fne8w2ahReddit users hate NordVPN. Are their criticisms legit?
mannycalaveraTo be fair they asked and answered on pcworld.com
Axolotl
CerebralHawksReddit also hates people who criticize child predators.
I question calling something Nordic if it’s based in Panama and headquartered in Lithuania. I get it, it’s just branding, like how Texas Pete isn’t made in Texas (at least it’s not made in New York City, I suppose) but maybe call it something else?
IIRC Proton is Nordic, but I don’t know if that makes their VPN better or worse. They do have a free ordering and I use it when I’m on public WiFi because I can, but otherwise can’t vouch for it.
Proton is based in Switzerland, which is not a Nordic country. Neither’s Lithuania, but at least the Baltic is Nordic-adjacent.
The notion that the home country of a company operating in multiple countries matters? Only if that home country’s regulatory regime can be trusted. In the case of Proton, a US request to the Swiss government led to a Swiss warrant that forced Proton to disclose the details of a user who had criticised the fascist government in the US. Many countries will do favors like that for other countries without any sort of due process. The best you can hope for is that the vendors’ system architecture retains the minimum user information needed to sustain operations.
My experience with them was bad. Somehow they automatically moved me from a plan for just vpn (which is pretty cheap) to one that included a bunch of bullshit I didn’t need, want, or even know I could use. The new plan was over $30/mo. There are ISPs who charge less than that!
My previous VPN service has been about $36 per year or something. I remember it was small enough that I just paid it annually out of pocket change, which also lowered the price in comparison.
I stopped sailing the seas, as it were, and dropped it. Then I needed to briefly, and tried Nord. Meh. Anyways it’s strictly land-lubbing these days.
If you’re in the USA, you should be using a VPN 100% of the time right now.
I still have 200+ days on my plan, but cancelled it for now. Not because of any major concerns, it’s good enough for what I need it for.
But they just making the app worse. There used to be like a map where you could select servers, they removed it. You used to have a “pause” and a “disconnect” next to each other. Now the “disconnect” is the last option behind the “pause” menu. Why?
I hate enshittification and that’s just that.
Will probably switch to mullvad after it expires.
Send like most of the valid criticism is based around the fact that the company also is in the business of user data mining. Which is enough for me to never use them.
Though they also very aggressively advertise, which is also a big red flag.
Sharing co-owners with Tesonet and receiving funding from the same company that owns a data-mining service isn’t ideal. But there is no evidence, and never has been, that anything is being shared between NordVPN and Oxylabs. Besides, NordVPN states that it follows a strict no-logs policy, which means it doesn’t record, store, or share user activity. And this is backed up by the usage of RAM-only servers and multiple independent audits—most recently the service passed a third-party no-logs audit in late 2025 by security firm Deloitte.
I mean… Deloitte is mercenary, and hired by the company wanting a passed audit.
They get paid to check pre-agreed spots A, B, and C and keep their eyes closed outside those areas.
A RAM-only server can still send metrics, metadata, “anonymized” metadata…
Anything Deloitte touches is crap and their employees are as incompetent as they come. Source: my work contracts with Deloitte regularly.
We had a project that, by law, could only be touched by people within the US. We constantly caught Deloitte trying to sneak their (undoubtedly cheaper) off shore staff in there.
𝕸𝖔𝖘𝖘Deloitte? Lol. My past employer was audited by them, and passed. There is absolutely no way we should have passed. I was flummoxed when I read the report. Since then, any time I see a security or privacy audit by Deloitte, I just assume the company being audited would actually fail a bare-minimum audit.
Tesonet is pretty well known as the biggest tech company in the baltics region so obviously they do a lot of different tech.
VPN itself is mostly harmless and can’t intercept e2e encrypted traffic and today even DSN is under e2e.
The only red flag is really the inaccurate advertising that vpn protects from publix wifi issues which is on page with every VPN ad (except Mullvad) but still wrong.
