ExpressVPN vs. NordVPN: Which VPN service is better? |
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ExpressVPN vs. NordVPN: Which VPN service is better?
Choosing between these two top VPN services comes down to feature needs and budget
Published March 27, 2026 4:05AM (EDT)
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Choosing between a well-established VPN provider and a newcomer isn’t that hard. But choosing between two premium providers with glowing reputations can be challenging. We’ll compare ExpressVPN to NordVPN to see which, if any, has the more compelling offering.
ExpressVPN is based in the British Virgin Islands, a jurisdiction that does not have mandatory data retention laws and is well outside the Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance.
It is owned by Kape Technologies, which is a British-Israeli digital security outfit that purchased ExpressVPN in 2021. While there haven’t been any significant controversies surrounding ExpressVPN, Kape Technologies’ suspected ties to the Israeli military may raise concerns.
That being said, ExpressVPN’s privacy practices include some “gold standard” stuff like RAM-only servers that are wiped at every reboot and its stringent no-logs policy. The company also undergoes regular third-party audits.
NordVPN is a Panama-based provider, so it is outside the Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes jurisdictions as well. While the service operates from Panama, its parent company, Nord Security, is based in Lithuania. There are no Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes there either.
While NordVPN benefits from a generally positive reputation, when it suffered a breach on one of its servers in 2018, it waited a year to inform its users. They fixed the breach immediately and seemingly no user data was compromised.
Whether the above is enough for you to steer clear of NordVPN, I’ll leave up to you. However, bear in mind that NordVPN submits to regular third-party audits and strongly focuses on user privacy, as evidenced by its solid no-logs policy. NordVPN, like ExpressVPN, also employs RAM-only servers.
Performance and speed
While speed will always be an important metric for potential VPN users, it’s important to understand that every VPN out there will cause your connection to take a speed hit. That’s because of the overhead caused by the encryption/decryption.
ExpressVPN is a high-end VPN service. As such, you’d expect its performance to be above average, and it is. When doing things like online gaming, torrenting and streaming while connected to ExpressVPN, I didn’t experience any lag, buffering or freeze-ups on any of the servers I tested.
I got good ping times (low latency) and good throughput (fast connections) in my speed tests. The slowdown I was experiencing was roughly 30-35%. That’s not the smallest slowdown I’ve seen, but it’s well within the average, and my connection remained fast and stable. And, to be honest, had I not explicitly tested my speeds, I probably wouldn’t have noticed the slowdown.
As with ExpressVPN, NordVPN’s performance was also excellent with online gaming, streaming, and torrenting, with no hiccups whatsoever. So, it’s pretty much on par with ExpressVPN here.
But when it comes to speeds, NordVPN did better than ExpressVPN. Pretty much across the board, NordVPN took a smaller speed hit. It was between 10-15% when averaged out. This is impressive. NordVPN is one of the VPN providers that can offer the best speeds. If this were a contest, NordVPN would take the prize for speed.
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