Hide.me VPN review: A feature-packed VPN that rewards tinkering

Best Prices Today: Hide.me

Hide.me VPN in brief:

• P2P allowed: Yes
• Simultaneous device connections: 10 
• Business location: Malaysia
• Number of servers: 2,600+
• Number of country locations: 91+
• Cost: $11.99 per month, $54.99 for 1-year, or $69.99 for 26 months

Hide.me from Malaysia-based eVenture Ltd. continues to hang with today’s most popular services, even if it doesn’t quite have the same name recognition. It has long billed itself as a privacy-first VPN for people who like to tinker, and that reputation hasn’t changed.

The service packs in an impressive array of features and even offers a free tier with the same core security protections as its paid plans. On paper, Hide.me makes a strong case for itself, but its flexibility comes with some minor drawbacks: The interface and sprawling menu system can feel a bit overwhelming and its connection speeds lack consistency.

Read on to learn more, then see our roundup of the best VPNs for comparison.

Hide.me features and services

Since my last review, Hide.me has focused mostly on reaffirming its commitments to user privacy. The service completed another successful independent audit by security firm Securitum in June of 2024 which once again confirmed its no-logs policy.

Additionally, Hide.me was re-accredited with a VPN Trust Seal by the independent VPN Trust Initiative (VTI) in late 2025. The VTI is an industry-led consortium that establishes and vets standards and best practices for VPN providers. While this isn’t quite the same as a full independent audit, it does demonstrate that the service is continuously maintaining a high level of security, privacy, and transparency.

Hide.me also partnered with KuCoin Pay, allowing users to pay for the service with a wide variety of cryptocurrencies.

Hide.me VPN hands-on

When you open up the Hide.me application you’re confronted with a dashboard that displays tiles with options for quick connect that will connect to the last-used server as well as tiles with information on your current IP address, account information, a list of streaming-optimized servers, and a list of your favorite locations. 

All of these tiles and widgets are movable and interchangeable, allowing you the freedom to customize the dashboard to suit your needs. It’s a useful interface, and while I wouldn’t call it plain, it does allow you to keep it as simple or detailed as you want.

On the left sidebar you have additional tabs for Locations, Map, Features, Socials, and Settings, as well as Your Account, and Support. The Locations tab displays a searchable list of all available Hide.me server locations, with faster 10G servers tagged as such with an icon. Along the top you can filter through all servers, those optimized specifically for streaming, or multi-hop servers as well. All of these can be further sorted by ping, country name, or physical distance from your home IP.

For those who are spatially inclined, the Map tab displays the physical location of all of these servers on a world map instead.

The Features tab is where Hide.me really shines—there’s a lot here. It houses a deep toolkit: split tunneling, port forwarding, a kill switch, custom DNS, and Hide.me’s proprietary Stealth Guard firewall that blocks apps from accessing the internet unless the VPN is active.

There is a feature called Bolt “Fast Proxy” which optimizes internet speed performance over an OpenVPN TCP connection. Theoretically, this can lead to speed increases, particularly in Windows.

Hide.me’s proprietary Stealth Guard feature is also noteworthy. It’s basically an advanced, customizable version of a traditional kill switch. This can be used to limit either your entire internet or just certain apps unless a Hide.me VPN connection is present. It acts as a more granular firewall, ensuring your chosen apps never connect unencrypted. There is also a traditional kill-switch feature under the Settings tab as well.

Additionally, under Features you’ll also find an ad- and tracker-blocker called “SmartGuard.” Like I said, Hide.me’s configuration options go deep. Add to that the vast array of protocols available and the option to use custom DNS and it quickly becomes apparent that power users have a lot to like with Hide.me.

That flexibility comes with a downside: Due to the sheer amount of available features and the maze of menus you need to work through to tweak all of them, this service probably isn’t for beginners—or the faint of heart. 

In the beginning, I personally found navigating the app a bit disorienting. Some things are listed under “Features” that I thought would be in “Settings” and vice versa. It’s a minor gripe though and figuring out the menu system is only a matter of spending some time in the application itself.

Hide.me is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iOS, as well as some consoles and smart TVs. There are also browser add-ons for Chrome and Firefox that come with support for the SOCKS proxy. 

How much does Hide.me cost?

Hide.me offers a total of three different plan options for its premium service; a monthly plan, a 1-year plan, and a 2-year plan. The monthly plan costs $11.99 per month, which is a bit above the industry average. Sure, the VPN gives you a lot of configurable options, but similarly priced services such as NordVPN or ExpressVPN offer all of the same things plus extras like bundled password managers, identity protection services, and larger server networks.

The 1-year plan is a better deal at $54.99 or $4.58 per month, which is still on the high end. The 2-year plan is where Hide.me really becomes affordable though. For a total of $69.99 or $2.69 per month, you’ll get access to the premium service for 24 months plus an additional two free months. That ends up making it cheaper than most other VPNs across the same time period.

Finally, it’s worth noting that Hide.me has a handy free version that provides all of the great security features of its premium counterpart for absolutely no cost. The downsides are that you only have access to eight of its servers and you’re limited to one device connection at a time. 

