Let’s be blunt: you don’t want people seeing what you’re doing on the Internet. Whether it be looking at adult websites, trying to get around government firewalls to get to censored information, or want to use torrents and don’t want nasty letters from your Internet Service provider when you do.
Or you’re at a public WiFi and don’t want that guy sitting in the corner with the packet sniffer to see all of your banking information and start buying jewelry for his girlfriend with your credit card.
This is why using a trusted Virtual Private Network (VPN) provider is a good idea. Nobody can tell what you’re looking at or downloading, because your connection through VPN is encrypted. All the Internet provider, whether it be your cable company or where you work, knows is you’ve connected to a VPN, and that’s it. What you do from there is private, and only for you to know.
VPN.AC has a standalone, custom-built client for Mac OS X. The software is nearly identical to its acclaimed Windows-based cousin. For starters, the app enables the user to connect to multiple locations in the US, UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, Australia, and elsewhere.
The following is a list of the best free VPNs for Mac. A really good VPN connection can cost anywhere from $10 to $30 a month, but these are just as good for getting started.
The List: The Best Free VPNs for Mac
So with that, let’s go over the list of the best free VPNs for Mac users.
1. NordVPN
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NordVPN employs military-grade, 256-bit key AES encryption to keep your online data safe. If you are serious about protecting your online identity and anonymity, you will be better served by purchasing a full-featured VPN. We believe that NordVPN is your best choice.
Some of the features that bring NordVPN on top of the list:
- The ability to hide your IP to keep your Internet activity anonymous.
- Support for six simultaneous connections that can be used on your Mac as well as Windows, iOS, and Android devices.
- Automatic kill-switch that shuts down your connection if your VPN connectivity is interrupted.
- Onion over VPN routes traffic through Nord’s VPN and then sends it to the Onion Router for added protection, such as when accessing the dark web.
- SmartPlay technology that ensures access to over 400 geo-restricted streaming services such as Netflix, Pandora, and Amazon Prime.
- Double data protection sends your data through two VPN servers before reaching its destination, effectively encrypting your data twice.
How to use Nord VPN for Free:
- Start your risk-free NordVPN trial, you can cancel your subscription at any time. There are no costs.
- NordVPN offers 30-day money-back guarantee. Flexible pricing plans make it easy to try this valuable privacy tool.
2. Windscribe
Windscribe comes with a free version. For those who want a little bit more, the price is affordable starting at $9 a month and going down with a longer commitment.
Every list is going to have Windscribe on it. It meets all of our target points:
- Secure with AES-256 encryption.
- Private by not keeping logs. Which means even if someone requests they identify what a customer accesses, they can’t because they don’t store the information.
- Robust with servers in 55 countries and 110 cities, so you know wherever you go there’s a way to connect reliably.
- 10 GB per month of bandwidth traffic.
Windscribe provides a VPN client for Mac, but also has Windows and Linux clients for users of other operating systems. Even better, it can be integrated into browsers like Chrome or Firefox with an extension, so you can just connect the browser through their VPN, and off you go.
3. ProtonVPN
ProtonVPN provides their security with what they call the “Secure Core”. Rather than just have their users connect and then route them to the Internet through one location, they protect users by forwarding the traffic through multiple servers. This means that people won’t be able to find out where the original computer connected from, increasing your privacy.
Along with these features, it includes:
- Security with AES-256 encryption
- Forward Secrecy where each connection receives new encryption key, so even if someone traced your transmissions before, they can’t use that information to decrypt new ones.
- Legal protection being based in Switzerland, where privacy laws are the strongest in the world.
ProtonVPN also features no logs so users don’t have to worry that their information will be betrayed later. They include clients for Windows and Mac VPN connections. As an added plus, ProtonVPN has physical security from the use of an old fallout shelter. War never changes, but with strong physical and encryption security, ProtonVPN can keep your connection secure.
4. TunnelBear
We didn’t pick TunnelBear just because it’s an adorable name with a mascot that looks like what would happen if Mario was turned into a bear and came out of a warp pipe.
TunnelBear, like the other services, features protections like AES 256-bit encryption and no logging.
What TunnelBear adds is a strong push for protection with:
- 500 MB of available data, plus another 1 GB if you tweet about them.
- VPN blocking protection: Some websites and Internet services will block users if they detect that the connection is coming in from a VPN. TunnelBear has systems that make these connection less detectable, so your communication can still go through while protected.
- Vigilant Mode: This is a very cool feature. If a security issue is detected at any point, then TunnelBear will cut off all unsecured traffic until connections are properly restored. So when something tries to breach the connection, you can be assured that people can’t try to get around and see what’s happening through unsecured channels.
TunnelBear has services in 20 countries, and it’s expanding all the time.
5. Hotspot Shield
Hotspot Shield is one of the most popular choices out there.
It has a free VPN option that includes both 128 and 256-bit AES encryption, and features like:
- Connection for up to 5 different devices. Most of the free VPN offerings only allow one connection at a time, while HotSpot Shield allows 5 different devices to connect through the same account.
- Kill Switch: When a connection issue through the VPN occurs, the computer can start trying to use the regular insecure connection rather than the secure encrypted VPN connection. The Kill Switch stops all communication from the computer to the Internet until the VPN connection is restored, so the traffic that needs to stay private is “always” private.
- 2500 servers across the globe. This means wherever you go, there’s going to be a local connection that keeps up the speed and security.
Honorable Mention: VPN Gate
VPN Gate is interesting because it’s the outgrowth of an academic project. It’s made up of public VPN relay servers, so it’s a community of people working together to provide secure communications for others. It allows protection for people trying to get through government firewalls or just wanting to secure their connection over public WiFi connections.
