Best Free VPN for Android: 8 Options Compared
If you are looking for the best free VPN for Android, the honest starting point is what "free" buys you. A free VPN for Android will hide your traffic from the network you are connected to and let you appear in another country, but the free tiers below differ enormously in what they limit and in what the provider records. This page goes through eight of them and says what each one publishes about those limits.
This page covers Android specifically. For the free plans compared across every platform, see the best free VPN comparison.
What a free VPN on Android actually does
Two things, and it is worth being precise about both before comparing anything.
It hides what you are doing from the network you are connected to. On café or hotel wifi, the operator of that network sees an encrypted tunnel instead of the sites you visit. That is real and it is the strongest reason to have one on a phone, because a phone joins networks you do not control all day long.
And it changes where you appear to be. That is what makes a catalogue from another country reachable, when the service on the other end has not blocked the address range you land on.
What it does not do is make you anonymous. You are still signed into your accounts, your browser still carries its cookies, and the apps on the phone still identify the device. A VPN is one layer, and on Android it is a layer with a specific weakness: the app needs permission to route all traffic on the device, which is a lot of trust to hand to software you did not pay for.
The Top 8 Free VPNs for Android
Before the list, the part most comparisons leave out: a free VPN has to be paid for somehow. Providers do that in one of three ways, and it is worth knowing which one you are choosing.
A capped free tier from a paid service. The provider limits data, speed or the number of locations, and hopes you upgrade. The business model is the subscription, so the free user is a prospect rather than the product. These are generally the safest of the three.
Advertising. The app is free and carries ads. That is a legitimate model, but ad delivery usually means some form of tracking, which sits awkwardly next to a privacy tool.
Something unstated. Unlimited free data, no ads, and no explanation of where the money comes from. There is no such thing as free bandwidth at scale. If a provider does not say how it is funded, that silence is itself information.
What to check for any of them: who operates the service and in which country, what the privacy policy says is recorded, and whether an independent party has audited that claim. We set out how we weigh that in our review methodology, and the paid services are compared in our VPN comparison.
Proton VPN
The one free tier on this page that behaves like a product rather than a sample. Proton publishes it without a data cap, funded by the paid subscriptions, and the company is registered in Switzerland. The limit is which countries you can connect to, not how much you use it.
If you want a free VPN on Android and you are not going to read any further, this is the one to start with. Our Proton VPN review covers the paid plans.
Turbo VPN
Ad-supported, unlimited, and popular on the Play Store. It states that it does not keep logs; that is the company saying so, and we have not seen an independent audit of it published.
The question worth asking of any free app in this category is the one from the top of this page: what pays for the servers? Advertising is an answer, and it is a partial one. Ad revenue on a free VPN app is thin, and the traffic passing through is valuable. If you cannot establish who owns the company and how it earns, that is information you have, not information you lack.
Hotspot Shield
A long-established name with both a free and a paid tier, so the business model is at least visible: the free version carries ads and pushes the subscription.
It advertises a large network and strong encryption. Encryption strength is not what separates these eight, everyone here uses the same ciphers, so it is not a reason to choose one. What separates them is the logging policy, whether anyone independent has examined it, and who owns the company. Check those on the provider’s own pages before installing.
Windscribe
A capped free tier from a paid service: you get a monthly data allowance and a subset of locations, and the company earns from people who upgrade. That is the healthiest shape a free VPN can have, because you are the prospect rather than the product.
Windscribe publishes its own account of what it stores. Read it rather than a summary of it, including ours.
hide.me
Also a capped free tier alongside paid plans, with a small set of locations on the free version. Same shape as Windscribe: the free user is a prospect, and the limits are published on the pricing page.
The free tier is deliberately narrow. That is not a criticism, it is how a free tier stays honest, but it does mean checking the current cap before you rely on it, because those numbers move.
SurfEasy, shut down
SurfEasy no longer exists. Its own site carries the notice: "SurfEasy VPN is shutting down on September 1, 2026. After this date, your SurfEasy apps will stop working." Checked on surfeasy.com, 6 September 2026.
It appeared on this page as a recommendation until today, which is our mistake and worth saying plainly. If you have the app installed, remove it and check that no subscription is still billing through the Play Store. A shut-down service does not always stop that for you. The owner, Gen, points existing users at Norton; that is their suggestion, not ours.
Touch VPN
Free, ad-supported, unlimited data, and no paid tier to fund it. That combination is the one to look at hardest: if there is no subscription anywhere in the business, the revenue comes from somewhere else, and on a VPN the obvious candidate is the traffic itself.
We are not saying that is what happens here. We are saying it is the question the page you are reading should raise and usually does not.
Opera’s built-in VPN
Not an app but a feature inside the Opera browser, free, with no account and no data cap. On Android it covers traffic from the Opera browser and nothing else, not your other apps, not a second browser.
For reading in a café that is often enough, and it costs nothing. For anything device-wide it is the wrong tool. We go through what it does and does not cover in our piece on Opera and VPN extensions.
If you make a purchase via one of these links, we may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you. Learn More