Also, Hide.me recently did away with the data limits on its free plan which is a huge plus. In my testing, I noticed my connection speeds on average were quite a bit slower than with the premium version. Due to these limitations, I don’t recommend using the free version to stream, but it is a great way to browse securely or just to try out the service to see how you like it.

When signing up for Hide.me you do have to provide personal billing information and it accepts payments via credit card, PayPal, Google Pay, and multiple cryptocurrencies via KuCoin pay.

How is Hide.me’s performance?

In order to test Hide.me’s speeds I rated connection speeds across its servers in countries all around the world for multiple days and then compared them to my baseline internet speeds. Across all locations tested, the speeds averaged just over 45 percent of the base download speed and 67 percent of the base upload speed. That’s okay, but short of our list of the fastest VPNs. 

These results fall right in line with the average speeds I found in my last review of the service. At a time when many other VPN providers are prioritizing server speeds, I can’t help but question why more hasn’t been done on Hide.me’s end in recent years to address the issue.

That being said, within these aggregates were some truly incredible speeds—I noted some local U.S. servers running at 90 percent or greater of my baseline. I just found they weren’t consistent. It was quite common for each location to show some great relative speeds one day and then fall off completely the following day. I also found that the drop in speed was quite significant the further the Hide.me server was from my physical location. This is, of course, not uncommon as distance tends to affect latency, but it was still surprisingly drastic.

Hide.me does indicate which servers have faster, 10Gbps connection speeds next to the locations on the server list. So if you have a higher speed connection, I advise you opt for those servers to maximize your potential VPN connection speeds.

Also, testing with different protocols didn’t show one to be much faster than the others, however I did find that WireGuard had the slight edge over the others, as is to be expected. For Windows users Hide.me offers a feature called Bolt “Fast Proxy” which routes traffic through TCP instead of UDP. As proxy routing is often faster, you’re likely to get a bit of a performance boost here. During my testing I noticed very slight increases on average, but not enough for me to opt for proxy routing over the stronger encryption standards of a VPN connection.

Please note however that online speeds can vary wildly in pure Mbps tests from day to day and even hour to hour. It’s best to take any and all speed tests with a grain of salt. Your experience with Hide.me may differ from those in the tests for this review.

Despite these middling speed results, unless you’re gaming, streaming 4K videos, or downloading large files, I don’t really think it will be too much of a concern. Hide.me’s speeds should be enough for browsing and everyday online tasks.

In regards to streaming, Hide.me performed admirably. Under the server list there is a tab for streaming-optimized servers. Every optimized streaming server I connected to was able to access streaming sites such as Netflix and Amazon Prime without any problems. I was even able to access streaming sites with some non-optimized servers as well. Given these results, Hide.me should serve you well for accessing streaming content and getting around region blocks.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Hide.me free version. Of all the eight servers offered with the free VPN, I found that every single one was blocked by Netflix. Given that the free plan specifically highlights that it doesn’t offer a streaming-optimized server, I can’t recommend Hide.me’s free version for those looking to stream. Something like our top free  pick Proton VPN would be a much more reliable free VPN for streaming.

How is Hide.me’s security and privacy?

The VPN comes with industry standard AES 256-bit encryption. It also offers a whole range of protocols including IKEv2, OpenVPN, SoftEtherVPN, WireGuard, and SSTP—that’s more than most other services. It even offers advanced configuration options for many of these protocols to add to the customization. Furthermore, in my testing I found that there were no IP address leaks when using Hide.me across any of its servers and protocols. 

Hide.me is owned by eVenture Ltd., an IT security company based out of Malaysia. Privacy-conscious users will be glad to know that Malaysia has no data retention laws and is not a member country of any surveillance alliances such as Five, Nine, or 14 Eyes.

Hide.me has a very thorough privacy policy on its website. It states that it does not track your activity when you’re connected to the VPN. It doesn’t keep connection logs or store IP addresses. 

The company does, however, keep troubleshooting logs that include a randomly generated username and an internally assigned IP address for each user. The troubleshooting logs are erased every few hours, according to the privacy policy. Additionally, it logs monthly data traffic amounts for quality assurance purposes.

The company did originally pass an independent security audit of its “No-log” policy by Defense Code Ltd., in 2015. In a previous review I criticized the service for not undergoing a new audit since that time. Hide.me was obviously paying attention though, as it completed not one, but three more audits since then; the latest being a successful no-logs audit by independent security firm Securitum in June of 2024.

The fact that it was one of the first VPN services to undergo an independent audit back in the day gave it old-school privacy cred. Now, with the latest audits, the company continues to prove that it takes user privacy seriously—a welcomed sign.

Hide.me also publishes annual Transparency reports detailing data requests the company has received in a given year.

Is Hide.me worth it?

Hide.me is a really intriguing VPN service. On the one hand it offers a fantastic tool set for power users to tweak and configure to their hearts’ content. On the other, it can’t quite nail down some basic things you want from a VPN such as consistent speeds across servers, and the user interface, while okay, could probably use a redesign to make it more intuitive.

It has a great privacy track record though, and the service was able to unblock all streaming sites that I tested. Overall, it’s a well-rounded service that ticks nearly every box you could want from a top VPN. I can easily recommend it for experienced power users, but beginners might want to try the free version first before committing to the paid service.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.

Best Prices Today: Hide.me