If you choose the best VPN, you can trust the fact that you will get the most secure VPN experience, hiding your IP address and using strong encryption features to ensure that your online data/activity remains as private and protected as possible.

With both paid and free services to choose from, you may be tempted to save money with a free VPN, but you may wonder if it is as secure and reliable as a paid one. In this article, we will determine if free options are truly safe.

Free services are small entry-level companions to paid services; VPN providers (such as Hotspot Shield, Windscribe, and TunnelBear) offer limited free options in the hopes of upgrading to a paid plan.

Many of the best free options come from premium providers who make their profits through paid subscriptions (rather than sneaky partnerships with advertisers), so the chances of them selling/sharing your data or having shoddy security or privacy infrastructure is that it is unlikely. If they did, no one would want to upgrade to a paid plan and it would not be commercially viable.

However, one should not take for granted that a fee-free VPN is secure. Instead, be sure to do some background research on how well-known and reputable the VPN provider is. This includes whether they use the strongest encryption available (AES 256-bit encryption).

Unlimited Free Service is a stand-alone VPN that offers all of its paid services for free. It sounds too good to be true, and it is. Moreover, it can seriously compromise your online security and privacy.

Unlike premium VPN providers, these free options often make their profits through advertising. As a user, you may end up with lots of embedded pop-up ads or be automatically redirected to random (and potentially dangerous) third-party websites without your consent.

In worse cases, these services might track your personal data and online behavior and sell it to advertisers or analytics companies for profit. Worse yet, malware may be hidden, allowing hackers to infiltrate.

Worse yet, these services are likely to have weak encryption (or none at all). In addition, they may slow down the Internet and fail to unblock regionally restricted content.

Overall, this type of free service undermines the point of having a VPN in many ways. At best, they are unsatisfactory and counterproductive; at worst, they pose a serious threat to online security and privacy.

Arguably, the most secure VPN services are paid ones. Paid services not only provide much better access to servers, server locations, geo-blocked content, and monthly data, but also provide a superior security network for your Internet traffic and personal data.

First, the paid service will likely offer the strongest encryption (AES 256-bit encryption) as well as special premium features like a kill switch that disconnects you from the network if the VPN unexpectedly stops working.

Second, most VPN providers that offer paid services have a no-logging policy and will not track your online activity, let alone share it with advertisers or analytics companies. Compared to unlimited free options, paid services (like ExpressVPN and NordVPN) are infinitely more reliable.

After all, if you plan to use a VPN extensively, you're much better off choosing a paid service; the idiom "You get what you pay for" applies here as well.

When it comes to online security and privacy, paid services are more likely to have a better ethic of data handling and a more robust security/privacy infrastructure. Overall, it is better to spend some money than to take a risk with free services, especially unlimited ones that may pose a serious threat to your personal online data.

Nevertheless, if you only want to use a VPN on an occasional, temporary basis in certain situations (for example, if you need to temporarily connect to a public Wi-Fi network), a fee-free VPN may work in a pinch.