A side-by-side on jurisdiction, audit history, kill switch and what each service is genuinely good at.
| hide.me | PrivadoVPN | |
|---|---|---|
| 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 | Competitively priced, undercutting most premium VPNs on annual plans |
| Jurisdiction | Malaysia — outside the 5-Eyes, 9-Eyes and 14-Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances | Switzerland |
| Free plan | A genuine lifetime free plan — no ads, no data-selling, no throttling, capped monthly data | Free plan with 10GB/month data |
| Simultaneous devices | Up to 10 simultaneous connections | Unlimited simultaneous devices |
| Server footprint | 2,600+ servers in 92+ countries, rated up to 10 Gbps each | 236 server locations across 66 cities |
| 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 | AES-256 encryption and a published no-log policy, bundled with an ad blocker and antivirus |
| 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 on desktop and mobile apps |
A wider security bundle — VPN plus ad blocker, threat protection and antivirus — for one price. On jurisdiction, PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland. On audit history: aes-256 encryption and a published no-log policy, bundled with an ad blocker and antivirus
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 PrivadoVPN's specific strengths — a wider security bundle — VPN plus ad blocker, threat protection and antivirus — for one price — 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.
PrivadoVPN bundles more security tools into one subscription, which suits someone who wants a single app for VPN plus antivirus. But hide.me's no-logs claim has gone through a third-party audit repeated annually since 2015 and a 13-year transparency-report history; PrivadoVPN's no-log policy, as far as our research found, is a stated policy rather than a named, repeated third-party audit. If audit history matters most, hide.me has the stronger paper trail.