Windscribe VPN review (2026): a free plan worth using and unlimited devices

What Windscribe is in 2026

Windscribe is a consumer VPN run by Windscribe Limited from an office on Richmond Street West in Toronto. It started in 2016, and its three founders, Yegor Sak, Alex Paguis and Mark Ulicki, still own it with their staff. There are no outside investors, and the company says it does not pay for ads or reviews.

Most people meet Windscribe through its free plan, which gives you 10GB a month in 10 countries once you confirm an email address. Paying customers choose between Pro, at $9 a month or $69 a year, and Build A Plan, which charges $1 a month for each country you add. Every account, free or paid, works on as many of your own devices as you like.

The old version of this page called Windscribe a new entrant with something to prove. Ten years on, it has a public transparency report, three independent audits and a court case in Greece that ended in its favor in April 2025. This review covers how you sign up, what the free and paid plans include, the app settings you will use, privacy, price, support, and how it compares with Proton VPN and Surfshark. We did not run our own speed or streaming tests for this update.

Signing up and getting connected

You can create an account with a username and password alone. The privacy policy lists email as optional, and you only need one if you want the larger free allowance or a way to reset your password. Without an email you get 2GB a month.

Apps are on the download page for Windows 10 or later, macOS, Linux, Android (including Huawei AppGallery and F-Droid builds), iPhone, Apple TV and Amazon Fire TV, and the help center has a guide for Android TV boxes such as the Nvidia Shield. Browser extensions cover Chrome, Firefox and Edge. For routers, Windscribe supports any model with an OpenVPN, IKEv2 or WireGuard client, and the help center has setup guides for ASUS, Netgear, TP-Link, Linksys, DD-WRT, eero and Google Nest routers. The config generator that builds those router files is listed as a Pro feature.

Once you sign in, Auto Pilot picks a location for you. The free plan shows 10 countries: the US, Canada, the UK, Hong Kong, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Norway and Romania. Pro opens the rest of the network, which Windscribe describes as 69 countries on its homepage and in its help center. Its status page gives a higher figure of more than 85 countries, so treat the exact number with some caution. Windscribe says every location runs on physical servers rather than virtual ones, so the country you pick is where the server sits.

The free plan in practice

Ten gigabytes a month covers email, browsing and the odd video call on public Wi-Fi, but it will not last through a month of HD streaming. You can add a one-time permanent 5GB by posting about Windscribe on X, and referrals earn extra data.

Windscribe says its free servers are the same machines as its paid ones and the difference is crowding: more free users share each free server, so expect slower evenings at busy locations. The free plan keeps the firewall, split tunneling and every connection protocol, which is more than many free VPNs allow.

The limits that matter are torrenting, which is switched off on free servers, and ad blocking, where free accounts get only the malware and ads lists in R.O.B.E.R.T. and three custom rules. If you need a VPN for a trip abroad or for a café's open network a few times a week, the free plan may be all you ever use.

Build A Plan and Pro

Build A Plan is Windscribe's most unusual idea. You pick the Pro countries you want at $1 a month each, with a $3 minimum and a maximum of seven. Each country adds 10GB to your monthly allowance, so three countries give you 20GB on top of the free plan's 10GB, plus P2P on those three locations. Build A Plan accounts also get every R.O.B.E.R.T. block list and 10 custom rules. Past seven countries, Windscribe itself points you to Pro because the monthly plan works out cheaper.

Pro removes the data cap and opens every location. It also adds the config generators for OpenVPN, IKEv2 and WireGuard, up to 1,000 R.O.B.E.R.T. rules and ephemeral port forwarding. Monthly Pro is $9. The yearly plan is billed at $69, which is $5.75 a month, and Windscribe's homepage promises that the advertised price is the price you keep paying.

You can switch between plans twice in any 30-day period. When you do, Windscribe cancels the old subscription and refunds the unused days.

Protocols and blocked networks

Windscribe connects over WireGuard, IKEv2 and OpenVPN on UDP or TCP. It also has two options for networks that try to block VPNs: Stealth, which wraps OpenVPN in TLS so it looks like ordinary encrypted web traffic, and WStunnel, which carries OpenVPN over WebSocket. The desktop apps let you choose from more than 20 ports.

In practice you leave the app on WireGuard at home and switch to Stealth or WStunnel at a hotel, on a campus network or in a country that filters VPN traffic. Network rules can make that switch for you: you tell the app to connect, disconnect or use a particular protocol whenever you join a named Wi-Fi network. Windscribe also has a packet size setting that can improve speeds on some networks, and an option to close existing TCP connections when the VPN starts, so open connections restart inside the tunnel.

