Below is a table that breaks down the three payment tiers Surfshark VPN offers. Whether you opt for one month, six months or two years, you can take advantage of a 30-day money-back guarantee (Surfshark doesn’t have a free trial). There is also a seven-day free trial, but you need to sign up via the app to access it. For comparison, the table below shows how Surfshark VPN compares to our current top five VPN providers. In fairness, this was a good way to test the Surfshark support, which was very quick to respond on live chat and offered timely assistance to help me resolve this issue (one I haven’t faced with other VPNs). I wasn’t off to a great start with Surfshark but it was pretty much all smooth sailing thereafter. While the 3,200 servers and 65+ countries are on the short side compared to our current best VPN recommendations, there are five cities to choose from for Australia, three for the UK, and 23 for the US. Most of the rest of the countries are limited to a single connection option except for Canada (three), France (three), Germany (four), India (three), Italy (two), Poland (two), Portugal (two) and Spain (three). It’s also worth noting that the country count was 62 at the time of updating this review. The other issue is that while it’s convenient that a new server location is a single click away, there’s no way to manually connect to alternative servers, meaning you’re at the mercy of whatever Surfshark determines to be the best. If you do like a simplified VPN, Surfshark defaults to the fastest server (closest to you) and there’s a fast connect option that will connect you to the nearest country (New Zealand in my tests). Unlike other VPNs I’ve tested, Surfshark didn’t meddle with any of my normal internet activities, which means I was free to use peer-to-peer software like Slack, all of my digital gaming platforms, and regular web use was uninterrupted while Surfshark was switched on. This means you can feasibly buy one account and protect all the supported devices in your home, without having to worry about any restrictions. Surfshark even encourages you to share your VPN account with your family members. For comparison, the VPN in our current top five with the most simultaneous connections is PureVPN and that has 10, which is great next to its peers but nowhere near as impressive compared to Surfshark. Here’s a list of the devices that Surfshark VPN supports: The table below uses my Superloop NBN 100/40Mbps Fibre-to-the-Curb home internet as the basis for basic speed test comparisons with Surfshark during the middle of the day. That said, upload speeds take a massive hit, jumping from the 13% slowdown for the Sydney server to a whopping 73% when connecting to the one in San Francisco. On the latency front, there was impressively no change with the VPN on or off with the Sydney server, while the jump to 157ms is beaten only marginally by NordVPN, ExpressVPN, and Hotspot Shield’s 153ms latency. The table below shows how well Surfshark performs with popular US and Australian streaming services (and one UK alternative). All of these services have a tendency of being able to sniff out lackluster VPNs. For Australian server tests, Stan passed with flying colors but Kayo was a little trickier. Kayo didn’t score the usual VPN error where it refuses to load, but it took about 20 seconds just to load into the main menu and then refused to play any content. You can (incredibly slowly) navigate the menus, but you shouldn’t expect to be able to watch Kayo content with Surfshark. The table below uses the best-case 11% download speed variance when connecting to a CyberGhost US server and applies it to the average typical evening download speeds (TEDS) for providers across NBN fixed-line speed tiers. To put it into practical perspective, the three columns on the right of the table show the number of simultaneous streams you could run on with a single account for Netflix, Hulu, and BBC iPlayer. Note that while Netflix taps out at four simultaneous streams, BBC iPlayer technically allows for unlimited streams and Hulu has an unlimited-screens upgrade. Part of the subscription cost includes a selection of servers in Germany, Japan, Singapore, the UK, and the US that has static IP addresses if consistency is important to you. If you want to go the opposite route and don’t mind the slower speeds, you can up your online security by connecting to dedicated ‘MultiHop’ servers that route traffic through multiple Surfshark servers. Surfshark also has a ‘Whitelister’ feature, which is the VPN’s term for split tunneling, except it makes this usually more advanced VPN feature more accessible to everyday users. Click on it to add the apps or websites you’d like to bypass Surfshark so they work like they would with the VPN disconnected. You’ll also find ‘CleanWeb’ in the same part of the app, which is off by default, but is absolutely worth flicking on to block ads, trackers, and malware. There’s also a Smart DNS service if you’re looking to access faster speeds for streaming geoblocked content (albeit without the protection). Finally, Surfshark is serious about your privacy in terms of its logging policy, which is to say that it doesn’t keep a log of what you do online. For Surfshark, this includes no logs for:
IP address Browsing history Used bandwidth Session information Network traffic Connection timestamps
While all three VPNs boast easy-to-use interfaces with fast connection and disconnection times, NordVPN has more servers (5,440 vs 3,200) but fewer server locations (59 vs 65+), and ExpressVPN has fewer servers (3,000+ vs 3,200) but has servers in more locations (94 vs 65+). All three VPN services boast zero-logging policies, Smart DNS, split tunneling, military-grade encryption, and a 30-day money-back guarantee in lieu of trials. While Surfshark boasts unlimited simultaneous connections, NordVPN only offers six, and ExpressVPN taps out at five per account. In terms of speed, NordVPN and ExpressVPN only had single-digit percentage changes for download and upload when connecting to a Sydney server, whereas Surfshark takes a 13% hit. That said, Surfshark’s 11% change to download speeds beats the best test results from NordVPN and ExpressVPN (19% and 16%) when connecting to the closest US server. Surfshark also beats NordVPN for better upload speeds (73% slowdown vs 84%) but can’t hold a candle to ExpressVPN’s 29% change.
