your online connection through a secure server. This makes it much more difficult to trace your activity. Some VPNs take this a step further by resetting your server’s IP address at regular intervals, making it all but impossible to link your online adventures together as one complete timeline.
And if you’re someone who engages in P2P file sharing, the best torrenting VPNs can help keep your identity and network protected while sharing and downloading from other access points.
What’s more, the most secure VPNs have comprehensive no-logs policies, meaning they limit the data they collect to the absolute essentials required to provide a service. The strength of these policies vary, but the best VPN providers will have them independently audited at regular intervals.
2. Shield your data
As well as hiding your IP address, a VPN routes your online traffic through a secure, separate, and encrypted tunnel – meaning the data passing back and forth between your device and a website or online service is inaccessible to third parties.
Typically, those who provide or administrate a WiFi network can see the data moving around it fairly easily – without a VPN, ISPs, workplaces, schools, or even national governments can all take a look at your activity.
There are a lot of different VPN encryption protocols on the market. They define how the VPN connects to its servers and how your data is sent, received, encrypted, and decrypted.
Available protocols vary by VPN service, but most VPNs support OpenVPN and WireGuard with strong encryption. OpenVPN is older and more resource-intensive, but nigh-impossible to break, while WireGuard is lighter on the CPU while still providing a secure and speedy connection. Services like ExpressVPN and NordVPN offer their own protocols based on these two technologies.
3. Unblock streaming content
There are dozens of streaming platforms out there, catering to every kind of movie and TV fan – but even if you subscribe to all the best streaming services, you might find that the show you actually want to watch isn’t available in your country or region. This is a common annoyance while travelling overseas.
A VPN can help with unblocking region-locked content. The best VPN providers maintain dozens, sometimes hundreds of servers across the globe, meaning you can easily spoof your location and convince websites that you’re accessing content from another country.
They do this by concealing your IP address and providing you with a new, temporary one based in the same location as the server you pick. To watch US-based content, just connect to a server in New York, Los Angeles, or another American city, and to browse through the BBC iPlayer library, take your pick of servers scattered across the United Kingdom.
Make public WiFi safer
Free public WiFi is one of the great inventions of our time, allowing us all to stay connected or work on projects from cafés, pubs, hotels, or airports. It’s a godsend for digital nomads or social media scrollers alike.
However, public WiFi is rarely anywhere as secure as a home WiFi connection or mobile hotspot, making these unprotected networks a go-to target for cybercriminals. A public WiFi connection may lack a password or any encryption whatsoever, and as the recent PHP security crisis shows, new vulnerabilities are being found and exploited all the time.
Generally, it's a good idea to use a VPN whenever you'll be using public Wi-Fi (and doubly so if you're going to be making purchases, logging into accounts, or checking your banking app). It'll mask your original IP and encrypt your data which means that if someone does manage to intercept your activity, it'll be massively difficult for them to pinpoint your identity.
5. Boost online freedoms
In addition to the Great Firewall (which keeps folks in China from accessing social media sites and foreign content), the country takes an invasive approach to surveillance, and sniffs out VPN usage by using deep packet inspection (DPI). So, as you can imagine, a VPN for China is vital in 2026.
If your travelling through or live within a country with harsh government restrictions on online activity, a VPN can offer more freedom online.
In countries with active internet restrictions like Russia, Iran, or most famously China, you might find that everyday search engines, social media sites, or online marketplaces are limited or totally blocked. This can make contacting friends and family a difficult task – for example, X is banned in Russia and Venezuela, while China’s infamous Great Firewall blocks Google and its various apps and services.
We’d advise anyone using a VPN in violation of local legislation to be very careful and discreet with their usage, weighing up the possible penalties against the necessity of accessing unblocked connections. If you’re just travelling through a restricted region, and don’t need to access blocked services for journalistic or research reasons, it might be worth it to just wait out the restrictions.
6. Avoid ISP throttling
If you’re someone who uses a lot of data each month – for example, by downloading large games, moving high-res photos and videos to cloud storage, or sending large project files to colleagues and clients – you might find yourself on the receiving end of one of internet service providers’ most annoying tactics.
