Pros & Cons
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- Ten simultaneous connections
- Reliable Netflix access
- Privacy-first policies
- Affordable
- Full-featured free plan
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- Average server numbers
Hide.me VPN Specs
| 500+ Servers | |
| Blocks Ads | |
| Can Manually Select Server In Free Version | |
| Free Connection Speeds Limited | No |
| Free Version | |
| Free Version Server Limit | Five Locations |
| Free Version Data Limit | 10GB Per Month |
| Free Version Simultaneous Connection Limit | 1 |
| Geographically Diverse Servers | |
| No Ads In Free Version? | Yes |
| Public Third-Party Audit | |
| Server Locations | 89 |
| Simultaneous VPN Connections | 10 |
Hide.me is an excellent VPN for a reasonable price. It still offers plenty of advanced features, such as per-app split tunneling support and multi-hop servers. It scored well in our performance tests and managed to access regional Netflix catalogs without a hitch. We especially like that you can try a full-featured free version out for five days, giving you a good idea of whether the service is right for you. Given all these features as well as its sub-$10 monthly pricing, Hide.me earns an Editors' Choice award for affordable VPNs. If you can pay a bit more, Nord is our top pick for feature-packed VPNs thanks to its robust security suite of applications.
Pricing and Plans
Hide.me is one of the few VPNs that you can try for free. The free tier does have a few limits, but it isn’t nearly as restrictive as I expected. You don’t need to provide any personal information aside from an email address to get started. The company assures that its privacy policy applies to free users as well, which means no logs are kept.
After my five-day free Premium trial, I had access to seven server locations, one device connection, and even the WireGuard protocol. There’s no bandwidth limit, either. However, Hide.me’s free plan does restrict you to slower speeds, no torrenting support, no port forwarding, and limited access to advanced features like the service’s built-in proxy. You may also have issues accessing regional content catalogs on services like Netflix due to server crowding, insufficient speeds, and blocked servers. My speeds were serviceable for browsing, but I wouldn’t recommend streaming content with them, as I experienced choppy visuals and long load times.
Proton, our Editors’ Choice winner for free VPNs, takes a similar approach, albeit with fewer restrictions.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)Hide.me’s premium plans are affordable. I signed up for the one-month plan, which costs $9.95 per month. While I generally recommend avoiding long-term subscriptions, Hide.me's plans are straightforward and easy to understand. There are no deceptive long-term plans that renew at a higher rate, and there are no confusing charts or lists to sort through. You get the same features regardless of the duration of your subscription. The one-year tier is $4.57 per month ($54.95 annually), and the 26-month plan is $2.69 per month ($69.95 every 26 months).
You can pay for Hide.me with PayPal, most major credit cards, Amazon Pay, Google Pay, Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, KuCoin, Litecoin, Monero, and Solana. It’s nice to see such a wide range of cryptocurrency payment options available, though I'd also like cash as an option for those who want an anonymous alternative to the blockchain. Mullvad is one of the only VPNs that accepts cash.
Features
Hide.me focuses solely on offering an affordable and customizable VPN service. Many competitors have shifted focus to security suites with expensive bundles. Those options may be great for some, but I have found that most bundled password managers and antivirus programs pale in comparison with standalone programs.
The service’s premium plans come with a wealth of features. Protection for all of your devices is attainable with support for unlimited simultaneous connections. You also get split tunneling, which allows you to choose programs that you may not want to have routed through the VPN’s encryption. This feature is particularly useful for games or other applications that require low latency.
SmartGuard blocks ads, trackers, and malicious websites. I found that it worked fairly well for text-based sites, but it was unreliable on video sites like YouTube and Twitch. I confirmed that it didn’t block ads on streaming services, as it's noted in the app that it won’t work with the likes of Netflix. You can configure more advanced options like a parental filter, forced safe search, and site allowlist. Overall, it’s one of the most advanced content filtering tools I’ve seen included with a VPN client. One thing to note is that SmartGuard doesn’t work with multi-hop or streaming servers.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)StealthGuard is Hide.me’s more advanced kill switch. It can bind your internet to your VPN, ensuring no activity goes outside of the encrypted tunnel. It can also be used to disable certain apps while your VPN is active. This feature lets you fully lock down your PC and only run the applications you want while Hide.me is active.
Port forwarding is included with an additional option to use the feature only with certain applications. Bolt “Fast Proxy” (the quotation marks are, oddly, part of the name) is included as well if you don’t need advanced encryption for a certain task.
