Best Mobile VPN of 2025

There are hundreds of VPNs available, and with so many of them offering mobile apps, it can be difficult to choose the right solution for your iOS or Android phone or tablet. Based on our extensive research and hands-on testing of VPNs over the years, these are the factors to look out for when choosing the best mobile VPN for your needs and budget:

Privacy

If there’s anything you can’t compromise on while choosing a VPN, it’s privacy. Without reliable privacy guarantees, you’re handing all of your data over to a third party that you can’t trust. It’s especially important to make sure you trust your mobile VPN provider, as there are plenty of scam apps masquerading as VPNs on both the Google Play and Apple app storefronts that actually just sell your data to the highest bidder. At the bare minimum, your VPN should be using industry-standard AES 256-bit encryption (with the OpenVPN and IKEv2 VPN protocols) or ChaCha20 with WireGuard, along with basic privacy protections like a kill switch, DNS leak protection and an audited no-logs policy.

If you have heightened privacy needs, you’ll need a VPN provider that’s based in a privacy-friendly jurisdiction, offers obfuscation and has a RAM-only server architecture. Additional privacy features to look out for include Tor over VPN functionality (which uses Tor to make it even harder to trace your traffic back to its source), ad and tracker blockers and multi-hop connections (which make it even more difficult to trace your traffic back to its source using multiple VPN connections). These features can offer increased privacy but aren’t absolutely essential. It’s also a good idea to choose a VPN that has a proven track record of being both trustworthy and transparent. One of the best ways to immediately tell whether a VPN provider is confident in its privacy policy is whether it regularly publish the results of third-party audits commissioned by a trustworthy cybersecurity company. It’s not the only privacy aspect you should look at, but it’s a good start.

Speed

Your mobile VPN’s connection speeds can have a major influence on the quality of your streaming, downloading, video conferencing, gaming and general web browsing activities. To keep things running as smoothly as possible, you’ll want a VPN that will have as minimal an impact on your regular internet speeds as possible, whether you’re using Wi-Fi or mobile data.