Throttling is a particularly annoying practice used by internet service providers (ISPs) to deliberately reduce your bandwidth or internet speed when they assess that you’ve used more than a reasonable amount of data.
A VPN can prevent this by hiding, and in some cases automatically changing, your IP address – all your ISP will see is a few unrelated IP addresses each using a normal amount of data. Even if you stick with one server, your ISP won’t be able to tell that it’s you downloading game after game or a library of 4K movies.
7. Smoother gaming experiences
The best gaming VPNs can reduce ping and latency by routing your connection through a server that’s geographically closer to the game server. For fans of MMOs, fighting games, first-person shooters, and other genres that require snappy reactions and speedy connections, a VPN can be the difference between a win and a loss.
There’s another layer of protection in using a gaming VPN for streamers or professional gamers. Unfortunately, stream sniping, DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks, or even swatting attempts are a real threat for streamers, making protecting your IP (and therefore location) even more important. A VPN places a secure wall between you and would-be aggressors, meaning you can chase victory in peace.
8. Bag online bargains
As mentioned, using the internet without a VPN leaves all kinds of data behind that websites and advertisers can use to build a picture of who and where you are. Unfortunately, online shopping and travel sites are known to use this profile data to change prices on the fly, like raising prices for hotels if you’ve been searching for flights.
Since a VPN encrypts your data and traffic, websites can’t tell what kind of shopper or traveller you are, meaning they’re more likely to serve you the ‘default’ price for a service or product.
Let's say you want to pick up a cheap flight, for instance. Connect to a VPN server elsewhere, refresh your search, and compare the new prices against the ones served up to you when using your original IP address. You might be pleasantly surprised!
What are the disadvantages of using a VPN?
Though we think the positives outweigh any drawbacks, VPNs do have some downsides. It's important to weigh up the pros and cons before you spend your hard-earned cash on a subscription plan. Here are some of the most prevalent issues with VPNs:
- Impacted connection speeds: a VPN adds an extra step to the journey your data takes when it leaves your device. Instead of heading straight to the website or service, it first gets routed through the VPN server, which can negatively impact your overall speed. This usually makes a negligible impact, but is something to keep in mind if you have a slow connection to begin with.
- Compatibility issues: not all apps work with a VPN enabled. Android Auto is a good example — it'll pull up an error screen if you try and use it alongside a VPN. You can tame the issue somewhat with split tunneling, but sacrificing your security for app functionality isn't ideal.
- Cost: this is the big one. You're not alone if you're wondering if it's really worth shelling out a few dollars a month for something as intangible as a VPN. You'll save big if you pick up a long-term plan of multiple years, but monthly subscriptions can get costly. There are, however, some awesome cheap VPNs on the market as well as a handful of reliable free VPNs.
FAQs
Is a VPN worth using?
A VPN is definitely worth using. VPNs encrypt your identifiable data as it passes from your device and across the internet – making it unreadable to any third party snoops. This includes things like your browsing history, the messages you send on social media, and anything you download. Plus, by spoofing your original IP address, your VPN allows you to check out geo-restricted content and avoid VPN bans.
When should you not use a VPN?
On a mobile device, using a VPN can drain your mobile data – so you might want to switch your VPN off until you need it. You may not want to use a VPN when logging in to certain apps, too, like banking accounts and medical services, as they sometimes require you to log in from the country in which you registered your account.
When should I use a VPN on my phone?
You should use a VPN on your mobile phone whenever you connect to a free Wi-Fi hotspot – like the ones you find in hotels, cafes, and airports. These connections are typically poorly secured, and therefore hotbeds of cybercriminal activity. A mobile VPN encrypts your data, securing it from bad actors, and allows you to connect to public hotspots without worrying about who could be looking over your (digital) shoulder.
We test and review VPN services in the context of legal recreational uses. For example: 1. Accessing a service from another country (subject to the terms and conditions of that service). 2. Protecting your online security and strengthening your online privacy when abroad. We do not support or condone the illegal or malicious use of VPN services. Consuming pirated content that is paid-for is neither endorsed nor approved by Future Publishing.
