Best UK VPN: The top-rated VPN service for UK users

Best VPN UK: At a glance

NordVPN

ExpressVPN

CyberGhost VPN

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Will a VPN work in the UK?

The best UK VPN

1. NordVPN

2. ExpressVPN

3. CyberGhost VPN

What is split-tunnelling?

Hunting for the best VPN to use in the UK? With a truly mind-boggling number of VPN services available, finding the right one can be tough. We’ve tested the biggest brands out there to find the ultimate Virtual Private Network (VPN) for those in the United Kingdom.

Haven’t got the time to read our complete guide to VPNs in the UK? No worries, sign-up for NordVPN.

This brilliant VPN service offers everything UK users could possibly need. It has incredibly easy-to-use apps for all of your devices – iPhone, Android, iPad, Amazon Fire TV, Windows PC, and even your Wi-Fi router – which makes it a great choice for VPN newbies. However, NordVPN also bundles a number of advanced features, like split-tunnelling, a dedicated IP address, MeshNet technology, and built-in malware protection, for those who want to dive into the settings.

1/ NordVPN – Get 3 months FREE + save 68%

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Our top pick for UK subscribers – NordVPN. It has beautifully-designed apps, advanced features like Split-Tunnelling and Dark Web monitoring, and a competitive price tag. There’s also 24/7 customer support and a 30-day money-back guarantee!

2/ ExpressVPN – Get 3 months FREE + save 49%

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ExpressVPN is a great choice for people based in the UK looking for a VPN. This provider specialises in streaming – with minimal impact on your download speeds and a team dedicated to unblocking servers that Netflix has blacklisted!

3/ CyberGhost VPN – Get 2 months FREE + save 82%

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If you’re unsure about how a Virtual Private Network will fit into your (digital) life, CyberGhost offers a longer money-back guarantee than any other VPN provider in the UK – up to 45-days of your new subscription!

In the past, VPNs were only a requirement for laptops dished out by the IT department at your work …but now, these fiendishly clever apps are commonplace on streaming set-top boxes, smartphones, tablets, and PCs at home. Yes, VPNs are well and truly mainstream.

That’s because the best VPNs unlock a number of benefits when heading online. First up, VPNs ensure all of your web traffic is encrypted – keeping it safe from bad actors looking to steal your data as well as preventing your broadband provider and advertisers from keeping tabs on your habits online. Without a VPN, your online data is like a personal message on the back of a postcard, with everything visible during its voyage to your the intended recipient. VPNs solve that issue.

Not only that, but VPNs also allow you to manually change your IP address, which is allocated to your device when you connect to the internet and includes data about your current location. If you’re in the UK, that’ll allow you to pick an IP address abroad – so you can watch unblocked Netflix, sports fixtures, HBO Max, and websites that are not currently available in England, Wales, Scotland or Northern Ireland. Likewise, if you’re away from home and want to appear as if you are in the UK, a good VPN can do that for you too.

If you want more information on how UK users can benefit from a VPN as well as some of the other prominent providers on the market, scroll down to read our comprehensive guide on the best VPN in the UK.

Will a VPN work in the UK?

In a nutshell – yes, it will.

There are a number of countries that outright ban the use of Virtual Private Networks, including China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and the UAE. Meanwhile, other nations, including Belarus, Iraq, North Korea, Oman, and Turkmenistan, have passed specific laws that ban the use of VPNs entirely.

Fortunately, as you can see from the list above, the United Kingdom isn’t included in either of these categories. As such, you’ll be able to sign-up, download and install almost any VPN when living in the UK. Once installed, activating your new VPN will create a secure, encrypted tunnel for all of your online traffic – protecting every website you visit, the amount of time you spend online, the files that you download – from everyone, including your broadband provider.

This encryption will also shield you from man-in-the-middle attacks, which allow bad actors on the same Wi-Fi network as you to intercept your online traffic and steal crucial information – like payment details. These cyber-attacks are particularly prevalent on free public Wi-Fi networks, like those available in coffee shops or airport terminals. It’s the reason the IT department at your work likely forces you to connect via a VPN when you’re travelling with work.

Using a VPN in the UK will allow you to spoof your IP address to make it appear as if you’re logging on from another location on the planet. This could allow you to access different content on your favourite streaming service, sports fixtures that don’t air in the UK, websites that might be blocked, and more.

The best UK VPN

If you’re looking for the ultimate Virtual Private Network to allow you to use from the UK, scroll down to find our complete list of options. Our top pick is NordVPN, which offers a number of brilliant discounts, pricing in £ for UK customers, and server locations across the UK. We’ve got more information on NordVPN and why we’ve been so impressed with its software below.

