Business Choice Awards 2019: VPN Services for Work, Remote Access

Virtual private network services are making in-roads at home, as they should, but at work, they've been around a lot longer, allowing remote access to servers and services for telecommuters or people who just can't stop working.

This Business Choice survey looks at remote-access VPNs for the second time, adding questions about paid VPN services people use at work that make them (or at least make the IT people) feel truly secure.

VPN Services for Work

Business Choice seal

ExpressVPN
This comprehensive VPN service is the favorite for business users, who singled it out for excellent reliability and ease of use, and found that ExpressVPN doesn't do much to degrade device performance or internet speeds.

Whether you set it up yourself or IT did it for you, ExpressVPN is the VPN users in the trenches prefer. The service scored the highest overall satisfaction score at 8.9 (out of 10), plus high scores for reliability, ease of use, tech support, device performance, and internet speeds. It tied its high score with Private Internet Access on trustworthiness and the likelihood to be recommended to colleagues.

It's pretty neck-and-neck with Private Internet Access in fact. The service—which won our Readers' Choice award for consumer use of VPNs—topped ExpressVPN on one particular metric: value. Its 8.9 there was a tie with NordVPN. Private Internet Access also earned a slightly higher Net Promoter Score of 78 (out of 100) compared to ExpressVPN's 72.

NordVPN is the most used of the VPNs in our survey, but more users doesn't always equal happier users. Nord's scores are all a trifle bit behind with the exception of setup, where it was on top with a 9.4, and a tied high tech support score of 8.6 with ExpressVPN.

The scores for these three services are all pretty great and you won't regret signing up for any of them, to be honest, if the numbers are any indicator. The one you and your business will want to avoid is Symantec's Norton Secure VPN, which does poorly across every metric.

Remote Access VPNs

Business Choice seal

Pulse Secure
A new contender arrives to take out the big names in remote access VPNs: Pulse Secure nailed the award this year with high scores and praise from business users. When your office is planning to offer telecommuting, tell them to go with Pulse Secure for your at-home connection.

With a VPN service, anyone—even an employee—can sign up and feel secure, but remote access VPNs are a bit trickier. They require the IT department that sets up servers to provide access to those logging in. So while the traffic is still secure, access is specific to the business.

Last year, the favorite for encrypting such traffic was Cisco with its AnyConnect software, but for 2019 the award goes to Pulse Secure.

While Cisco AnyConnect had the same overall score it earned last year—8.3—Pulse Secure finished with an overall score of 8.5, more than enough to take the prize. Interestingly, Pulse Secure, Cisco, and OpenVPN all earned the same 7.8 score for likelihood to be recommended to colleagues, but Pulse got the highest Net Promoter Score from the same question (26 out of 100).

Pulse isn't on top in every category. Cisco is ahead for setup and device performance, and the two are tied for ease of use. Which one you pick for your business may depend on the importance of those factors.

Arguably the only vendor to avoid in remote access VPNs appears to be Microsoft. Last year it only had a 7.3 overall satisfaction score, and while it did improve that to a 7.9 this time around, Redmond's VPN was in the bottom of every ranking, with an especially poor score for tech support at 6.9.

The PCMag Business Choice survey for VPNs was in the field from August 12, 2019 through September 3, 2019. For more information on how the survey is conducted, read the survey methodology.

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About Our Expert

Eric Griffith

Senior Editor, Features

My Experience

I've been writing about computers, the internet, and technology professionally since 1992, more than half of that time with PCMag. I arrived at the end of the print era of PC Magazine as a senior writer. I served for a time as managing editor of business coverage before settling back into the features team for the last decade and a half. I write features on all tech topics, plus I handle several special projects, including the Readers' Choice and Business Choice surveys and yearly coverage of the Best ISPs and Best Gaming ISPs, Best Products of the Year, and Best Brands (plus the Best Brands for Tech Support, Longevity, and Reliability).

I started in tech publishing right out of college, writing and editing stories about hardware and development tools. I migrated to software and hardware coverage for families, and I spent several years exclusively writing about the then-burgeoning technology called Wi-Fi. I was on the founding staff of several magazines, including Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine. All of which are now defunct, and it's not my fault. I have freelanced for publications as diverse as Sony Style, Playboy.com, and Flux. I got my degree at Ithaca College in, of all things, television/radio. But I minored in writing so I'd have a future.

In my long-lost free time, I wrote some novels, a couple of which are not just on my hard drive: BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale," according to Publishers' Weekly) and a YA book called KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. Go get them on Kindle.

I work from my home in Ithaca, NY, and did it long before pandemics made it cool.

The Technology I Use

My first computer was a Laser 128, an Apple II-compatible clone with an integrated keyboard, matched with an eye-straining monochrome green monitor. I used it to type papers in college for other people for money...until I discovered the Mac SE in the college computer room. That changed my life. My first cellphone was a Samsung Uproar—the silver one with the built-in MP3 player from the Napster days (the pre-iPod era).

I use an iPhone 15 Pro hourly and an iPad Air infrequently (but I'm always in the market for a cheap Android tablet). I have a PlayStation 5 just to play Spider-Man, and several Windows machines, including a work-issued Lenovo ThinkPad. I talk to Alexa and Siri all day long. I do the majority of my computing on a 15-inch LG Gram laptop attached to a Thunderbolt hub to run a multi-monitor setup—I overdid it on the power needed to simply work from home.

I'm most at home in Microsoft Word after decades of writing there. More and more, I turn to services like Google Docs, using tools like Grammarly. I use Google's Chrome browser due to an addiction to several extensions I think I can't live without, but probably could. I use Excel extensively on data-intensive stories, but for chart creation, we've switched over entirely to using Infogram for interactive features that are hard to find elsewhere. I do a lot of graphics work for my stories, but limit myself to the free and amazing Paint.NET software to edit images.

I'm a firm evangelist for using the cloud for backup and syncing of files; I'm primarily using Dropbox, which has never failed me, but I also have redundant setups on Microsoft OneDrive, plus extra picture backups on Amazon Photos and iCloud. Why take chances? For entertainment, mine is a streaming-only household—my kid has never seen network TV and barely been exposed to commercials, thanks to Roku and Amazon Music. The house is peppered with smart speakers from Amazon for instant gratification and control of smart home devices like multiple Wyze cameras and Nest Protect smoke detectors. I've got accounts on all the major social networks, to my horror. I have a robot vacuum for each floor of the house. I want a 3D printer, but not sure what I'd use it for.

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