Best VPN for Germany

There are many reasons to love staying in Germany. It’s a safe country lived by generally welcoming people where one can start a home for the long-term or simply live for a short-stay, for your studies or other experiences. However, staying in Germany makes it hard to keep track with programs for home, favorite shows or that all too important sports season for the team you support.

In many cases, you will need to get the very best VPN for Germany in order to make use of your favorite streaming platforms. For others naturally, there is always the concern that download or upload data maybe intercepted and monitored by the authorities or other maleficent hackers. A good VPN for Germany is thus useful to enforce your privacy.

Whatever your motivations are, it’s important to make an informed decision on this topic, so you get the best bang out of your budget. I recently went on a quest to find the best VPN for Germany, so after a few trials and many hours searching, here are my findings.

My requirements to pick the best VPN for Germany

As we all know, the basic purpose of a VPN is to connect to the internet via a private network, which allows you to benefit from the functionalities provided by that network. You don’t expose your device directly but rather; all your ingoing/outgoing data is hidden being the VPN via an end-to-end connection. You can then go pass geo-restrictions, explore the interwebs privately & and protect your device from intruders. It also means your German internet provider cannot see the data going in and out.

That’s the basic stuff, but the best VPN for Germany should have:

1. A consistent and reliable performance to make sure you use the internet as fast as you are use to.
2. A simple user interface for an easy set-up and maintenance.
3. A great track record for security and privacy (good encryption, no logging your activity, kills switch to prevent accidental exposure).
4. A fair number of allowed devices per account (for your phone, tablet, etc).
5. Decent customer support
6. Supports all devices and operating systems.

A selection of the top VPN providers for Germany

NordVPN

Definitely one of the households name to protect your privacy in Germany. They are particularly good at ensuring that your traffic is hidden from view thanks to their 900 + servers across 60  countries. This enables fast download and upload speeds for all the services you use, in any geographical zone you might desire for streaming, downloading or gaming.

Based in Panama, they offer the right mix of essential features like an automatic kill switch, DNS leak protection and double encryption if necessary. This added to a zero-logs policy make NordVPN one of the best options out there. Judging by the many positive reviews, their customers are happy to pay for a slightly above average price since the quality is there to match.

The user interface is pretty intuitive as well and allows for up to 6 devices to use the service. And last but not least, NordVPN has a fair and transparent price policy with a 30-day money-back guarantee, in case you want to test the service before really committing

Who is NordVPN for:

Pick NordVPN if you want the best all-around performer without too much tweaking and offers good value for the money. A good option for most people..

PureVPN

With an excellent reputation and a good track record since they started in more than a decade ago, PureVPN uses state of the art technology to anonymise you online activity. I thought it was fair to include it on the list of best VPN for Germany.

They use more than 500 servers in 141 countries to unlock your favorite content. They have become a crowd’s favorite thanks to their excellent support of various devices like video games consoles, SmartTVs, Roku, Amazon fire, Chrome cast, etc. They have the required features as well (kill switch, good encryption, leak protection.). As a nice bonus, they also provide an integrated ad-blocking feature, to prevent those pesky ads away from your screen.

Based in Hong-Kong, they also practice a no-logs policy but they still provide good customer support thanks to 24-hour live chat support with real humans. No chat bots there! They also have made a lot of progress with the user interface of their apps. It has become quite user friendly.

Who is PureVPN for:

Pick PureVPN if you are tight on a budget but still want a decent VPN service in Germany. It’s good option to use your favorite streaming services on your smart devices and P2P applications too.

ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN is another champion for people that are looking for a safe solution regarding data retention while keeping a high-speed service for gaming or streaming. They use a massive network of more than 1700 servers (!) around the world for a great bandwidth. Not to mention the quality of their blog and guides that will help you make your internet activity safe and secure. No activity or connections logs are kept as they are based in the virgin islands.

ExpressVPN offers the usual set of required features as well as a lot of head-room for advanced users with features like the choice of VPN protocol or split tunneling. A limitation here however is probably the amount of devices for a single subscription (only 3).

Who is ExpressVPN for:

You should consider ExpressVPN if you want the biggest amount of possible servers possible, high-speed, fair customer service. This is also recommended to advanced users with special needs. If you have many devices, it’s maybe best to consider another provider.

CyberGhost

The only European-based provider on this list, CyberGhost is serving about 10 million users from Romania. This is probably one of the best options for beginners as you can simply select the activity you want to do through the VPN from the main screen to be guided to the best options. It’s also possible to proceed manually of course and select from over 1000 servers in 50 countries.

