And one of the top contenders in that shortlist is NordVPN. It’s a great place to start for those intimidated by VPNs, and the more you’re willing to buy, the cheaper the monthly cost becomes. If you don’t mind paying more initially, NordVPN has one of the cheapest adjusted monthly fees on that two-year option in comparison to other VPN providers. Ultimately, price shouldn’t stop you from trying NordVPN. Below is a breakdown of costs for NordVPN. Disconnecting is ever-so-slightly more painful in comparison to other VPNs that simply disconnect as soon as you click or tap on the ‘Disconnect’ button. For NordVPN, hitting ‘Disconnect’ brings up four options: pause for five minutes, pause for 15 minutes, pause for an hour, or fully disconnect. Given how quickly NordVPN connects, this additional disconnection step feels more like an inconvenience than anything else. To put it into context, in my months of testing NordVPN, I didn’t ever use any of the pause options. NordVPN offered over 5,500 servers in 59 countries, and though NordVPN is very much in the top five for best VPN services, that server count is behind CyberGhost and PureVPN, while it has the lowest number of countries to connect to out of all five. There are some quirks to using NordVPN, too. Certain servers will effectively stop you from being able to connect to particular websites – for instance, our sister site WhistleOut – which is unnecessarily limiting. This wasn’t the case when testing between NordVPN and Hotspot Shield. The other quirk was NordVPN would sometimes notify me that it was connected to a server but the dashboard would say it’s still connecting, which created doubt as to whether I was actually connected (even though my tests proved I was). Additionally, it’s worth noting that the NordVPN Chrome extension is less reliable than using the software on PC, so you’re better off avoiding it. NordVPN is faster to connect but ExpressVPN had consistently faster speeds once connected in our tests, plus disconnecting on ExpressVPN involves a single click rather than fumbling around with a drop-down menu. Picking a winner out of the two close-competing VPN services really depends on what you want. If you want a great price for lots of servers with fast and intuitive server connections, go with NordVPN. If you want fantastic support, servers in more countries, and faster overall connection speeds, ExpressVPN is the better pick.
