Hide.me VPN review: Quietly smashing my expectations

Whenever I review hide.me, the main word I have to stop myself from overusing is "surprising." There's something about this small-scale, unpretentious VPN that consistently punches above its weight. It's not flashy, controversial or particularly innovative, but hide.me is subtly one of the best VPNs in the game.

I ran hide.me through my intensive testing procedure and learned a lot. This VPN is much faster than you'd expect, offers competitive pricing and designs all its apps with a genius sort of simplicity. It's also secure, private and solidly built on the most fundamental level. Check out each section for more details.

TLDR: Most important things to know about hide.me

• Streaming:hide.me is good at unblocking streaming platforms, but you'll have the best luck if you change your server location before you open Netflix .

• Speed:Speeds only dropped by an average of 5 percent, one of the fastest I've ever measured.

• Pricing:The best deal hide.me offers is $2.69 per month for 26 months. There's also a free plan with no bandwidth limits.

• Bundles:There aren't any add-ons or side apps, but hide.me does partner with two German smartphone companies to offer free subscriptions.

• Ease of use:The apps for Mac, Android and iOS are simple and well-designed, while the Windows app takes a bigger swing that doesn't quite connect.

• Security:hide.me is secure as long as you stay on one server, but briefly drops concealment when you switch locations.

• Privacy:The VPN logs no information that isn't absolutely necessary, as confirmed by audit.

• Locations:hide.me has a network of 81 total server locations in 57 countries, mostly in Europe, North America and eastern Asia.

• Extras:Besides the VPN, hide.me's best features are its dynamic multihop, deep automation and highly customizable domain blocklists.

• Support:There's a written knowledgebase, fast live chat, support tickets and an online forum for the thornier questions.

• Background:I found no serious hacks in hide.me's history, but social media bans in its home country of Malaysia may lead to regulations that hamper VPN privacy.

Can hide.me unblock Netflix?

Yes, but not if you try to virtually visit too many countries in too short a time. You'll have better luck closer to your real location, though unblocking is still possible everywhere.

One of the most common (and fun) things to do with a VPN is to change your location to access streaming content that's regionally locked. Since certain shows are only available in other countries, a VPN can help you stretch a single streaming subscription a lot farther. Although this is legal, streaming services don't want you doing it, so they keep blocklists of IP addresses known to be associated with VPNs. hide.me is good at keeping its servers off these lists.

However, there's another way a streaming service can detect and block you. If your virtual location changes too many times in a row, Netflix will assume you're using a VPN. This is most likely to come up for me as a tester — if you pick the one country you want and switch there before opening Netflix, you should be fine.

If hide.me doesn't end up working to get you into your streaming platforms, try ExpressVPN . I was able to get it into Netflix in four of five test locations, though it sometimes took multiple attempts.

Speed test

hide.me is shockingly fast. In my tests, I never lost more than 10 percent of my starting download speeds at any time. When starting with a standard Wi-Fi connection running at 60 megabits per second (Mbps), every server was fast enough for 4K/UHD video streaming.

Because hide.me is so secretive about where its servers are really located, there is a strong possibility that the ridiculously good speeds you'll see in the table above are actually on servers much closer to my physical location. Physical distance can affect download speed (though not as much as it impacts real-time communication latency), so if all these locations were really near me, hide.me would get a secret advantage.

However, the steepest speed declines came in Peru and Poland, which suggests (but doesn't prove) that those servers are physically in their stated locations. If that's true, it means hide.me has set up a near-perfect VPN infrastructure — less than 10 percent loss when routing to Europe and South America from the western United States is insanely good.

To sum up, whether the servers are physical or virtual, hide.me runs fast. Except for Surfshark , there aren't many VPNs who can compete with it on speed.

How much does hide.me cost?

hide.me keeps pricing simple. Along with the free plan, there's only one type of paid subscription, which comes at three different durations. It costs $11.99 to upgrade for one month, which is in line with basically every other VPN — Proton VPN and Windscribe are cheaper at that level, but more expensive in the long term.

You can get 12 months of hide.me for $54.99, which equals about $4.58 per month. It renews indefinitely at the same price. That's pretty good, but the best deal is the 26-month option, which you can also renew continually (even including the two bonus months). Each billing period costs $69.99, so you'll pay $2.69 per month, an excellent price comparable to any VPN deal currently available. Any subscription can be used on up to 10 devices at once.

Be warned that these prices are only available directly through hide.me's website. If you go through an app store, you'll get more expensive options. I recommend creating an account through a web browser first, then using it to log in on mobile.

There are no paid add-ons like dedicated IPs, so the price you pick is what you'll pay. Every plan has a 30-day refund period, which hide.me always honors in my experience. As for payment methods, you can use credit and debit cards, PayPal, Google Pay, Apple Pay or several types of cryptocurrency (including bitcoin, Litecoin, Ethereum, Monero and others).

