NordVPN

NordVPN (nordvpn S.A., Panama; the Nord Security group, founded in Lithuania in 2012 by Tom Okman and Eimantas Sabaliauskas, holding company in the Netherlands, valued at $3 billion in September 2023; merged with Surfshark in February 2022, sister product NordLayer) is the market leader by a distance, with about 15 million users, 8,000-plus servers in 149 countries and 440-plus in the UK across Edinburgh, Glasgow, London and Manchester. The technical set is broad: NordLynx (WireGuard) with post-quantum ML-KEM on every platform since May 2025, OpenVPN, Double VPN, Onion over VPN, obfuscated servers, Threat Protection, kill switch, split tunnelling, an open-source Linux CLI, ten devices. Two things matter for a team. Meshnet links your own devices into a private encrypted network, at no charge, even to non-subscribers. NordVPN announced its retirement on 18 August 2025, reversed the decision on 29 September ("Meshnet is not going anywhere") and is open-sourcing the underlying library. And Dedicated IP is a paid add-on with UK addresses in London, Edinburgh and Manchester (official renewal £61.08 a year, single connection on NordLynx, and it switches off post-quantum). Port forwarding needs the separate Dedicated Server product. The no-logs claim has been examined under ISAE 3000 by PwC in 2018 and 2020 and Deloitte every year since 2022, most recently December 2025, though the reports are behind a customer login, unlike Proton's and Mullvad's public PDFs.

The pricing is the objection. Prices shown to a UK visitor on 7 September 2026, with "VAT may apply", so ex VAT: Basic is £11.09 month-to-month, £4.09 a month on one year (£49.08) and £2.59 a month on the "2 years + 3 extra months" deal, £69.93 for 27 months; Complete £14.79 / £4.79 / £3.39; Ultimate Max £17.59 / £7.79 / £6.29. The struck-through prices on the page are the renewals, and the official renewal table confirms them: Basic renews at £104.28 a year (£8.69 a month), Complete at £163.08, and "the displayed prices are charged upon the automatic renewal … in the currency in which the first payment was made." That is a 236% step from the intro rate on a per-month basis, the largest here. Plan names change often (Basic/Plus/Ultra became Basic/Complete/Prime in 2025), refunds are 30 days and exclude App Store purchases. Trustpilot is 4.2 on 50,209 invited reviews with 12% one-star, dominated by charges after cancellation and full-price renewals. On the record: a rented Finnish server was breached in March 2018 via the datacentre's remote-management interface and disclosed only in October 2019, which drove the move to audits and diskless servers; and the UK ASA upheld a complaint in January 2023 against a radio ad that implied complete malware protection.

First-party: NordVPN was our VPN for more than five years, and it is the more feature-rich of the two (Meshnet and the UK dedicated IPs are genuinely useful for a small team) and it was reliable for us throughout. It is second only because of the renewal pricing and the Panama-plus-login-gated-audit posture against Proton's. Saaskly has an affiliate link for NordVPN; the verdict came first and the link does not affect the score.