Windscribe Pro review: A versatile VPN with a good free plan

Windscribe Pro in brief:

• P2P allowed: Yes, but not all servers
• Simultaneous device connections: Unlimited
• Business location: Ontario, Canada
• Number of servers: 130+
• Number of country locations: 69
• Cost: $9 per month or $69 for one year

VPNs and ad-blockers help you surf the web privately so that websites and advertisers can’t track your online activities to learn where you go and what you do. You’ll find a plethora of VPNs and ad-blockers with different price tags and degrees of effectiveness, but one program worth trying is Windscribe. 

Originally marketing itself as a VPN with ad- and tracker-blocking at its core, Windscribe is one of the first to adopt such features and has also long stood out for its generous free plan. In recent years, the service has been trying hard to add features and expand on its paid service in order to keep pace with the market leaders. It might still lag behind the top dogs, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t still have a lot to offer.

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

What are Windscribe Pro’s features and services?

Windscribe is available for a variety of platforms including Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Linux, Huawei, Apple TV, FireTV, plus browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and MS Edge, and routers as well. For this review, I focused on the Windows and Android versions.

Windscribe offers access to 130+ city locations across 69 different real countries. The “real” here is important because Windscribe only provides servers physically located in the actual countries rather than virtual servers that connect by proxy to that country. As far as I can tell, Windscribe currently has the most real locations of any VPN on the market. 

Physical servers are generally considered to be better performing due to their closer physical proximity to the location. Windscribe owns all of the internal DNS servers, but does rent some of the servers located in other countries.

The service also mercifully allows users an unlimited number of simultaneous device connections—why more VPN providers aren’t doing this is a mystery. 

All servers except those in India, Lithuania, Russia, South Africa, and Bosnia allow P2P. The stated reason behind this is that those countries outright restrict P2P file sharing so Windscribe complies with local laws.

Sam Singleton

When you first open up Windscribe you’ll notice that the window is a tiny little square with only a big connect power button, your current IP address, and a drop-down for country locations. Clicking on various drop-down menus expands the app window accordingly. 

The interface is quite unique and I’m torn between whether I like it or not. On the one hand, you can tell that Windscribe has spent a lot of time cramming in all of these little fun extension windows, but on the other other hand, I feel like it is all a bit overdone.

You can click on the drop-down menu at the top left of the home screen to access additional settings. Here you’ll find a veritable treasure trove of customization options—power users, eat your hearts out. Most of these settings will only be used by the most tech-savvy users, but a few are worth pointing out in general.

Sam Singleton

There are your typical VPN features such as auto-connect, split tunneling, and a kill switch (Windscribe calls this feature “Firewall Mode”). If you have the app and browser extension installed you can use split-tunneling for both apps or IP addresses.

A feature dubbed R.O.B.E.R.T. is a highly customizable DNS and IP level blocker for the Windows client capable of blocking ads, trackers, malware, and objectionable websites (gambling, adult content, clickbait, crypto mining, etc.). Additionally, a MAC address spoofing tool can disguise your PC’s hardware address.

Plus, more advanced options are available. A port forwarding feature lets you securely access your home computer, network, or NAS remotely via a Windscribe connection. A Config Generator helps you create configuration files for different VPN protocols. And though the IP address assigned to your computer will change dynamically, there is an option to upgrade to a static address for an additional fee.

Sam Singleton

Windscribe Pro also comes with access to their browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. You might be wondering: Why use a browser extension when you’ve already got the Windows client? In a nutshell, the extension is designed to work in tandem with the app, mainly to reduce your online footprint and speed up your connection by blocking ads and trackers.

The extension offers a short tutorial to show you which buttons control which features. As you can with the Windows client, you’re able to turn the extension’s VPN on and off, allow it to select the best VPN server or choose one yourself, and control what gets blocked—ads, malware, social network sites, cookies, and more. Plus, you can whitelist specific sites that you don’t want affected by the blocking.

How much does Windscribe Pro cost?

Sam Singleton

Windscribe comes in a free edition as well as a subscription-based Pro mode. The free flavor restricts the number of VPN to 11 locations and by default, you’re granted 2GB of bandwidth per month. Adding and confirming your email address boosts that to 10GB per month. Otherwise, the free plan imposes no speed or performance caps. Overall, the free plan is a great option for those who don’t want to pay for a VPN but still need to browse online privately.

The Pro flavor grants you access to all the VPN city locations around the world as well as unlimited bandwidth. This plan can be purchased for $9 per month—which is not bad for a top VPN nowadays—or $69 per year, which drops the monthly price to an even more reasonable $5.75.