Protocols
Hide.me has an impressive range of protocols. I’ve come to expect OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2. Most VPNs support those options, and many services stop there.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)I was surprised to find that Hide.me offers both SSTP and SoftEtherVPN as additional protocol options. SSTP and SoftEtherVPN can be complex to set up due to the closed-source nature of the connection standards. However, both are incredibly secure. SSTP is known to be particularly adept at thwarting snooping ISPs from building a profile on you through fingerprinting.
You can also configure a fallback if your primary choice fails. I wish more VPNs had that feature. It is a pain having to manually change protocols when one fails or doesn’t work on the server you need to use.
Servers and Server Locations
Hide.me has a modest server network of roughly 2,600 servers spread across 57 countries. That figure puts the company in the middle of the pack. However, those stats shift from average to impressive when you consider that the service does not make use of virtual servers. Every server is physically located in the country it offers connectivity in.
Using dedicated servers generally equates to better performance due to full resource utilization. Virtual servers are often run from partitioned sections of a dedicated server, leading to that drop in performance. Physical servers are more reliable at accessing regional content since the hardware is actually located in the country and has a regional IP address that isn’t spoofed.
The company claims that all of the servers are self-managed, which means there should be no third-party involvement when it comes to handling data. A common misconception is that a VPN owns a self-managed server network. That isn’t always the case. These servers may still be rented from third-party cloud providers, but the involvement of said provider should end at the conclusion of the transaction. Some rentals come with administrative oversight and caveats. Hide.me asserts that there are no outside influences or administrators.
The network has servers in underserved regions like Ukraine, Africa, and Hong Kong. North America, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East have adequate coverage. I admire Hide.me’s performance-first focus of only using physical servers, but this stance does have a major drawback—scalability. CyberGhost has an immense network of 11,500 servers in 100 countries thanks to its adoption of virtual servers. You do give up a bit of speed, but the additional locations and reduced crowding might be a worthy compromise.
Hide.me’s server page details every city-level location. The app's server list is detailed and has useful information about each option.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)Plenty of VPNs just give you the country name with no further details. Hide.me provides the city-level location, as well as whether the server supports 10Gbps speeds. You can filter the list by ping, country name, or distance. There are tabs up top for streaming-optimized and multi-hop locations. Alternatively, you can switch to a map view if you prefer a more visual experience akin to TunnelBear’s interface.
Privacy
Hide.me’s privacy policy is comprehensive, but it is a slog of a read. You’ll need to sit down and parse through a wall of text to get all of the details. I appreciate that the company is thorough, but it is possible to have a detailed, concise, and easy-to-read policy. Surfshark breaks its documents up with summaries and scenarios that contextualize each point.
I dug through it and found no glaring faults. The VPN doesn’t keep any data aside from the email address you used to sign up. That email is kept in an encrypted form on a secure server. Since that’s the only information you need to give, the company doesn’t have any personal data to hand over. This is especially true if you made use of an anonymous payment method or took advantage of a disposable card.
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Logged connection data is equally limited. The company does not log timestamps or your IP address. All data usage is anonymized and cannot be traced back to individual users. It 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 is headquartered in Malaysia, which has data-handling laws. The company’s privacy policy mentions that it responds to valid court orders but cannot hand over data that it does not keep. An annual transparency report goes over every request that the VPN has received from outside agencies. None of the requests from 2013 to 2024 have resulted in the handover of user data.
Since 2015, the service has undergone frequent third-party security audits. Securitum's latest audit, conducted in July 2024, confirmed that the company adheres to its stated no-logs policy.
Can You Watch Netflix With Hide.me?
Streaming services like Netflix tend to block VPNs due to regional licensing restrictions. That's because they often make deals that allow the service to broadcast shows to certain regions. You may find that your favorite program is only available on the United Kingdom’s catalog. That’s where a VPN comes in.
During testing, I could fully access Netflix when connected to all five Hide.me servers we tested, including servers in Australia, Canada, Japan, the UK, and the US. You can learn more about our testing here and view the results in the chart above. While this process is never foolproof due to advancing detection technology and the occasional server blocklist, I have found that some services are more reliable than others when it comes to unblocking regional content.
Performance
Speed tests are not definitive. Network conditions can vary wildly from hour to hour and even minute to minute. A VPN adds an additional variable to the mix, so it can be difficult to ascertain an objective result from a speed test. Still, I do try to get a sense of the impact each service will have on your connection. While the results may not be directly applicable to your situation, the chart below should give you a general idea of what to expect.
Hide.me performed quite well in my latest round of tests. It only decreased my download speed by 5.93%. Upload speeds suffered a bit more with a 22.72% decrease. Latency was impacted the most with a 92.11% increase.
