Mullvad VPN is the VPN that privacy people recommend when nobody is paying them to recommend anything. No affiliate program, no discount funnels, no countdown timers — just a Swedish company that has charged the same €5 a month since 2009 and designs every part of the service so that it knows as little about you as possible.
That design produces a different kind of review. There is no pricing-tier table to decode and no renewal trap to warn you about. The questions that matter are: how strong is the privacy engineering, what do you give up for it, and whether you are the kind of user the trade-offs favor. (New to VPNs entirely? Start with what a VPN actually does.)
Independence note: This review is not sponsored. Mullvad runs no affiliate program at all, so every link to mullvad.net on this page is a plain link — we earn nothing if you sign up. Some other reviews on this site do carry affiliate links; those pages disclose it.
What Makes Mullvad Different
- No account, just a number. Signing up generates a random 16-digit account number. No email, no username, no password-reset flow — the number is the entire identity. There is nothing to recover because Mullvad holds nothing that identifies you.
- Cash in an envelope is a payment method. Card, PayPal and bank transfer exist for convenience, but you can also pay with Bitcoin, Bitcoin Lightning, Monero, prepaid vouchers from retail resellers — or physical cash mailed with your account number on a note.
- No recurring billing. Mullvad removed subscription auto-renewal in 2022 specifically to store less payment data. You top up time like a prepaid SIM card.
- Flat €5/month since 2009. No intro rates, no renewal jumps, no coupons. The two-year price is 24 × €5.
- Founder-owned. Mullvad VPN AB is owned by its founders through the parent company Amagicom AB — not by a conglomerate that also happens to own VPN review sites.
The 2023 Police Raid — a No-Logs Policy, Tested
Every VPN claims no logs. Mullvad is one of the very few whose claim has been tested by force: in April 2023, Swedish police arrived at the Gothenburg office with a search warrant intending to seize customer data. They left with nothing — not because lawyers won an argument, but because the data they came for does not exist. No stored activity, no connection records tied to identities, nothing to hand over.
That incident is worth more than any marketing page, but Mullvad does the formal work too: its apps and infrastructure go through recurring third-party security audits (Cure53, X41 D-Sec and Assured among the firms), with the reports published in full — including the findings that weren't flattering. Every client app is open source.
Security & Privacy Deep Dive
- WireGuard-only since January 2026. Mullvad announced the retirement of OpenVPN far in advance and completed it on 15 January 2026. One modern, formally analyzed protocol means a smaller attack surface and consistent behavior on every platform. (It also has a real cost — see the trade-offs below.)
- RAM-only servers. The fleet runs diskless: a reboot wipes everything. Nothing to seize in a data center, nothing left on decommissioned hardware.
- Quantum-resistant tunnels. Desktop apps establish WireGuard tunnels with a post-quantum key exchange by default — protection against record-now-decrypt-later collection.
- DAITA. Defense Against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (2024) pads and shapes traffic to blunt machine-learning correlation attacks — a threat model most VPNs don't acknowledge at all.
- Multihop and obfuscation. Route through two servers at once, or wrap WireGuard traffic so it survives networks that try to block VPN protocols.
- Content blocking and free public DNS. The app offers DNS-level blocking of ads, trackers and malware — and Mullvad's encrypted DNS service (DoH/DoT) is free for everyone, subscriber or not.
- Swedish jurisdiction. Swedish law does not currently require VPN providers to retain customer traffic data, and the 2023 raid demonstrated what "nothing retained" means in practice.
How Fast Is It?
Fast enough that speed is rarely the deciding factor. WireGuard is the fastest mainstream protocol, and independent tests consistently place Mullvad in the same top band as NordVPN and Proton VPN — typically retaining 80–95% of baseline speed on nearby servers. Two caveats: the network is smaller (several hundred servers in roughly 40 countries), so your nearest server may sit farther away than with a mega-network; and there are no per-service optimized endpoints — you pick a location and you get that location.