The hide.me free plan

hide.me offers two services completely free: VPN and proxies. The free proxy is a good quick-and-dirty option that changes your IP location fast, but without encryption, it's not a long-term solution.

The free VPN, on the other hand, is good enough long-term that I've repeatedly named it the best free VPN . Of all the free VPNs I trust, hide.me has the fewest downsides. It requires no payment method or email address, never shows you ads and doesn't cap your bandwidth. The free version says it caps your speeds after you use 10GB in a month, but I've never noticed significant slowdowns after that point.

Free users can choose between seven server locations: the U.S., the U.K., Finland, Germany, France, the Netherlands and Switzerland. It's not exactly global, but it's great if you live in North America or Europe — and speeds are decent, if not excellent, from everywhere else.

hide.me side apps and bundles

hide.me isn't part of a security suite, so it doesn't come with discounts on any other apps. That's all right — like with Windscribe , there's nothing wrong with a VPN that's OK with just being a VPN. This is even more pronounced with hide.me, which doesn't want your money for anything except the VPN itself. It doesn't even have a dedicated IP add-on .

The only outside partnerships I could find were between hide.me and two German phone manufacturers, Freifon and Volla . These companies sell phones bundled with hide.me subscriptions that are active out of the box, but for different durations: the Freifon Giganti 2.0 gives you a full 36 months, while the Volla Plinius just comes with one.

It should go without saying that you should only buy a new phone if you're interested in that phone specifically. If you want hide.me, it's a lot simpler to just buy a subscription. That said, if you're itching to own a smartphone inspired by the volcanic demise of a Roman naturalist, the Plinius is probably your best choice.

Setting up and using hide.me

Downloading and installing hide.me is practically effortless. It sets itself up through a wizard with only minimal help from the user (and nothing at all complicated). On desktop, I recommend going directly through the website, not the app store, to ensure you're getting the latest version. On mobile, your device's app store will work fine.

hide.me's apps for macOS, Android and iOS all follow fairly similar design schemes, with large buttons and important settings stored along the bottom in tabs. The Windows app veers off in a wildly different direction with a weird but highly customizable interface. If it wasn't in the hide.me colors, you might not know it was the same VPN.

The main window here is going for something similar to Private Internet Access , letting you decide what widgets are present and what order they appear in. In my opinion, hide.me is more successful, since it gives itself more space. Most of the widgets aren't especially useful, though. Some are: Quick Connect is the one you'll need most often, Favorite Locations is a big help and My IP Address is good for confirming whether you're connected.

However, My Account is a space-filler that frustratingly can't be deleted, and most of the others — including a set of links to hide.me's social media accounts — are just there to fill out the list. Many of them only work when you click to open them, which sort of defeats the purpose of widgets. Editing isn't as intuitive as it could be, either, though a quick onboarding tour helps.

Starting with the Mac app, hide.me chooses interfaces that longtime VPN users will find much more familiar. hide.me on Mac is centered on a giant connect/disconnect button. Five tabs along the bottom contain everything else you'll need: a list of server locations, a shorter list of streaming-optimized servers, a message center and a Settings tab that includes everything else.

I like a lot about this app, especially the easily searchable locations list and the ability to sort servers by name or current latency. The Settings tab, which I initially disliked, is actually one of hide.me's best interface features on Mac. It brings you to a secondary control panel with nine tabs along the left side. Each of these tabs covers a specific aspect of the VPN, divided so you never have to scroll to find anything. You'll often need two clicks to get somewhere, but you'll never be lost.

The mobile apps gave me even more reasons to prefer hide.me's simpler approach to its maximalist Windows experiment. Android removes the notification center from the tabs and tucks it away in the top-right corner, leaving only the most important features for the bottom row. Like all hide.me's apps, it connects quickly, and never froze once during my test runs.

The Settings page loses a bit of quality from Mac — instead of an elegant system of tabs, it's a big stack of undifferentiated options. Tapping each option takes you to another set of controls, which are usually self-explanatory. Once you know what features are there, the page gets a lot simpler to work with.

The iOS app looks almost identical to Android, with a big connection button and tabs for the location list, streaming-focused servers and a Settings menu. These Settings are arranged in the same somewhat clunky stack as on Android, but the plus side of both is that every non-server option is easily accessible in one place. Clutter is better than mystery in app design.

Security test

hide.me VPN is built on a secure foundation. As long as you stay connected to any given server, it'll keep your data safe and your activity anonymized. However, when you switch server locations, it disconnects before reconnecting — so be sure not to do anything during that period that you'd prefer to hide.

When building a secure VPN, half the battle is using the right protocols. These sets of instructions sit at the heart of how a VPN works , allowing it to communicate with unrelated servers without a tunnel being established in advance.

