The best-made VPN here
If this comparison scored on how the product feels to use, ExpressVPN would win it.
The apps are as polished as anything here, on every platform. The router firmware is the only one in the category a non-technical person can realistically install, which matters because a router is how you cover a household without installing anything on a television. Lightway, the protocol, is fast and has been independently reviewed. TrustedServer runs every server from RAM with no hard disks at all, so there is no persistent storage on the machine for anyone to seize.
ExpressVPN scores 7.9 under how we rate, which is higher than one of the four picks in our comparison. It sits outside the four anyway, and the reason is not the product.
What it costs from year two
Credit first, because ExpressVPN does the thing this page rewards.
The plan card says: "Billed $83.72 for the first 28 months. Then autorenews at $99.95 annually." Both numbers, side by side, before you buy. Two vendors in this comparison never publish a renewal figure anywhere and NordVPN buries its in the checkout.
So the advertised rate is $2.99 a month and the real ongoing cost is $8.33, a multiple of 2.8. The Advanced tier renews at $9.99 and raises the device count from ten to twelve.
At the renewal anchor that puts ExpressVPN above Proton VPN at $6.99 and well above Mullvad at $5.79, for a product that is better made than either and does less for your privacy than both. That is the value case, and it is a real one for people who want the friction gone.
Who owns it, and what that means
Now the part almost no page ranking for this term will tell you, for reasons that will become obvious.
ExpressVPN is owned by Kape Technologies, which bought it in 2021 for $936 million. Kape was called Crossrider until March 2018. It also owns CyberGhost, acquired 2017, ZenMate, 2018, and Private Internet Access, 2019.
In March 2021 Kape spent $149.1 million buying Webselenese, the owner of vpnMentor and Wizcase, two of the largest VPN review sites on the internet.
So one company owns four VPN brands and two of the biggest sites that review VPN brands. Two of those four, ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access, are in this comparison.
Be precise about what follows from that, because the temptation to overstate it is strong. It does not mean ExpressVPN is a worse product; the audits and the architecture are real and are described above. It does not mean the people writing at those sites are dishonest, and both sites disclose the ownership. What it means is narrower and harder to argue with: two large sources on this product are owned by the company that sells it, so their placement of it tells you less than an unconnected one would. Judge it on the audits and the engineering instead, both of which hold up.
That is also why ExpressVPN is not one of our four picks despite outscoring one that is. When we checked on 30 August 2026, Kape brands sat at the top of the comparison pages Kape owns. We would rather explain that here than add another slot to it.
TrustedServer and the audits
KPMG has audited the no-logs policy three times, most recently in 2025, and Cure53 has reviewed TrustedServer and the browser extension. The reports are published rather than gated, which NordVPN does not manage.
TrustedServer deserves its reputation. Every server runs from volatile memory, the entire software stack is reimaged on each reboot, and nothing is written to a disk because there is no disk. Windscribe reports the same architecture working in practice, when Dutch authorities seized one of its RAM-only servers and found nothing on it. That is Windscribe's account rather than something we verified, and it is the clearest illustration of the idea.
The British Virgin Islands sit outside the intelligence-sharing arrangements and have no data retention requirement, which is a genuine advantage and a weaker signal than the audit.
Who should buy it
Buy ExpressVPN if you want the least friction of any VPN on this page and you will pay $8.33 a month for it. Buy it if you are covering a household through a router, where its firmware is genuinely without competition here. Buy it if you have read the ownership section and concluded, reasonably, that a well-audited product from a company with an awkward portfolio is still a well-audited product.
Do not buy it if independence is the thing you are actually shopping for, because Proton VPN and Mullvad both cost less and answer to nobody. And do not take its ranking on vpnMentor or Wizcase as evidence of anything either way.
Prices, plan contents, audits and ownership on this page were read from the vendor order page, the vendor audit index and the public company record on .