1. NordVPN

NordVPN

An Easy-To-Use VPN With Gorgeous Mobile Apps

Things To Know

Money-back guarantee: Yes, 30 days
Customer support: 24/7 live chat
Server locations: 80+
Maximum number of connections: 6
Password manager: Yes

What We Love

Affordable Subscription
Brilliant Apps For All Platforms
Fast VPN Connection
Monitors For Password Leaks
Split Tunnelling Included
Never Stores Data On Customers

What We Don’t

Fewer Server Locations Than Rivals

Whether you’re new to VPNs or not, NordVPN is a brilliant place to start. That’s because this provider has some of the most beautifully-designed apps on the market. Available on a wide range of platforms, NordVPN makes it super simple to connect to a server from around the world and change your location from the UK to elsewhere. Your most frequently-visited countries will be listed at the top of the user interface, so you can jump back to your recent servers with a single tap.

The incredible ease-of-use is something that we praised in our five-star NordVPN review.

The NordVPN app will proactively monitor the Dark Web to make sure that none of your login credentials has leaked online. That includes your email addresses and passwords.

If your details have been leaked on forums on the Dark Web, NordVPN will warn you so you can quickly change your login credentials to keep-out cyber crooks from your online accounts. This isn’t something that is unique to NordVPN, a number of password managers – like 1Password and LastPass – offer similar monitoring. However, if you don’t want multiple subscriptions, NordVPN will handle this for you.

NordVPN allows subscribers to sign-in to their account on 6 different devices at the same time. That’s very generous, especially compared with some of its closest rivals. And there’s no shortage of apps to download with your VPN subscription.

NordVPN has apps for almost every device you could think of, including smartphones, from tablets, games consoles, Chromebooks, to Fire TV Stick dongles, Windows and macOS. You can even install NordVPN directly on your Wi-Fi router, so that every device that connects to your home Wi-Fi network in the UK will be automatically routed via the VPN and shielded by encryption, or (if you want) re-routed via a different country to appear as if you’re abroad.

When it comes to connecting to servers from around the world, NordVPN offers a pretty impressive selection – with a choice of 60 nations worldwide. That’s not quite as many as you’ll get from some of the other VPN providers in this list – like ExpressVPN, which boasts 94 possible countries. If you’re looking to subscribe to a VPN to change your UK IP address to somewhere much more exotic, you might want to look elsewhere.

That said, the most popular locations for UK users are all catered for – like the United States. For most UK subscribers, NordVPN will more than makes up for its shortfall in the number of countries with the dizzying number of servers worldwide (more than 5,000 available worldwide compared to just 160 for ExpressVPN), which ensures you’re always able to find a solid connection – even at peak times when some servers could become congested with a flood of users.

If you’re thinking of subscribing to a VPN to connect to new streaming services (or expand the catalogue of boxsets and blockbusters available from the service you’re already subscribed to), then NordVPN should only marginally impact download speeds. Without NordVPN enabled, we clocked up 130Mbps and a few moments later, with its VPN enabled and shielding our data, we recorded a download speed of 100Mbps. Sure, that’s a hit …but given that our data was beamed around to the other side of the planet, it’s an acceptable hit.

And that’s still more than enough bandwidth to stream in crisp 4K Ultra HD in multiple rooms around the house. And with features like split-tunnelling included with NordVPN, you only need to take the hit to your speeds on devices that need to be tapping into a server on the other side of the globe.

For those who don’t know, split-tunnelling allows you to pick multiple servers for your online traffic. So, while it might be an advantage for certain devices, like an Amazon Fire TV Stick, to think that it’s in the United States to unlock more boxsets, sports, and movies on streaming services, you might not want that for your iPhone, which needs to know your approximate location for Google Maps, for example.

Picking a server closer to home should also reduce the impact on your download speeds. So, it’s possible to stay connected via a Virtual Private Network in the UK, without sacrificing any download speed on devices where you don’t need to appear abroad.

Of course, a number of these features are available with the other VPNs included in this list. So, why have we ranked NordVPN above all others for UK subscribers? Well, it’s simple – NordVPN offers the best value for money.

While it has beautifully-designed software, apps for all of your favourite devices, advanced features like Dark Web monitoring and split-tunnelling, NordVPN has a comparatively low price compared to its biggest rival – ExpressVPN.

NordVPN offers a number of stellar deals, with prices regularly dropping below £3 a month for a subscription. It also offers a number of payment options for UK subscribers, including all major credit card providers (Mastercard, VISA, AMEX, and Discovery). PayPal and Amazon Pay are also accepted too. Unlike most of the other providers on this list, you can also pay for a subscription to NordVPN using Apple Pay and Google Pay. This will allow you to breeze through the checkout process, with your iPhone or Android device filling-in all of the payment details and keeping your credit card details private.

You can also subscribe to NordVPN using a number of the most popular cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ethereum.

Get 3 months FREE + save 64%

£9.99 £3.09 View Deal

For a limited time, get three months of NordVPN for free. Even better, the remaining months of your subscription will be discounted by a whopping 64% as part of its blockbuster Christmas sale!

24/7 Customer Support: Yes | 30-Day Money-Back Guarantee: Yes

2. ExpressVPN