A side-by-side on jurisdiction, audit history, kill switch and what each service is genuinely good at.
Short answers, based on our own captures and the data on this site.
On the nearest-European route hide.me delivered 222 Mbps against CyberGhost's 194 Mbps (74% vs 66% of each baseline); on the US route 200 vs 210 Mbps. One run each, so treat small gaps as noise.
We captured hide.me playing Netflix. For CyberGhost we captured BBC iPlayer. Missing results mean not captured, not failed.
Same line and machine with a fresh baseline for each, but the server country and protocol can differ; the table lists them.
The screenshots and recordings for hide.me are on its tests pages. We publish captures only for the VPN each site is about.
| 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.