Being a university project, it has clients for any number of operations systems, including a Mac VPN client.
Because of this, it has some features the others don’t:
- No registration. Every other service listed requires people to register in the hopes that eventually they’ll move to the paid version. VPN Gate doesn’t have a paid version, so it doesn’t need registration – just install the client and go.
- Additional users: Users can register to host VPN servers to add to the project, so it’s always growing as the community pitches in.
VPN Gate is a fascinating experiment, and for those just looking to do some secure browsing without a ton of extra features, it’s a great fit.
The Qualifications for Best VPN Service
Picking the best VPN for Mac OS X comes down to three things:
Reliability ✅
A VPN is no good if you can’t connect to it. The biggest issue with free VPN providers is they usually provide fewer servers or slower access speed, and reserve the better systems for paying customers. Kind of a “try it out and upgrade later” system.
Security 🔒
People use a VPN provider to keep their browsing and download habits private. So the connection has to use current encryption algorithms to keep hackers and other undesirables out.
Speed 🚀
There’s not much of a reason to connect to a VPN provider that makes you feel like you’re using an old dial-up modem. A good VPN provider provides fast access so you aren’t spending all day waiting for something to happen.
It’s Your Privacy
Your information, your browsing habits, your connections with the world are your business, and not anyone else’s. Don’t give up your privacy to use a public connection, or even within the privacy of your own home. A good VPN for Mac can let you explore the world without fear. Hopefully, this list has helped make your life easier, and more secure.
In other tips I've covered how to set up an OpenVPN Linux server and an OpenVPN Linux client. Here, I look at setting up OpenVPN as a client on OS X.
There are a few possible clients to choose from. One popular OpenVPN client for OS X is Tunnelblick. Tunnelblick is free and open source. Another client is Viscosity. It has a cost of $9USD with a 30 day trial. Finally, my client of choice is Shimo, which is not just an OpenVPN client (like the other two), but also works with a number of other VPN and VPN-like solutions: Cisco VPN, IPSec, PPTP/L2TP, SSH, and so forth. Shimo is more expensive than the others, but not by much: it is only €14.95 (about $21USD).
Shimo is also easy to use with OpenVPN. If you have followed along with the other OpenVPN tutorials in this series, you will have a copy of the client certificate, key, and the CA certificate on your system. If not, you will need to obtain them from the server, where they would have been generated, and securely copy (using SSH or a USB disk) them to your computer. Next, start Shimo and head to the Preferences. In the Profiles pane, add a new OpenVPN profile.
Under the General tab, name your new connection — something like 'OpenVPN Home' would suffice. In the Authentication pane, you will need to select your Certificate Authority file (ca.crt), Local Certificate (client.crt), and Private Key File (client.key). Make sure the Authentication Method is set to Certificate (Openvpn Client For Mac
Figure A). There is no need to set the username and password unless it is required by the server (for the purposes of this series, we elected to use just certificates without further authentication mechanisms).Figure A
In the Connection tab, enter in the name of the remote host (i.e., openvpn-server.domain.com). Ensure the Tunnel Device is TUN and the Protocol is UDP (Figure B); unless you have changed the connection port on the server, leave it at the default 1194. Set Compression to Automatic, and enable Automatic Reconnection. You can also elect to send keep-alive packets every few seconds to ensure the connection stays up (i.e., maybe send a keep-alive packet ever 120 seconds or so).Figure B
That's it! You can save the preferences for this profile; go to the Shimo menu icon, and select the new OpenVPN network from the list, and Shimo will establish the connection. If you have enabled the OpenVPN server to push DNS and DNS domain information to clients, when you connect, you will be able to access systems on the remote network by their computer names directly rather than IP addresses.
If you have an iPhone, you're in for an even bigger treat. With iPhone tethering, you can be on the road, anywhere, and securely access the home or work network simply by connecting your iPhone to the laptop (via USB or Bluetooth) and enabling tethering on the iPhone (via Settings | General | Network | Internet Tethering). Once the connection between the Mac and iPhone is established, simply fire up Shimo or whatever OpenVPN client you have chosen, and establish the VPN connection. This works so well that I have been able to obtain a kerberos-ticket and access a kerberos-authentication-only web site on the internal network while sitting in my car across town.
If you only need to use OpenVPN, Shimo may be overkill. It is a fantastic and robust OpenVPN client, but you may wish to give something like Tunnelblick a go first to see if it meets your needs. The latest version of Tunnelblick is 3.0, but it requires you to edit the OpenVPN client configuration directly.
This makes it a lightweight frontend to the OpenVPN command-line program, and the configuration for such can be found in the previous tip about configuring the Linux client. Primarily, you will need to change the 'remote' directive to point to the OpenVPN server, and ensure that the ca, cert, and key directives are correct. These directives look for those files in the directory that the configuration file resides in, so you will want to copy those files to ~/Library/Application Support/Tunnelblick/Configurations/.
Once that is done and the configuration file has been saved, use the Tunnelblick menu icon to initiate a connection to the specified OpenVPN server and watch the OpenVPN log output as it connects.
Install Openvpn On Mac
There are a few options to establishing connections to OpenVPN on the Mac. Tunnelblick is good, if a little rough. It is, after all, a simple frontend to the openvpn command line program. Shimo is great if you need a little more power, flexibility, and hand-holding. It is also the best of the bunch if you need to connect to different types of VPNs.
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Download the PDF, 'How to set up OpenVPN server and create Linux and Mac OS X clients.'