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 PrivadoVPN's 200 Mbps (74% vs 68% of each baseline); on the US route 200 vs 160 Mbps. One run each, so treat small gaps as noise.
We captured hide.me playing Netflix. For PrivadoVPN we captured BBC iPlayer, Netflix. 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 | 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.