ExpressVPN review: Expensive, but worth every penny

When you think of VPNs, ExpressVPN is likely one of the first names that pops into your head.  That’s no surprise as the company has grown into a household name over recent years and become synonymous with online privacy.

It is, and has been, one of the most trustworthy and notable VPN providers on the market from the very beginning. And with each successive year the service just keeps improving. Since our last review, ExpressVPN has undertaken two more independent security audits, launched post-quantum encryption for all apps, and added its own suite of identity-theft protection tools. It has become a one-stop privacy and security powerhouse.

Further reading: See our roundup of the best VPNs to learn about competing products.

ExpressVPN in brief:

• P2P allowed: Yes
• Simultaneous device connections: 8
• Business location: British Virgin Islands
• Number of servers: 3,000+
• Number of country locations: 105
• Cost: $12.95 per month, or $99.95 for a year

What are ExpressVPN’s features and services?

Sam Singleton

When you first open ExpressVPN, it has a simple single-panel interface with a connected/not connected button in the center, and the country selection below it. Then below that it shows the best smart location based on your geo data. The interface looks about the same as it has for a few iterations now and that’s because it’s simple and effective—if it ain’t broke don’t fix it.

When connected, the screen remains largely the same except that ExpressVPN will now show a selection of shortcuts to websites and internet-connected apps such as Google, Wikipedia, and Gmail. You can edit these shortcuts to customize them for your uses. 

If you click the drop-down menu in the upper-right corner, you can access additional things such as VPN Locations, Options, and Help & Support. The Options menu is where the meat of your settings are located. Here ExpressVPN offers a decent variety of customizable features, the highlights being a kill-switch, split-tunneling, and ability to switch protocols. All of these are fairly standard across all VPN services. 

Notably, however, ExpressVPN does not offer a multi-hop feature to allow you to further obfuscate your connection by chaining it through multiple VPN servers rather than just one. This is unfortunate as many competitors already offer multi-hop connections and it’s a useful privacy enhancing feature for users. For a service as robust as ExpressVPN to not have multi-hop is disappointing—it feels like someone didn’t get the memo.

Sam Singleton

Additionally, under the Options menu, you can enable ExpressVPN’s own ad- and tracker-blocking service called “Threat Manager.” There is also the option to turn on parental controls to block adult sites in case your kids are using the service as well. This addition of extra security features on top of the VPN is something that a lot of the top VPN providers such as Surfshark and NordVPN are offering now too. It’s certainly nice to have and you won’t find me arguing against it, but at this point there are likely better stand-alone security suites that offer better blocking and protection.

It’s also worth mentioning that while I focused on the Windows app for the purposes of this review, ExpressVPN does offer incredibly broad device and browser support. Besides Windows, it’s available for MacOS, iOS, Android, Linux, ChromeOS, Fire Stick, Android TV, capable routers, and most recently Apple TV. Not to mention that ExpressVPN’s browser extensions from Chrome and Firefox let you fully control the app from the browser instead of acting as simple browser-only proxy connections.

How much does ExpressVPN cost?

ExpressVPN offers three different subscription options for its service: a monthly plan, a 1-year plan, and a 2-year plan. The monthly plan costs $12.95 per month, which makes it one of the most expensive VPNs on the market if you subscribe month-to-month.

The 1-year plan becomes a bit more reasonable at $6.67 per month and throws in an extra three months for free for subscribers. The 2-year plan becomes the most affordable option—if you’re okay paying the sum total upfront—as it drops to $4.99 per month and you get an extra four free months upon sign-up.

ExpressVPN offers a 7-day free trial for new members as well as a 30-day money-back guarantee on all subscription plans if you decide that it isn’t for you. 

Subscriptions can be paid for via credit card, PayPal, or Bitcoin.

How is ExpressVPN’s performance?

When testing how fast a VPN is, I rate the service’s speeds across servers in six different countries all around the world over the course of a few days and then compare them to my baseline internet speed during that time. 

In my testing, ExpressVPN server speeds were once again excellent. Across all locations tested, the average download speed was 70 percent compared to the base speed and the average upload speed was an equally impressive 80 percent compared to the base. That firmly puts it into our top five fastest VPNs, up there as one of the speed kings—the Ferrari to NordVPN’s Red Bull, if you will.

The speeds this time around did drop about 1 percent from last year’s tests, but that shouldn’t be cause for concern as internet speeds are notoriously fickle. It’s still a lot faster than most services we’ve evaluated and is more than sufficient to accommodate a home user’s online activities. You aren’t likely to notice much, if any, buffering issues while streaming or lag while gaming. 

ExpressVPN has long promised that it will unblock Netflix and that still holds true. In fact, it not only unblocked Netflix, but also any other major streaming service that I tested including Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, Disney Plus, and AppleTV.

How is ExpressVPN’s security and privacy?

ExpressVPN offers two different VPN protocols: OpenVPN and its proprietary Lightway protocol. It uses this proprietary Lightway protocol to connect by default—this can be changed under the Options menu if you wish.

In just the last year, ExpressVPN has made significant upgrades to the Lightway protocol, upgrading it to DTLS 1.3 for better encryption. Along with this comes post-quantum protection across all major platforms, future-proofing the VPN’s encryption standard against quantum computers.

Sam Singleton

The Lightway protocol is also open source and you can find it on GitHub. It has also undergone a security audit by the penetration testing firm Cure53. For those who don’t want to use Lightway, there is the option to use OpenVPN instead. IKEv2 and L2TP/IPSec protocols are available as well depending on your operating system.

Another added privacy feature that ExpressVPN implemented recently is ShuffleIP. This feature, active by default, automatically changes your IP address for each website you visit rather than remaining static like many other VPNs. This privacy-enhancing feature makes it much more difficult for potential third parties to track your online activity.

As far as user privacy is concerned, there aren’t many better VPNs out there than ExpressVPN. It claims not to log any of your browsing history, or other personal data such as DNS queries, IP addresses, connection timestamps, or session duration. It does keep diagnostic and crash reports, but one thing that I really like is that ExpressVPN’s app on Windows asks you up front if you want to contribute this data. More of these options in the future, please.

The service is remarkably upfront about what it does and doesn’t track and it backs up its claims too with numerous independent audits. In 2022 alone, ExpressVPN underwent 12 audits on various parts of its service. In 2023, it undertook an additional audit and most recently in 2024 it completed two more—the latest being in June by Cure53 of its browser extension. 

Surely, the sheer number of independent audits makes ExpressVPN unmatched among all VPN providers. It’s a level of transparency that can only be applauded.

Furthermore, ExpressVPN is located in the British Virgin Islands which is not subject to any international signals intelligence-sharing alliance or data-retention requirements. Meaning it’s much more difficult for any government to force ExpressVPN to share any data about users or servers. Turkey even forcefully seized ExpressVPN servers in 2017 and still came up with nothing anyway—I call that the ultimate independent audit.

Is ExpressVPN worth it?

The short answer is, absolutely. In fact I don’t think that there are many VPN services out on the market today that rival ExpressVPN. Its combination of excellent speeds, ability to unblock every streaming service, and dedication to user privacy hits all of the right notes. Add to that an interface that is dead-simple to use and broad device support and you get a VPN that ticks just about every box. It might lack some tweakable power-user security features and other services may offer a larger catalog of nonessential security addons, but most of us won’t even notice these things.

ExpressVPN isn’t the cheapest option available, but for everything that it does offer, the higher price is more than worth it. Practically everything about this service is top-tier and as a whole, ExpressVPN is still quite simply one of the best VPNs around.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.