Yes, NordVPN is garbage. As a SysAdmin, my users that run it on their home PC along with our VPN are a continuous pain in the ass. The product only needs to be 5% of what it is, the rest is Anti-virus bs. It either: does not play well with other VPNs, is impossible to disable, or the people that buy this product are not computer literate enough to use such a complicated peice of shit. All of the above is also a possibility. Since it’s their home PC, we won’t go on it to fix anything and all I can do is blindly troubleshoot. The VPN I use cost me $20 a year and the only thing it does is be a VPN. It should be called NordComplicatedSecuritySuite.
do you have one that you recommend?
Private internet access fot personal.
moopettheir advertising was just as bad until relatively recently. And their offers are just as bad. Like, 90% off all the time. 90% off a price they never charged and made up. It’s the same as with pizza places, where they say the pizza really costs £20 but if you have this voucher you can get it for £5! What a deal, right?
Most stuff with obnoxious advertising causes me to avoid them, and that’s usually a bad sign. Compare that to Mullvad, who only do pinpoint relevant ads, and they have the receipts that show they actually do what they say.
I’ve noticed Mullvad advertising a lot in London on billboards, tube station platforms and sides of buses. Not saying it’s a bad thing just that I noticed it, they must have really ramped up spending on marketing.
They also advertise on the bay area in the US by the highways one time we drove by. Although compared to all the AI garbage companies that promise the world on their billboards, it was generic “protect your privacy - mullvad VPN” and something like that. I only remember it because of the mascot.
Mullvad really does sound like the only option if you’re 100% committed to this.
I’m using Proton as i hear it comes a close 2nd, is alot cheaper and what I’m hiding isn’t massively sensitive
Katherine 🪴Nord is good for what it is; they advertise to casual users for a reason.
When I paid for nordvpn with a credit card and decided to cancel, it took like a week and a half of emails with them to cancel and remove my payment info. A lot of, are you sure you want to cancel, are you sure you’re who you say you are
After that no more nordvpn. Pay for these services with crypto
Mullvad FTW. They’ve already proven themselves when they were raided and the feds got nothing.
JensSpahnpastaYou do know that you are not getting the best product and prices for something when the company is doing that much advertising
I’ve used NordVPN for a couple of years and never had reason to switch. None of it gets in my way, and it’s just worked.
I’m sure others are just the same, but ive no reason to put in effort to change when I have a working solution.
Plus it’s double effort cus I dont think anyone else does a meshnet alternative so I’d be setting up tailscale too.
Meshnet is going to be discontinued.
There’s also local share that is free open source that does the same thing. It’s been around for some time now and can be installed on most devices.
If you’re referring to their announcement last year about discontinuing meshnet, they’ve retracted that.
I know there are alternatives but why would I go to any effort to set them up when i have something that has worked exactly as I want it to for the last 2yrs? The cost of nordvpn is sufficiently low enough that I wouldn’t switch to something just because it’s free.
You do you. I have trust issues with companies switching their motto every two seconds. I’d rather not be complacent to instability nor discourage anyone who expects some basic standards of consistency where they spend their money.
socsaYes, the advertising is straight up misleading, saying shit like it protects you from viruses, and hides your browsing history from your ISP and lets you get international Netflix. It literally does nothing for viruses, it just exposes you to a different ISP (Nord), and Netflix is usually pretty quick about VPN blocking.
Nord doesn’t do a whole lot for anyone so it’s pretty worthless.
That being said, I switched to Proton from Nord a few months ago and this shit isn’t working out either. Constantly flapping connection with Proton.
I need a different alternative.
Everyone recommends mullvad
They’re overpriced.
zarkanianThey removed support for port forwarding. If not for that, I probably would’ve gone with them.
I tried mullvad, like their company and app, but the speeds weren’t great where I’m at. Also I needed port forwarding at the time.
gwl [he/him]TL;DR - sponsored article disguising as an opinion piece, mentions briefly the many many problems with it, but ends with “I trust my corporate overlords to never use my data for evil”
I need a VPN to get around geoblocks and to torrent without my ISP sending me letters.
NordVPN always worked perfectly for me. I don’t see the problem? Not saying other ones aren’t better, but it seems perfectly adequate.
setVeryLoud(true);They could possibly snitch you out to your government. We can’t trust that they are not recording your traffic.
😈MedicPig🐷BabySaver😈Fuck Reddit and Fuck Spez.