The protocol also determines which encryption ciphers the VPN uses on your traffic. Although most protocols support multiple types of encryption, some (like PPTP) are shackled to outdated, cracked algorithms. That means protocol choice has a clear impact on whether your VPN can keep you safe without leaking.

hide.me supports five different protocols — more than the average for top VPNs, since not many providers still support SSTP. All five options are secure, and hide.me implements them with sufficiently strong encryption. Three of the five (WireGuard, OpenVPN and SoftEther) are open-source and routinely vetted by experts; while SoftEther needs a little more penetration testing, I've found no serious issues with it so far.

Since every VPN protocol on hide.me is safe, it doesn't often matter which one you choose. I recommend leaving selection on automatic, where it's set by default. If one protocol is blocked or unstable, hide.me will switch to a better one without you having to do anything.

Leak test

I checked my IP address using ipleak.net both before and after connecting to several hide.me servers. This simple test can confirm whether or not a VPN is actually concealing your online data trail. Each time I connected to a server and refreshed, I saw the hide.me server instead of my real location.

hide.me did falter in one place, as I mentioned to lead off this section. When I switched from one server to another, the VPN disconnected from the starting server in full before connecting to the new one. This caused my DNS requests to expose my real location in Oregon for a brief time, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Unfortunately, this problem persisted even when I activated StealthGuard, hide.me's kill switch. That shortened the amount of time my real location was exposed, but didn't eliminate it. This doesn't make hide.me not secure — but just make sure not to switch servers while doing anything sensitive, like using a torrenting client.

Encryption test

I checked out hide.me's encryption using WireShark, an app that looks at data packets as they fly from my home network to my ISP. Each packet sent through the VPN tunnel was fully encrypted. I looked into enough of them at random that I'm prepared to pronounce hide.me secure at the encryption level.

hide.me privacy policy

hide.me's privacy policy begins with a summary of its stance: "We do NOT keep logs of your VPN sessions, browsing behavior, websites you visit or any activity related to your VPN connection." It goes on to state that the company never retains "connection logs and timestamps" that could be used to identify an otherwise anonymized device.

That's the right set of policies, but only if the rest of the privacy policy lives up to those claims. It does — mostly. Later sections clearly state that the only information the VPN client gathers is a troubleshooting log which is automatically erased several times per day. This is also stored locally on the app, so nobody will see it unless you send it on purpose. It's also nice to see that hide.me scrubs all traces of you from its databases when you delete your account.

This is all enough to convince me that hide.me will never have enough information to respond to a court summons in a way that incriminates any of its users. The only part of the policy I don't like is that hide.me takes a few too many liberties with visitors to its website and forums. The website gathers a lot more data than the VPN itself does, and posting on the forum counts as consent for processing data associated with your posts.

It's unlikely that any information gleaned from the hide.me website will be directly incriminating. That said, when Mullvad and other VPNs manage to operate without any on-site marketing tracking at all, there's less and less excuse for providers to keep doing this.

Independent privacy audits

hide.me has been getting regular privacy audits since 2015. Its most recent audit was conducted by Securitum in 2024. The report generated by that audit is free to view online . In the topline summary, Securitum states that hide.me's "no-logs policy is indeed applied, and the audit did not reveal any issues on VPN containers that could lead to a compromise of user privacy."

hide.me server locations

hide.me has a total of X server locations in Y countries. These locations determine where you'll be able to pretend you're coming from when connected to hide.me. A location in the Netherlands, for example, means the internet will treat you as though you're really in the Netherlands (barring unlikely leaks).

This is a pretty limited network. 57 countries is less than half of what NordVPN offers . hide.me also has the common VPN problem of clustering most of its locations in Europe, North America and East Asia, to the point where the entire Middle East region has only one location (Dubai).

Although the limited selection is frustrating, there are some advantages to hide.me's approach. According to its FAQs, the company manages all of its server locations with no third-party involvement. That forces the network to expand more slowly, but it also makes hide.me more secure. Contractors put in charge of servers might not follow the same security standards as their employers — that's what let NordVPN's Finland location get hacked back in 2018.

I wasn't immediately able to find any information on which of hide.me's servers are virtual locations. Virtual VPN locations have an IP address from one country while physically being in another, letting VPNs represent nations without being bound by their laws or local infrastructure challenges. I requested a list from hide.me's customer support, but was refused (see the customer support section).

Testing the extra features

hide.me doesn't break the mold with any of its non-VPN features. Every option here is one you'll find on most other VPNs. That's not to say it's a bad selection — on the contrary, everything I'm about to discuss operates seamlessly while being welcoming to beginners.