Measure it yourself: run our speed test with the VPN off, then on, and compare what the tunnel actually costs on your connection.
What You Give Up (Deliberately)
Mullvad's cons are mostly design decisions, and it is fair to read them that way — but they are still cons if you need the feature:
- Streaming is not a product goal. Some platforms work from some locations, some of the time. Mullvad does not chase unblocking and will not promise you foreign catalogs. If streaming matters most, pick NordVPN.
- No port forwarding (removed in 2023) — torrent seeding and self-hosting through the tunnel became harder.
- No OpenVPN means OpenVPN-only routers and older firmware cannot connect at all. WireGuard-capable routers work fine.
- Five simultaneous devices, no dedicated IPs, no bundled password manager or antivirus — it is a VPN, full stop.
- Roughly 40 countries versus 100+ on the mega-networks — travelers needing unusual exit countries will notice.
- The account number is on you. Anonymous design means no recovery email. Store the number in a password manager — see Proton Pass vs Bitwarden.
Pricing
One plan: €5 per month, whether you buy one month or twelve. A 30-day money-back guarantee covers every payment method except cash — an anonymous refund is impossible by definition, which is consistency, not stinginess.
| Question | Mullvad's answer |
|---|---|
| Monthly price | €5 flat — unchanged since 2009 |
| Discounts / coupons | None, ever |
| Renewal price jump | None — there are no subscriptions to renew |
| Payment methods | Card, PayPal, bank transfer, Bitcoin, Lightning, Monero, vouchers, cash |
| Refund window | 30 days (except cash) |
| Simultaneous devices | 5 |
Mullvad vs NordVPN vs Proton VPN
| Mullvad | NordVPN | Proton VPN | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Maximum privacy | Streaming + features | Free tier + ecosystem |
| Account | Random number, no email | Email account | Email account |
| Pricing | €5 flat | Intro rates, renewal jumps | Tiers + genuine free plan |
| Streaming | Not a goal | Excellent | Good |
| Jurisdiction | Sweden | Panama (ops in Lithuania) | Switzerland |
Full reviews: NordVPN and Proton VPN, plus the head-to-head Proton VPN vs NordVPN.
If your question is "which VPN respects my privacy the most", this page is the answer. If it is "which VPN does the most things", it isn't.
Who Mullvad Is For
- 🕵️ Threat-model-first users — journalists, researchers, and anyone who picks tools by what they can prove rather than what they promise
- 💶 People who want to pay anonymously — cash, Monero, vouchers; no email anywhere in the chain
- 🐧 Linux and GrapheneOS users — first-class Linux GUI and CLI, and an F-Droid build on Android that skips Google Play entirely
- 🧾 Subscription-fatigue sufferers — no auto-renewal, no dark patterns, no upsells, a price that never moves
- 🧭 Mullvad Browser pairing — the company co-built the most fingerprint-resistant browser short of Tor with the Tor Project; pair the two, then check the result with our fingerprint test
Look elsewhere if: streaming libraries are the point (NordVPN), you need a genuine free tier (Proton VPN), you rely on port forwarding, or your setup depends on OpenVPN.
Our Verdict
Scored through a privacy lens — the lens this site exists for — Mullvad is the reference implementation: anonymous accounts, a no-logs policy proven under a police raid, RAM-only servers, open-source clients, honest flat pricing, and fifteen-plus years of behaving the same way regardless of industry trends. The trade-offs are real, but they cost you convenience, never privacy.
Rating: 9.2 / 10 — the privacy benchmark
Already Using a VPN? Verify It
A VPN you cannot verify is a promise, not a protection — and that applies to Mullvad too. With the VPN connected, run a VPN check, a DNS leak test, a WebRTC leak test and an IPv6 leak test. If your real IP or your ISP's resolver shows up, fix the setup before trusting it.
This review contains no affiliate links and nobody paid for it. It reflects this site's editorial assessment as of August 2026.