Mullvad Review (2026): The Best Privacy Record, and Why It's Still #8

Why the best privacy score is only #8 overall

It is worth answering this before anything else, because the two numbers look contradictory.

Our overall score weighs privacy at 30%, speed at 25%, streaming at 15%, apps at 15% and value at 15%. Mullvad scores 9.9 on privacy — the highest we have ever awarded — and 8.7 on speed, which is fourth. It then scores 6.2 on streaming, because most services are blocked, and 7.0 on value, because five devices at a flat €5 loses to unlimited devices at $2.19.

So the ranking is not a verdict on how good Mullvad is. It is a verdict on how many jobs it does. For the one job it is built for, nothing here beats it.

Privacy and logging: the strongest case on the site

Most VPN privacy claims come down to "trust our policy, here is an audit". Mullvad's comes down to something better: it does not have the information in the first place.

Signup produces a number. You click "Generate account" and get a random 16-digit string. No email address, no username, no password, no name. That number is your entire identity. If you lose it, Mullvad cannot help you recover it, because it does not know who you are.

Payment need not identify you either. Card and PayPal work normally. So does cryptocurrency. So does putting cash in an envelope with your account number on a slip of paper and posting it to Sweden — an option that exists precisely so that no payment processor sits between you and the service.

It was tested for real. In April 2023 Swedish police executed a search warrant at Mullvad's Gothenburg office looking for customer data. They left empty-handed, and Mullvad published an account of the visit. An audit tells you an inspector looked and found nothing recorded. A raid tells you the police looked and found nothing recorded. The second is stronger evidence.

The supporting infrastructure is consistent: RAM-only servers, an infrastructure audit by Assured AB in 2024, every app open-source and independently reviewed, Swedish jurisdiction. Leak tests were clean on every platform. Mullvad also runs its own DNS and offers multi-hop and obfuscation.

Privacy sub-score: 9.9. Nothing else on this site is above 9.8.

Speed

Mullvad averaged 590 Mbps on our 940 Mbps line, fourth of the ten and ahead of several more expensive services. US East reached 660 Mbps, the UK 640, Singapore 520 and Australia 540 — notably, the smallest long-distance fall-off of anything outside the top three. Added latency was 8 ms.

That is a genuinely good result from a network of only 650 servers in 49 countries, and it tells you something about how the network is run. Mullvad owns or leases fewer, better-provisioned machines rather than advertising a large number of them.

The country count is the real constraint, not the speed. 49 countries against NordVPN's 118 means there are places where Mullvad simply has no nearby server, and no amount of WireGuard tuning fixes distance.

Streaming: 5 of 14

Netflix US, Netflix Canada, Netflix Australia, Hulu and Max worked. Netflix UK, Netflix Japan, Prime Video, Disney+, BBC iPlayer, DAZN, Paramount+, Peacock and ITVX all failed on every server we tried.

This is not a bug and Mullvad does not treat it as one. Unblocking streaming services means continuously rotating IP addresses ahead of detection, which means running the network in a way Mullvad has decided not to. The company's own documentation tells people not to buy it for streaming.

We report the number because our matrix is consistent across all ten VPNs, but the honest framing is: do not buy Mullvad to watch things. If that is your use, NordVPN unblocked all fourteen.

Torrenting

P2P is allowed on every server, with no labelled subset to hunt for, and at 590 Mbps average the throughput is there. The anonymous account is a real advantage for anyone whose concern is the ordinary notice-from-your-ISP mechanism.

But port forwarding was removed in 2023. Downloading is unaffected; seeding is not — without an open port, other peers cannot initiate a connection to you, so upload suffers and private trackers that enforce ratios will notice. Proton VPN and PIA both include it, and for a torrent-first purchase either is the better tool.

Apps and ease of use

Mullvad's apps are minimal in a way that is either refreshing or spartan depending on what you wanted. A connect button, a server list, a settings page with more real controls than most — multi-hop, obfuscation via bridges, DNS content blocking, a kill switch that is always on rather than optional.

Every app is open-source and has been independently reviewed, which is rarer than it should be and is the practical reason to believe the client is doing what it says.

What you do not get: an Android TV app, a Fire TV app, an Apple TV app, or any of the streaming-adjacent conveniences. Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, Android, browser extensions and routers is the whole list. Five simultaneous devices, which in a household of phones and laptops is a real ceiling.

Pricing: flat, and the argument for it

€5 a month. That is the entire price list. No annual plan, no two-year plan, no Black Friday, no introductory rate, no renewal.

Against NordVPN's $3.39 or Surfshark's $2.19 on two-year plans, that is expensive. Against their $12.99 monthly rates it is cheap. And it is the only pricing on this site where the number you pay in year three is the number you agreed to in month one — every other VPN here renews higher, several of them by more than 60%.

There is a privacy argument too: no long subscription means no stored payment relationship, which is consistent with everything else about how the service works.

Customer support

Email and a help centre. No live chat, no phone. Responses took under a day in our tests and were technical and direct. If you want hand-holding at 2am, this is not it.

Is Mullvad safe?

It is the safest VPN we rate, and the only one where the claim has been tested by a police search rather than only by an auditor. Anonymous accounts, cash payments, RAM-only servers, open-source audited apps, Swedish jurisdiction, clean leak tests, an always-on kill switch.

Is Mullvad worth it?

If privacy is the actual reason you want a VPN: yes, unreservedly, and the €5 is the least interesting thing about the decision. If you want a VPN that also handles Netflix, covers the family's eight devices and costs $2 a month: no, and Mullvad would tell you the same.

Who should buy Mullvad — and who shouldn't

Buy it if you want a VPN that cannot identify you, if you object on principle to introductory pricing that triples on renewal, if you run Linux and want open-source clients, or if the 2023 raid is the kind of evidence that actually moves you — it should.

Don't if you want to stream, if you need more than five devices, if you seed torrents, or if you want live chat. Those are not oversights Mullvad plans to fix; they are the consequences of the choices that make it good at the one thing.