A side-by-side on jurisdiction, audit history, kill switch and what each service is genuinely good at.
| hide.me | CyberGhost | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | €11.99/mo billed monthly, or as low as €2.69/mo on the 24+2-month plan (€69.99 billed every 26 months) — every plan carries a “renews at the same price” guarantee | Aggressive long-term-plan discounts, noticeably higher at the month-to-month rate |
| Jurisdiction | Malaysia — outside the 5-Eyes, 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances | Romania (legally); owned by Kape Technologies, headquartered in the UK |
| Free plan | A genuine lifetime free plan — no ads, no data-selling, no throttling, capped monthly data | No ongoing free plan |
| Simultaneous devices | Up to 10 simultaneous connections | 7 simultaneous connections |
| Server footprint | 2,600+ servers in 92+ countries, rated up to 10 Gbps each | 9,000+ servers in 100 countries |
| No-logs audit | Independently audited no-logs policy (Securitum, first audited 2015, re-audited yearly), a public transparency report published every year since 2013, and VPN Trust Initiative accreditation | No-logs policy the company says was audited by Deloitte, though the report isn't public — customers must request it directly |
| Kill switch | Stealth Guard — a per-app kill switch that automatically cuts internet if the VPN drops, plus Multihop double-VPN routing and Dynamic Port Forwarding | Kill switch included across apps |
One of the largest server fleets in the industry and a 45-day money-back window on longer plans. On jurisdiction, CyberGhost is based in Romania (legally); owned by Kape Technologies, headquartered in the UK. On audit history: no-logs policy the company says was audited by deloitte, though the report isn't public — customers must request it directly
hide.me's no-logs policy has been independently audited every year since 2015 by Securitum, it publishes a transparency report every year going back to 2013, and it holds VPN Trust Initiative accreditation — a longer, more repeated verification history than most VPN reviews can point to. Its Malaysia jurisdiction sits outside the 5-Eyes, 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes alliances, and Stealth Guard's per-app kill switch automatically cuts your connection the instant the VPN tunnel drops.
If CyberGhost's specific strengths — one of the largest server fleets in the industry and a 45-day money-back window on longer plans — matter most to you, it's a reasonable pick. If a repeated, named third-party no-logs audit and a jurisdiction outside every major surveillance alliance are non-negotiable for your threat model, hide.me's track record is hard to match.
CyberGhost's server count and money-back window are generous, but its ownership by Kape Technologies — which also owns ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access — is worth knowing if you specifically want an independent provider; hide.me states plainly on its own about page that it's “100% independent” and not part of a larger holding group. And CyberGhost's Deloitte audit report isn't public the way hide.me's Securitum report is.