NordVPN Review

The VPN registered in Panama, NordVPN is an extremely popular VPN provider with over 14 million customers worldwide. The company emphasizes its speed and technical features. After several weeks of use, here are our conclusions.

Created in 2012 by a few friends, NordVPN quickly became one of the best-known providers on the market. With a lot of publicity and thanks to an efficient infrastructure, NordVPN has carved out a place of choice for itself in the lucrative VPN market.

Responsive to the integration of the WireGuard® protocol, it quickly offered the best speeds. But in 2021, most providers also have this protocol. The company must therefore reinvent itself to remain a leader in this competitive market. And while the software remains state-of-the-art with plenty of connection options, NordVPN is also committed to developing a healthier market. 

The company is this and now practices an anti-surveillance and censorship policy by granting emergency access to freedom fighters and journalists working in dangerous conditions, as AirVPN has offered for many years.

Main Features

Data protection and privacy

Placing your Internet connections in the hands of a VPN provider takes trust, a lot of trust. Sometimes, the operation of these operators may indeed lack clarity. Thus, NordVPN is regularly linked to several other companies such as Tesonet, Tefincom or NordSec, whose overlaps are not obvious at first glance.

Tefincom is the company that owns the NordVPN brand. In 2020, it was renamed NordVPN SA for more consistency and remains under Panamanian jurisdiction. Note, however, that a NordSec umbrella brand includes all products: NordVPN, NordPass, NordLocker and NordVPN Teams. Tesonet is one of the biggest technology accelerators in the Baltic States. It incubates and invests in Internet and technology companies on a global scale. Tefincom benefited from the support of this company during its development.

As reported by our colleagues from ZDnet , NordVPN let some data escape in 2018. If the flaw did not seem critical, it was rather the lack of transparency that challenged. Having data stolen while selling a security and anonymization service is not very reassuring. Even though it was a mistake by a provider that NordVPN no longer works with, this case could only have damaged its reputation as a VPN service provider. NordVPN has since started a migration of its servers to models that only work in RAM. In addition, the brand has also carried out a security audit with Versprite and has a bug research program ( bug bounty) to strengthen the security of its infrastructure.

Like most VPN providers, NordVPN claims not to keep any connection, traffic or user activity logs (only to count the number of open sessions). NordVPN is also one of the few providers to have carried out an audit which confirmed the confidentiality policy without an activity register.

However, we will point out that the commercial site will place no less than 12 trackers during your visit. Finally, the head office being located in Panama, NordVPN is not subject to the obligations of the 5 and 14 Eyes alliances.

Encryption, protocols and DNS

Depending on the application and operating system, NordVPN offers the following connections:

• OpenVPN with UDP / TCP (Windows, Android, macOS, iOS)

• IKEv2 (macOS, iOS)

• WireGuard®, called NordLynx (Windows, macOS, Android, iOS)

• We are also testing for DNS leaks using the dnsleak.com / ipleak.net sites and we did not note any issues in our evaluations.

Video streaming

Some users take advantage of the VPN to access various foreign streaming services or simply to connect to television services in France from outside. Note that access to certain services like Netflix, BBC or Amazon Prime varies over time, with companies constantly seeking to protect their content from unauthorized access. In our trials with NordVPN services, we were able to connect to the most common streaming sites without worry, taking care to create private browsing.

Advanced features

NordVPN offers many connection options to ensure maximum privacy. So, you can opt for double VPN - sometimes called MultiHop - which routes a connection through two VPN servers. You will also appreciate the possibility to connect to servers optimized for P2P, or to mask the traffic in an HTTP ( obfuscated ) stream . NordVPN is one of the few providers (along with ProtonVPN) to offer a live connection to the anonymous Tor network. With the Onion Over VPN option, it is possible to browse Tor servers without going through a specific browser, which will titillate the most geeks of customers.

Of course, using the Tor browser via a VPN connection is still possible with all providers. On the macOS version, it is also possible to activate monitoring of the famous Dark Web in order to determine if emails are used fraudulently. You can also have a static IP at an additional cost. Finally, the CyberSec option allows you to limit advertising and malicious sites through the use of DNS.

Technical assistance

The NordVPN Help Center offers several tutorials to help you install VPN on different types of devices, as well as various articles to solve the most common problems. A chat system allows you to contact a person 24/7. The system does not offer on-the-fly translation and you will have to wait for a French speaker to be available, which can be quite long. A translation tool would undoubtedly be beneficial to save time. Note that in our testing, human technical support was very hit and miss in response times, ranging from a few minutes to several hours.

Getting started

Installation

Classically, NordVPN distributes client software for macOS - available in the Apple Store, but beware, there are two versions of the software (IKE with WireGuard and OpenVPN without WireGuard, but with more options) - and Windows which install in a few clicks. The Linux version requires a passage through the Terminal, but you can also manually configure the Network Manager. Again, this will not allow you to take advantage of all the options offered on other operating systems. The app is also available on Android and iOS in their app stores.

Interface

For this article, we mainly tested version 6.37.2.0 on Windows, but also on macOS and Android. Once connected, the application displays a graphical interface that is both elegant and uncluttered which presents a planisphere with the different countries in which it is possible to connect. It's hard to make it simpler. And if geography isn't your strong suit, you can choose your host country from a list that also allows you to select specialized servers. Clicking on the three dots allows you to obtain the load rate of the servers, and once the connection is established, you have little information on the current connection (protocol used, speeds, specificity of the server, etc.).

Smartphone

The Android app looks a lot like the computer version with the ability to quickly choose a location via a map or a list of countries. It is possible to choose the connection city to improve performance depending on its location. On Android, the split tunneling option is available, unlike the iOS version.