Auto Connect

hide.me's Auto Connect feature initially seems like a simple setting that connects to a VPN server whenever you open the app. Dig in, though, and you'll find an automation system that's almost as robust as CyberGhost's Smart Rules . You can choose what the VPN will do on secured, unsecured and ethernet networks, and set specific actions for known networks.

The one thing you can't do is determine which location the VPN will connect to on each of these networks. It'll just connect to the current server you have selected. If you're going to use Auto Connect, I recommend leaving it set on "Best Location."

Split Tunnel

hide.me's split tunneling works by app on every platform. You can either set certain apps to be the only ones that get protected by the VPN, or pick which apps will be the ones not protected. If you want to split the tunnel by websites, get a second web browser, then set one to go inside the VPN tunnel and one to run outside.

SmartGuard

SmartGuard is hide.me's blocker for ads, trackers, malware and content parents might want to keep their kids away from. Turning on Block Ads is self-explanatory. Parental Filter comes with two pre-programmed lists, one for children under 12 and one for minors under 18.

The real meat of this feature appears when you turn on the Advanced switch. You can also set your own blocklist and allowlist, which will function as exceptions to any of the rules above. You can have SmartGuard block sites related to trackers or malware, require all search engines to use their safest setting and choose between three risk levels (Possible, Medium and High).

If you have a local DNS server, you can use SmartGuard to route all traffic through it. This may reduce the risk of DNS leaks while switching locations.

StealthGuard

StealthGuard is hide.me's kill switch. It's a strong protection that makes it impossible to connect to the internet unless you're also connected to a hide.me server. In a relatively unique touch, you can set StealthGuard to apply only to certain apps. If there's a specific program you want to protect, like a torrenting client, you can bind it to the kill switch while leaving other apps exempt.

Multihop

You'll find the multi-hop feature on the locations menu of any hide.me app. Just click Add Multihop and you'll be prompted to pick your entry and exit locations. This slows down your connection a little, but in exchange, adds more security in case something goes wrong with either server location.

hide.me customer support

hide.me has a written knowledgebase, live chat (run by Zendesk) and a support ticket submission system. It also has a community on its website, rare among VPNs, who tend to let their communities form on Reddit. Although it's not the most active , members of the hide.me team do keep an eye on it, so it's a viable place to ask questions.

I always learn the most about a VPN's customer support by approaching it with a real question. Since the main hide.me website isn't forthcoming about which of its server locations are virtual, I decided to investigate that in its support pages.

I started at the knowledgebase , which is due for an organizational overhaul. Its various sections overlap far too much, with "About hide.me" and "Connection Help" covering largely the same topics. There's no way to see all the articles in a certain section except by clicking over to that section's page, so you often have to simply guess where your topic might be.

The search bar works pretty well, though the articles are a bit lacking. I recommend using the written FAQs mainly for specific problems, which are easier to find in search and whose articles tend to make better use of screenshots. General advice articles come with less actionable information.

I put my question to live chat, which can be accessed from any page on the hide.me website. After entering a name and email, I was instantly connected with Serge, who swiftly told me that my quest was impossible — for safety reasons, hide.me does not give out any information on its server locations. That was obviously disappointing, but I couldn't argue with how quick and humane my live chat experience felt.

Background check

hide.me launched in 2012. Its own website tells a simple version of its backstory — its founders, finding all the other VPNs of the time to be too expensive, insufficiently secure or both, built hide.me with a mission to always offer a free plan. They've fulfilled that mission for almost 15 years. It's the Costco hot dog of VPNs.

Not only has hide.me stuck to its guns for over a decade, it's also gone that whole time without suffering a major hack or data breach. If any hide.me user's credentials or browsing history have ever been compromised, it wasn't serious enough to leave a record. In short, the hide.me story is as bland as I could hope for from a VPN.

The sole cause for concern in hide.me's background is that its parent company, eVenture, is headquartered in Malaysia. Although Malaysia does have a comprehensive privacy law that doesn't require companies to retain data, it's also enforcing a ban on social media for kids under 16, becoming only the latest country to do so . Such laws can lead to bans on VPNs when the governments behind them learn how easily VPNs can foil age verification.

If things go that far, hide.me may have to choose between retaining user data or pulling up stakes and moving its HQ. I trust it to pick the latter, but I hope things don't get that far.

Final verdict

hide.me is a near-ideal free VPN, with a good distribution of servers and unlimited usage available for no charge. The best way I can describe its paid version is that it's the perfect backup VPN. Speed and app design are the best things about it, though its astounding download speeds are slightly held back by a smaller-than-average server network.

Other VPNs may have bigger networks, more interesting features or better records at unblocking streaming. But while hide.me won't always wow you, it's unlikely let you down, either. It's the VPN equivalent of the old shoes you slip on whenever something is wrong with your go-to pair. That alone is worth the price of a two-year plan.

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