NordVPN vs. ExpressVPN

Price: which is cheaper?

On the prices posted October 12, 2026, ExpressVPN is the cheaper of the two at both ends of the contract. Its Basic plan costs $2.99 a month on a 28 month term, billed as $83.72 up front, and then renews at $99.95 a year. NordVPN’s Basic plan costs $3.49 a month on a 27 month term, billed as $94.23 up front, and then renews at $139.08 a year.

ExpressVPN also sells Advanced ($4.49 a month intro, $119.95 a year at renewal) and Pro ($7.49 a month intro, $199.95 a year at renewal). Those tiers add a password manager, identity theft insurance and, on Pro, a dedicated IP. NordVPN sells higher tiers with extra tools on top of Basic too. Its pricing page blocks automated access, so we list only the Basic price here, and you should check the higher tier prices at checkout.

The bigger cost for both is the renewal. Both renew automatically, and NordVPN’s help center says the renewal price can change, with notice by email first. If you plan to stay past the first term, set a reminder a month before it ends and either turn off auto-renew or ask for a better offer. Prices change often around Black Friday, so treat any figure here as a snapshot and confirm the total on the checkout page.

Privacy and audits

Both companies say they keep no logs of browsing activity, and both have paid outside firms to check that claim more than once. NordVPN has passed six no-logs assessments. The latest was run by Deloitte Lithuania under the ISAE 3000 standard, covered standard servers plus Double VPN, Onion over VPN and obfuscated servers, and the report was issued on December 12, 2025.

ExpressVPN lists audits from KPMG (2022, 2023 and 2025), PwC Switzerland (2019 and 2020) and a long series of Cure53 reviews of its apps and its Lightway protocol. Its TrustedServer setup runs servers without writing data to hard drives. There is also real world evidence: when Turkish authorities seized an ExpressVPN server in 2017, they found no logs that tied activity to a user.

Each has a past issue worth knowing about. In 2018 an attacker got into one NordVPN server rented from a data center in Finland through a remote management tool the host had installed. NordVPN disclosed it in October 2019 and said no user credentials were exposed. ExpressVPN kept its chief information officer after he was named in a 2021 U.S. case over hacking work he did for the UAE before joining. Neither event has been tied to leaked user activity, but they belong in your decision.

Servers, apps and devices

NordVPN has the larger footprint. NordVPN’s public server list showed servers in 150 countries and 225 cities on October 12, 2026. ExpressVPN lists servers in 113 countries. If you need an exit point in a smaller market, check both server lists for that country before you pay.

For device limits, ExpressVPN is more flexible on its higher plans: 10 devices on Basic, 12 on Advanced and 14 on Pro. NordVPN allows 10. A household with more than 10 phones, laptops and TVs will hit NordVPN’s cap first, though a VPN on your router counts as one device for everything behind it.

Both cover Windows, Mac, iPhone, Android and Linux, plus browser extensions. ExpressVPN also lists apps for routers, smart TVs and game consoles. Both use their own fast protocol by default: NordLynx, which NordVPN built on WireGuard, and Lightway, which ExpressVPN wrote and had audited by Cure53. Both include a kill switch and split tunneling.

NordVPN adds specialty servers that ExpressVPN does not sell as separate options: Double VPN, which routes traffic through two servers, Onion over VPN for Tor access, and obfuscated servers for networks that block VPN traffic.

Streaming, torrents and speed

These are the questions most comparison sites lead with, and they are also the ones that change month to month. Streaming services block VPN IP ranges and VPNs rotate addresses in response, so a result from one test can be out of date a few weeks later. We have not run our own tests, so we do not publish speed figures or a list of which Netflix libraries each one reaches today.

What we can say from the vendors’ own terms: both allow torrenting on their networks, and both offer a 30 day refund, which is the practical way to check streaming on your own account. Sign up, try the services and devices you care about in the first week, and ask for a refund if something you need does not work. ExpressVPN limits its refund to new users, and both pay back only the first purchase.

On speed, both run modern protocols (NordLynx and Lightway) that are designed to be fast, and your result will depend more on your own internet plan and how far you are from the server than on the brand. If you pay for gigabit internet at home, test a nearby server on both during the refund window and keep the faster one.

If gaming is your main use, latency matters more than raw download speed. Pick the closest server, not the fastest one on a test site.