Hide.me VPN Review | PCMag

When testing a VPN, we consider the service’s price, privacy, and technology. Hide.me does well in all of these areas, and it has a good collection of advanced features such as ad-blocking and per-app split tunneling. It has a reasonably simple app, is fairly priced compared with the competition, and is notable for its fully functional (if bandwidth-limited) free tier. We wish it offered specialized servers, but that’s a small complaint. As such, Hide.me VPN is our Editors’ Choice winner for affordable VPNs. If you can pay a bit more, NordVPN is our top pick for feature-packed VPNs.

How Much Does Hide.me Cost?

Unlike most other VPN services, Hide.me has a full-fledged free tier. Without even giving your credit card information, you can access five Hide.me VPN server locations on one device at a time. You are, however, limited to 2GB of data per month. Note that streaming and P2P traffic are banned on the free tier.

Other free VPNs are available if Hide.me’s offer doesn’t suit you. TunnelBear‘s free version offers less data per month, at just 500MB. Our Editors’ Choice for free services, ProtonVPN, doesn’t limit your data usage but limits the devices and servers available to free users.

Hide.me VPN pricing (Credit: Hide.me/PCMag)

Hide.me’s paid Premium tier costs $9.95 per month and is what we tested. That’s less than the current industry average of $10.80 per month. Note that Hide.me, like most other VPN companies, frequently offers discounts on its subscriptions. You may see a lower price when you visit the site, but $9.95 is the base listed price.

The Premium tier removes the data cap from the free tier, grants access to all 87 VPN locations Hide.me offers, and raises the device limit to 10. That’s twice the industry average for simultaneous connections. Avira Phantom VPN, Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN place no limit on the number of devices you can use.

As with most VPN companies, Hide.me offers longer subscriptions at a discount. A one-year plan with Hide.me is $59.95—the same price the service charged when we reviewed it in 2018! The two-year plan, which went for $99.95 in 2018, now gives you 27 months of service for just $69.95. Compare this with NordVPN, which costs $67.35 per year for the lowest tier, while ProtonVPN’s Plus tier costs $79.48 per year, and TunnelBear’s excellent service costs a third less at $39.99 per year.

In general, we advise you to purchase short-term plans first and then try out the VPN service for a while before committing to a long-term plan. That way, you can be sure the VPN will work for all the services you use most frequently.

You can purchase an account from the Hide.me website using major credit cards, PayPal, and several anonymous cryptocurrency options, like BitCoin and Ethereum. That’s particularly handy if you want your VPN purchase to be anonymous. Some VPN companies, such as TorGuard VPN, let you purchase an account using prepaid gift cards from major retailers such as Subway.

Avid BitTorrent users should note that Hide.me does allow file sharing on its network, but only on certain servers. That’s true for nearly every VPN we’ve reviewed. Still, simply allowing it doesn’t mean it’s the best VPN for BitTorrent. TorGuard, for example, has a slew of specialty offerings designed to protect and support the use of BitTorrent.

One thing Hide.me doesn’t offer is specialized servers. Many VPN companies have servers marked for specific situations, like trying to watch Netflix in the US. NordVPN, for example, has many specialized servers, including one that provides double encryption and another that routes your traffic through the Tor anonymization network via VPN.

What VPN Protocols Does Hide.me Use?

VPNs have been around for a long time, so people have figured out several ways to create an encrypted tunnel. Our preferred method is to use the OpenVPN protocol. OpenVPN is a newer technology and has the advantage of being open-source. That means users have thoroughly examined its code for potential vulnerabilities.

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The Hide.me Windows app we tested for this review uses both OpenVPN and the newer WireGuard protocol. WireGuard is the heir apparent to OpenVPN, promising unrivaled speeds and the latest security, so this is a point in its favor. Hide.me also supports the IKEv2 protocol and has legacy support for L2TP/IPSec and the older SSTP and PPTP protocols. We advise against using these last two, but they can be handy for certain applications.

Additionally, Hide.me includes support for the SoftEther VPN protocol. It’s the first service we’re aware of that uses this particular technology, which the company says is designed to be hard to detect and block. Other VPNs offer similar features that seek to disguise VPN traffic to circumvent VPN blocking. TunnelBear, for instance, calls this feature GhostBear.

Finally, the company has what it calls its Bolt “Fast Proxy” (The quotation marks are, oddly, part of the name.) In the Windows and mobile app, you’ll see a feature listed as Bolt “Fast Proxy,” which, at least from a legal perspective, seems to protect the company from a lot of scrutiny.

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Bolt “Fast Proxy” sends your traffic over the TCP instead of taking the traditional Windows route through the slower UDP. It’s a setting you could configure on your own in the operating system, but it will be easier for most to use the switch here to handle the job instead.

Servers and Server Locations

The number of servers and the location of a VPN company’s servers can noticeably affect performance. Companies with only a handful of servers must funnel more customers into crowded servers, reducing the sliver of the bandwidth pie available to each person. Similarly, if a company only has a few server locations, it can mean connecting to an entirely different continent to get online. Therefore, we carefully consider how many servers are offered and whether there’s a good degree of geographic diversity in those servers’ placement.

