finally upgraded to an iPhone 16 but now am looking for a lightweight VPN. wondering which paid VPN is best since I tried a free VPN before but it was too slow (also read somewhere they collect data).
cost isn’t much of an issue, my main concern is battery life. was hoping to find something that won’t drain my battery?
What are you trying to do with your vpn? If it’s just a simple “out and about on public WiFi” vpn - id just use Tailscale on a computer in your house and have your phone use it as an exit node. This is totally free.
If you want a vpn for torrenting and that sort of stuff, none are going to really be better than any other in terms of battery drain. From a “I’m a cybersecurity professional” perspective, mullvad is kind of the king of the hill for most people who value privacy above all. Protonvpn is quite good, nord is mainstream but for regular human use also quite good. I personally use mullvad and Proton and they are fairly equal in battery drain.
I can really recommend checking this spreadsheet out. It has a TON of info in it
thanks for the detailed reply! sorry I forgot to mention in my post I’m looking for a vpn to get around geo restricted content aside from security/privacy. nord seems tempting since it looks like it can access geo locked content on netflix. was also interested in proton vpn but I couldn’t find a straight answer on google about whether it can do it or not
can it bypass geo restricted content? sorry I forgot to mention that in the post
So for Netflix and streaming services, this is tricky. A lot of vpns are IP blocked but can work on some servers, then those servers get flagged and can’t. You could try a private vps for this through aws or linode but that takes a lot of technical knowledge. I think nord would be your best bet for this, however I will say I haven’t had issues on protonvpn. Mullvad is a bit more spotty.