A Build-a-Plan option lets you pay only for what you use via an a-la-carte approach. Don’t need or want access to all the accessible VPN servers? You can limit the scope to just certain server locations. For example, you could buy access to all 35 VPN server locations in the US for $1. For each country you add, you get an extra 10GB of data per month. You can also grab unlimited data for your plan for another $1 a month. Ultimately, you need to spend at least $3 per month if you opt to build your own plan. 

It’s a fun and unique way to only pay for what you want and it could be well worth it if you take the time to set up this type of plan.

How is Windscribe Pro’s performance?

As always, when testing a VPN’s speeds I measure connection speeds across its servers in different countries all around the world and then compare them to my baseline internet speed.

Windscribe VPN’s speeds didn’t let me down. During the tests, Windscribe was able to manage a decently impressive 64 percent of the base download speed and 70 percent of the base upload speed. Those results are nearly identical to the last time I tested and enough to keep it in the top 10 fastest VPNs, and still the fastest free VPN I’ve ever tested.

While these speeds were done over the WireGuard protocol, testing other protocols did slow down the connection to varying degrees—none too drastically though. Regardless, I recommend that almost everyone use WireGuard as their default protocol for the best speed and security anyways.

When it comes to unblocking streaming content, Windscribe scored decent enough marks. Using region-specific VPN servers all over the world, I was able to connect to and stream content from Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney Plus, and other services, a feat that many other VPN products can’t always achieve. 

In the past, I had problems accessing Netflix while using Windscribe, but those issues seem to have been mostly fixed and now the service works pretty well with all streaming services. I did encounter a few issues with Netflix recognizing that I was using a VPN and subsequently blocking access. But a quick change of servers was able to remedy the situation. With these results, Windscribe Pro is a decent option for those looking to get around streaming restrictions, but just be aware that you’ll run up against the 10GB of data with the free version pretty fast.

How is Windscribe Pro’s security and privacy?

Sam Singleton

Windscribe comes with strong AES-256 encryption and all of your standard protocol options including WireGuard, IKEv2, and OpenVPN (both UDP and TCP). It also has a “Stealth” option that disguises traffic as HTTPS with TLS and a “WStunnel” protocol option which wraps your traffic with web sockets. Both of these can be used in certain countries to get around stricter government censorship. 

I tested Windscribe’s security on Windows with a DNS leak test and found no DNS or other leaks. Similarly, when I tested the kill-switch function it worked well; however, there was no immediate indication as to what happened until the connection was automatically reestablished—a minor gripe, and doesn’t affect the functioning of the client’s kill switch.

Winscribe covers what data it does and does not collect in the privacy policy on its website. The data it does collect includes total bandwidth you’ve used in a month for its free plan for data management purposes and a timestamp of your last activity in order to identify inactive accounts.

It claims that there is no logging of connections, IP addresses, timestamps, or browsing history, which it backs up in its regular transparency reports. In June last year, Windscribe went through an independent audit of its FreshScribe stack-code by cybersecurity firm Packetlabs. Included in the audit was a successful review of the service’s no-logs policy showing no user data was being stored by Windscribe.

Public audits are crucial to reassuring users that their data is anonymized and properly handled according to the VPN’s privacy policy. It took the service a bit to finally complete a no-logs audit, but nevertheless it’s better late than never.

Based in Canada, Windscribe is a small operation founded in 2015 by Yegor Sak. Canada is a member of the Five Eyes Alliance, an organization in which member countries promise to share intelligence data with each other. But that hasn’t yet affected Windscribe. As you can tell from the aforementioned transparency report, it shows that the VPN has rejected all requests for user information from government agencies due to a lack of relevant data. Plus, the proven no-logs policy means there is no data for them to cough up anyways.

Recently, the company faced a lawsuit in Greece that mistakenly identified Windscribe and its founder as being the source of an illegal server breach. An anonymous Windscribe VPN user had seemingly been the actual culprit. And while it’s unfortunate that the anonymous user who committed the breach has yet to be found, the fact that Windscribe had no user data to turn over for identification purposes proves that its no-logs policy can really be trusted.

Is Windscribe Pro worth it?

Windscribe is a powerful and effective VPN with solid ad- and tracker- blocking. It stumbles a bit with a convoluted interface and smaller server network, but makes up for it with solid speeds and tons of customization options. 

The Windows client and the browser extensions make for a powerful team that will protect your privacy and block annoying ads and objectionable content as you browse the web. And with the free version of Windscribe already being so good, you can always start there and then jump to the Pro edition if you need more capability.

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.