Hide.me has a good number of servers—2,300 in 87 locations across 54 countries. That should be plenty, but it’s far from the most we’ve seen. For example, NordVPN, CyberGhost, and Private Internet Access all have more. Companies will purchase as many servers as necessary to meet demand, so it’s not a strict quality measurement.

As for the geographic diversity of Hide.me’s servers, the company has done a fairly good job of covering the earth. Many VPN companies ignore South America, India, and the whole continent of Africa, but Hide.me has a few locations in these regions. It also has servers in China and Turkey, regions known to censor the web. ExpressVPN and CyberGhost lead the pack, offering servers in more than 90 countries.

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Potential customers may have concerns about VPNs using virtual servers. That’s when a single physical server plays host to multiple virtual machines. Those virtual servers can, in turn, be configured to appear as if they are in a different country than the machine hosting them. That can be an issue if you’re concerned about precisely where your data is headed. On the other hand, companies use virtual servers to compensate for sudden demand. They can also protect your data by using a physical server in a safe location to offer service to a less safe location nearby.

A representative of Hide.me told us the company only uses dedicated servers located in the designated country. That’s excellent from a data transparency perspective.

Your Privacy With Hide.me

A big reason to use a VPN is to protect your privacy online, so it’s important to know if the VPN is violating your privacy. While we cannot monitor company employees or their servers, we can ask questions of company representatives and read through a VPN company’s privacy policy.

Hide.me’s privacy policy is very thorough and very long, especially compared with TorGuard’s impressively brief policy. It does, however, lay out what data the company gathers, how it goes about gathering it, and what that data is used for. The effort is laudable, but we would like to see a more concise one in plain English.

The gist of the policy is that Hide.me collects as little information as possible. In fact, the only information it seems to store for any length of time is user email addresses. The policy reads, “We do not request or store your name, IP address or physical addresses or any other personal information.”

The company does not monitor the sites you access, log your true IP address, or even timestamp your connection. The company does track the amount of traffic for users since two of Hide.me’s plans have data caps. It also keeps some troubleshooting information, including “customer’s randomly generated username and internally assigned (non-public) IP address,” but it deletes that information every few hours. Hide.me could stand to improve in this area, as other VPN services strive to gather as little information as possible and keep it for as short a time as possible.

Part of why you don’t want a VPN storing much information about you and your activities is that the company could be compelled to hand over that information to law enforcement. Hide.me explains the company’s stance this way: “If a court order is received from a recognized legal authority with jurisdiction over Hide.me, then the company shall comply with that order. However, the company cannot be compelled to hand over information which it does not have.”

If you’re particularly concerned about receiving a DMCA notice for downloading copyrighted content, Hide.me has a ready response: “Since we store no connection logs, we cannot associate the notice with a customer identity even if legally compelled to do so.”

In addition to understanding a company’s privacy policy, it’s also good to know where that company is located and under what legal jurisdiction it operates. Hide.me is transparent about this: It’s based in Malaysia and operates under local law. Hide.me even includes its mailing address.

Hide.me has been audited by DefenseCode, a step several VPN companies have taken to demonstrate their privacy and security bona fides to customers. TunnelBear notably has undergone multiple audits and has pledged to be audited annually. Hide.me does issue an annual transparency report, a step we appreciate. The company has not participated in the CDT’s VPN questionnaire.

Hands On With Hide.me

We had no trouble installing the Hide.me app on our custom-built test PC running Windows 11. You can forgo the app entirely and manually configure your computer to connect via VPN, but it’s a bit of a pain.

The Hide.me app is simple, offering a blue window with a big button to connect the VPN. We appreciate apps that cut to the chase like this. It’s much more straightforward than PureVPN, which has some useful scenario-based connection presets but lacks a fast and easy way to get online.

Although the Hide.me app is simple, it’s not exactly user-friendly. We much prefer NordVPN’s app, which uses maps and large buttons to make even complex tools approachable. TunnelBear does something similar with brightly colored bears.

While Hide.me does make it obvious which servers allow BitTorrent, it doesn’t include server stats like overall load or ping time. However, it lets you check specific servers in the app’s location list. That’s handy because you might find that one server works better for you than another. You can add that useful server to your Favorites for easy access later.

The Settings panel does provide some surprisingly advanced features, however. Hide.me even lets you trigger custom scripts for when the VPN fails, which disconnects the service if it detects a leak. The company calls this feature StealthGuard, but in reality, it’s basically a kill switch. An Advanced tab lets you mess around with ports. The Windows client also includes an uncommon feature called split tunneling, which lets you designate which apps send traffic through the VPN and which do not. This is handy for negotiating tricky scenarios, like streaming to local media devices or accessing specific services that block VPN traffic.

