Methodology

How WhatVPN scores a VPN

Scores are editorial judgements, but they are built from evidence that anyone can check, weighted the same way for every provider. Here is exactly how a score is produced.

The weighting

Every provider gets a 0–100 score in five categories. The overall figure is a weighted average — weighted the same way for all of them:

Privacy & Trust30%

Speed25%

Streaming20%

Torrenting15%

Ease of use10%

What feeds each score

Ownership and independence — who ultimately controls the provider, and whether they also own VPN 'review' sites (a conflict we flag).
Jurisdiction — the legal environment the provider answers to, and any mandatory data-retention obligations.
Audit history — the auditor, scope and recency of independent no-logs and security assessments. Reports older than 24 months count for less.
Logging and architecture — the exact wording of the logging policy, and whether infrastructure is RAM-only.
Published third-party benchmarks — speed and streaming results from named testers (e.g. TechRadar, Tom's Guide), noted where they disagree.
Feature verification — protocols, kill switch, split tunnelling, port forwarding and dedicated IP, checked against current apps.

On "under review"Speed and streaming change more often than legal pages do, so those numbers are a snapshot and are refreshed as new benchmarks are published. A provider marked 'under review' has not yet been through our full test process and is deliberately shown without a score rather than given a placeholder one.

What we don't do

We don't publish invented test figures, we don't suppress a provider's weaknesses or a rival's strengths, and no provider can pay to change a score or a position. A provider without verifiable test and audit data is held out of the scored ranking until the evidence exists, rather than given a placeholder. This is both our editorial line and, under the UK's Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, the standard the law expects of published rankings.