Once again, we find all the standard features you should care about (Killswitch, auto-connect, anti-leak, etc) in an easy to use interface available for a range of devices. It also allows you to deactivate undesired tracking and ads. I must say i like their approach at a more than fair price. It definitely belongs to our list for best VPN for Germany.

Who is CyberGhost for:

Ideal for beginners and people that prefer to pay in Euros and support a local provider. It’s a great price considering the features. Some features are lacking in the android and mac apps though, if you want to have your VPN active there, you may want to look elsewhere.

Best VPN for Germany sports streaming

I am myself a very big tennis addict. So as you can imagine, i’m not a very happy man in Germany because there are no major tournaments taking place here. I can imagine that the same can be said for cricket or rugby too. But even if they do broadcast the event, it’s always best when you can follow it with your favorite commentators. This is why i have resorted to also search for the best VPN for Germany sports streaming.

1. Again here, there is a litte surprise as NordVPN is scoring very high on the set of features needed to be on the list of VPN providers for sports streaming in Germany.
2. ExpressVPN is also often as a good options to sports fan. It provides good speed and easy access to the right servers to see all your favorite games.
3. PureVPN comes last in the top 3 but it’s still highly recommandable for most people, making sure there is no buffering time involved.

German VPN free trial

It is naturally difficult to commit to right away, so that’s why you may want to look into German VPN free trials to test the service to see if it suits your needs. The following providers offer free trials before asking you to commit and pay for the service.

Out of all the previous options, these German VPN free trials are to consider:

• NordVPN doesn’t offer a free trial per say there is a 30-day money back guarantee. If you decide to pull the plug out, before then, there is nothing to pay.
• ExpressVPN also offers a 30-day money back guarantee, so it could count as German VPN free trial, if we follow the same logic.
• Cyberghost and its cute mascot is again sticking to the 30-day money back guarantee, there is a pattern there isn’t it?
• PureVPN doesn’t do too well here because you only one week to decide if you want to pay for it or not.

So all in all, if we look at the serious contenders, no provider is really providing a free trial for a German VPN unfortunately, where you could enjoy some days without entering any payment information.

VPN services to avoid:

HideMyAss: Owned and operated by AVG Technologies, the same guys doing the anti-virus software. They are known to share information with the authorities as they are based in the UK. Also the interface is nice-looking, there aren’t a tons of features for the money.

IPVanish: If it’s suitable for by passing geo-blocks, i would stay away from them as they based in the US, which as we all know, not ideal for privacy protection not it’s not part of my selection for best VPN for Germany.

VyprVPN: A superb service based in Switzerland that you should consider if you are a gamer or a streaming service user. However, their policy on P2P sharing is not the safest for P2P users.

Some general knowledge about VPN features:

• DNS Anti-leak: In some cases, your system might “avoid” using the VPN to connect to the internet for some requests, which might put you at risk. This feature is testing wether or not all requests are made behind the VPN.
• Encryption protocols: Your VPN provider may use different encryption protocols to secure your online activity. Most use military grade encryption like AES-256 bit and IKEv2/IPsec.
• Kill switch: It does sometimes happen that a VPN connection simply stops. In this case, you may be unknowingly exposed again. This feature prevents your device or certain programs from accessing the internet while being disconnected from the VPN.
• Auto-connect: This is a small but useful feature forcing your device to use the VPN to connect to the internet to avoid bad surprises when being forgetful.
• Zero-log policy: This means that the service is not keeping records of your activity when using your service. Only the best VPN for Germany can offer that.

I keep reading about the 14-Eyes? What is this?

It’s a collective of countries who have made agreements to share, collect and analyze a common pool of data for intelligence purpose. Although it’s been primarily used to do secret stuff during the cold war, it is now largely believed that it is mainly used to monitor internet activity. So in theory, any request made to a VPN based in one of the following countries would have to comply and communicate customer-related data:

US, UK, France, Germany, Canada, New-Zealand, Australia, Denmark, Holland, Norway, Belgium, Italy, Sweden and Spain.

At the time of writing this article, none of the VPN providers suggested above are based in these countries. Each suggested VPN provider is also practicing a zero-log policy for extra-safety.

A beginner’s guide to use a VPN service in Germany

For more or less all VPN providers in Germany, the steps to take to start using the service will look like this:

1. Sign-up for their service
2. Download the relevant app for your device / OS
3. Pick the right settings so it fits the scenario/usage you were aiming for.
4. Enjoy.

This was a little tour and a little intro to help you pick the best VPN for Germany to enjoy your favorite content without any restrictions while protecting your privacy. Feel free to suggest any tricks, options or parameters that you think any VPN users should know about in the comments.

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