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You can select the VPN protocol you want Hide.me to use, and OpenVPN is an option, as mentioned. By default, Hide.me uses IKEv2, so changing this is probably worthwhile. You can also set up a Fallback configuration. If the VPN can’t connect with your first choice of protocols, it will try again with the protocols you select.

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A VPN should secure all your data and not leak anything that could identify you—such as your DNS request information or your real IP address. Using the DNSLeakTest.com tool, we confirmed that our DNS requests were being protected and that our IP address was successfully changed when using Hide.me.

Can You Watch Netflix With Hide.me?

Many streaming video services block VPNs because you can use them to spoof your location and access content licensed for specific regions. Netflix is the example that comes most readily to mind. Another is the BBC’s free streaming iPlayer, which is only for UK citizens. But if you hop onto a VPN server in London, you may as well be a local.

During our testing, we could access Netflix when connected to all five Hide.me servers we tested, including servers in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US. However, some of the libraries showed only Limited access. You can learn more about that qualification in our article here and see the results of our testing in the chart above. Your mileage may vary, but remember that a VPN service that works with Netflix today might not tomorrow.

Speed and Performance

A major concern among PCMag’s readers is the impact using a VPN will have on their internet speeds. That’s a valid worry, as using a VPN forces your web traffic to jump through more hoops and travel farther than usual. To get a sense of the impact of each service, we use the Ookla internet speed test tool to compare test results with and without the VPN. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s parent company.)

In our most recent testing on the Hide.me NYC server, we found the service worsened latency by about 20%. That’s not bad, but neither is it excellent. It reduced upload test results by just 4.20% and download test results by 8.72%. That’s such a small drop that it puts Hide.me just outside the top five best speed test results we’ve recorded in the city.

You can see how Hide.me compares in the chart below with the top 10 performers from among the more than 30 services we tested.

However, many variables can affect the outcomes of these tests, from the configuration of the VPN servers to physical damage to network infrastructure. Moreover, we don’t believe speed should be the single criterion for choosing a VPN. If, despite this, speed is your main consideration, you can read our roundup of the fastest VPNs we’ve tested.

Hands On With Hide.me VPN on Other Platforms

We also tested Hide.me’s VPN apps for Android, iOS, and macOS. Although Hide.me doesn’t offer an app for Chromebooks, there is a Hide.me proxy browser extension for Chrome. If you want an app for your Chromebook, Proton VPN and NordVPN each offer one.

The Hide.me VPN apps are all attractive, feature-rich tools with a uniform blue, green, and gray color scheme. We were able to browse the web using all three apps without any trouble while connected to Hide.me VPN’s servers.

On iOS, the app offers the following features: auto-connect, a kill switch, network connection choices, and something called SmartGuard, which is an all-in-one ad blocker, parental control app, and website filter. The Android and macOS apps have all of the features found on iOS, with a welcome addition: split tunneling—a feature they share with the Windows client.

We wish the SmartGuard filters offered descriptions of the various filters, as some sound helpful, like the ability to block sites by risk level. We didn’t see explanations for the risk levels, parental control site blocking criteria, or what qualifies a website for being labeled malicious by Hide.me in SmartGuard. The SmartGuard settings toggles are hidden a few levels deep in the Settings menu, so the average user may not get to try them out. It’s too bad because the filters work. Note, however, that since these filters work at the VPN level, they necessarily block (or allow) entire domains. Compare this with the phishing filters you find in an antivirus, which can block only the fraudulent pages in a domain.

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There’s also a feature exclusive to macOS called StealthGuard, which allows you to choose from three options: block all internet unless the VPN is active, block certain programs from internet unless the VPN is active, or—the default—allow your computer to connect to the internet even when a VPN is not active.

We tested Hide.me VPN’s adblocker on PCMag.com using Chrome on Android and macOS. In both cases, it blocked all of the ads on the page. We also tested the parental control filter on both platforms, and it blocked well-known porn websites and 4chan.

The service also provides apps for Amazon Fire devices, which is surprisingly rare. Additionally, you can install Hide.me’s previously mentioned proxy plug-ins for Chrome, and there’s one for Firefox, too. These proxies change the IP address and apparent location of your browser traffic, but they do not use the same means to encrypt your traffic as the normal VPN app. For more on the difference between the two services, check out VPN vs. proxy: what’s the difference?

Alternatively, you can follow Hide.me’s instructions on how to run a VPN on your router or purchase a Vilfo router configured to run with Hide.me. Note that while the former solution is an interesting option, the setup is too complex to be practical for the average user.

Our Favorite Affordable VPN

Hide.me VPN has some enviable strengths. It supports the best VPN protocols, provides 10 simultaneous connections, and has a good distribution of servers across the globe. Hide.me also offers a fairly generous, full-featured free option, which is rare. Its privacy policy is thorough and transparent, and it packs some advanced features into a simple app that most people should find easy to use. For all its strengths, Hide.me is our Editors’ Choice for affordable VPNs. For a free VPN, we recommend ProtonVPN, while NordVPN is our top choice if you’re willing to spend more.

Max Eddy contributed to this review.