To get the figures above, I ran a series of tests to determine my base network speed during the same time of day that I evaluated the VPN. I use Ookla Speedtest to compare my test results with and without a connection to the VPN. (Note: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company. For more, see the ethics policy in our Editorial Mission Statement.)
Hands On With Hide.me for Windows
I tested the Hide.me Windows app on an Intel NUC 12 “Serpent Canyon” desktop running the latest version of Windows 11. The Windows app is highly customizable. You can keep things simple with the default settings, or you can configure the entire interface to display precisely what you want it to. The dashboard is broken up into windows that display your connection, server locations, current IP address, favorite locations, account details, and more. You can have as little or as much information here as you prefer.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)I appreciate the level of fine-tuning you can do with the app, but new users may find it overwhelming. An onboarding wizard does show you around the basic functions of the client, and every feature has either a line of text explaining what it does or a link to a requisite knowledge base article. It’s not as clean and simple as ExpressVPN’s one-button interface. The learning curve may be higher for Hide.me, but you get a level of customization not prevalent among the majority of competitors. For me, that’s a worthy compromise.
None of the features are hard to find or configure. You don’t have to deal with hidden tabs or pop-up menus. Advanced settings are plentiful if you like to tinker with your VPN. Alternatively, you can set everything to auto-connect on startup for a completely hands-off experience. The Windows app has a kill switch, a full set of protocols, and an app lock that disables access to the client window after certain actions or periods of inactivity.
Hands On With Hide.me VPN on macOS
I tested Hide.me on a 2020 M1 MacBook Pro running Sequoia 15.5. The macOS design is more in line with Android and iOS. Instead of a fully customizable experience, you get a clean mobile-style interface. It’s neat and tidy, but I did find myself missing the configurable dashboard.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)The macOS version lacks SoftEtherVPN and SSTP protocols, which is unfortunate. However, all other advanced features and tools are available. I was able to connect to servers using every available protocol without incident.
Hands On With Hide.me VPN on iOS
I tested Hide.me on an iPhone 14 running iOS 16.3. You can download the iOS app directly from the App Store. Setup was a breeze, with no additional steps needed except enabling permissions in iOS. The mobile design is sleek and features easy-to-use menus.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)The core functionality is the same on iOS, but you’ll be missing out on a few extras. SSTP and SoftEtherVPN protocols are absent here, too. Same with split tunneling. All other key features, servers, and options are available, however. I didn’t run into any hurdles connecting to servers on any of the available protocols.
Hands On With Hide.me VPN on Android
I tested Hide.me’s Android app on a Samsung Galaxy S23 FE running Android 14. The mobile interface is simpler. It forgoes the customizable dashboard for a clean one-button connection option. You can tab over to more advanced menus at the bottom of the screen.
(Credit: PCMag/Hide.me)You will still have access to streaming and multi-hop servers on Android, as well as the majority of protocols. The only exception is SoftEtherVPN, which is not available. All advanced features from the Windows application were present. I had no issues connecting to the service using every protocol I had access to.
Customer Support and Money-Back Guarantee
If you use a service for long enough, you’re bound to need customer support at some point. I test every VPN’s support options to see how long it takes to get a response and assess how knowledgeable the agents are on common issues. I also test a service's money-back guarantee if it has one.
Hide.me has one of the best knowledge bases I have seen. There are well-organized and informative guides for most issues and queries. I found it easy to search and find a wealth of information on niche problems. Every guide is written well and includes useful images to help walk you through the task. Individual support is available in the form of a support ticket or a 24/7 live chat.
I didn’t run into any actual issues with Hide.me, so I messaged the support agents with a fabricated issue of not being able to access Netflix on the service’s US streaming server. The agent directed me to submit a ticket through the app so that any service logs would be accessible to the technical support team. While the agent didn’t try to troubleshoot the issue directly, they did link to a helpful guide showing how to submit the ticket. Given that I wasn’t truly experiencing connection issues, I refrained from submitting the ticket, as the logs would not indicate any problems. I understand the approach, but I would have liked to see an initial attempt at resolving my issue. A suggestion as simple as trying alternative servers could have provided an instant solution.
As for the money-back guarantee, you need to submit a support ticket within 30 days of purchase. Hide.me specifies in its refund policy that it can take up to 10 days after the cancellation to receive the refund. After submitting my ticket, I received a refund in just under 24 hours. You will be prompted by a support agent to provide a reason for cancellation, but I was not pressed further or pushed to stay after I gave my reason.
Final Thoughts
(Credit: Hide.me)
Hide.me VPN
Hide.me VPN offers truly unlimited free trials, great performance, and tons of security options to protect your data. Even better, its pricing plans are simple, easy to understand, and affordable.