Firewall, split tunneling and other app settings

Most VPNs call their leak protection a kill switch. Windscribe calls it a firewall and puts it in the Windows and Mac apps under Preferences, with three modes. Automatic turns it on when you connect and off when you disconnect, and cuts your internet if the app crashes or the tunnel drops. Manual leaves it to you. Always on blocks every connection outside the VPN whether the app is running or not, even after a restart, which suits anyone who must never send traffic outside the VPN by mistake.

Split tunneling lets you pick apps that skip the VPN or, the other way round, only the apps that use it. It is on the free plan as well. The Windows app adds MAC address spoofing on public networks, a proxy gateway that turns your PC into an HTTP or SOCKS5 proxy for other devices on your network, and a secure hotspot that shares your VPN connection over Wi-Fi. You can also import your own OpenVPN or WireGuard config and use it like a Windscribe location.

That is a long list of settings, and the app keeps most of them out of the way. If you only want to tap Connect, you can ignore them all.

R.O.B.E.R.T. and the browser extensions

R.O.B.E.R.T. is a DNS blocker that runs on Windscribe's servers, so it filters every device connected to the VPN, including phones and TVs where you cannot install an ad blocker. The free plan blocks malware and ads. Paid plans add lists for social networks, adult sites, gambling, fake news and clickbait, cryptocurrency sites and other VPN companies, and you can write your own rules to block or allow any domain or IP address.

The browser extensions are separate from the desktop VPN. They work as a proxy for the browser only, and they add anti-fingerprinting tools that can rotate your user agent and spoof your time zone, language and GPS location. Run the extension and the desktop app together and you get Double Hop: the extension proxies your browser through a second Windscribe location on top of the VPN. Double Hop only works on desktop, and Windscribe's help article does not say which plans include it.

Static IPs, port forwarding and torrenting

Most VPN addresses are shared by many users, which can trigger captchas and fraud checks. Windscribe sells two kinds of static IP on yearly plans. A datacenter IP costs $24 a year in one of 13 cities, including Washington DC, Los Angeles, London, Frankfurt, Tokyo and Toronto. A residential IP costs $96 a year in Chicago, Dallas or Toronto and looks like a home connection to websites, though P2P is banned on it. Each static IP is shared with a handful of other customers rather than dedicated to you, and you need Pro or unlimited data to use one.

Static IPs come with port forwarding for up to 10 ports per device. Pro accounts also get one ephemeral port at no extra cost, which you request in My Account and which lasts seven days before you need a new one. Free and Build A Plan accounts get no port forwarding.

For torrenting, Pro users can run P2P on most locations. Windscribe blocks it in 11 countries, among them India, Russia, South Africa, South Korea and Thailand, and on a short list of named North American servers. The help center has setup guides for qBittorrent, uTorrent and BitTorrent.

Streaming

Windscribe labels some servers Windflix and says it maintains them for different Netflix regions. If one stops working, its advice is to try another Windflix server or a different server in the same country. It does not promise access to any service, and we did not test streaming for this update. If streaming abroad is your main reason for buying a VPN, use the free plan first to check your service in the countries you need, then pay for Pro or for those countries on Build A Plan.

Privacy, audits and the Greek court case

Windscribe's privacy policy, updated July 30, 2024, lists what it keeps. To run your account it stores your username, a counter of how much data you used in the last 30 days, the time of your last activity and the number of devices connected at once. Payment transaction IDs are kept for 30 days to fight fraud. While you are connected, the server holds your username, connection time and data used in memory and discards them when you disconnect. It does not keep a history of sessions, your source IP address or the sites you visit.

Three outside audits back the software side. Leviathan Security Group reviewed the desktop app in September 2021 and the Android and iOS apps in March 2022, and Windscribe says it fixed everything they raised. Packetlabs audited the server software in June 2024. The transparency report shows zero DMCA and law enforcement requests complied with, because Windscribe says it had no relevant data to hand over.

The strongest evidence is a court case. In June 2023 Windscribe learned that Greek authorities had charged Yegor Sak personally after someone used a Windscribe server in Finland to break into a server in Greece. The hosting bill for that server carried his name. After postponements, a Greek court dismissed the case on April 11, 2025. Windscribe's account is that it could not identify the user because it had no logs to give.

Windscribe is based in Canada, which some privacy buyers avoid because Canada belongs to the Five Eyes intelligence alliance. Its terms are governed by Ontario law. Whether that matters to you depends on who you are protecting yourself from; the data Windscribe says it keeps would not show which sites you visited.

Pricing and value

Windscribe's prices are easy to read. Free costs nothing. Build A Plan costs $3 to $7 a month for three to seven countries. Pro costs $9 a month or $69 a year. Teams can use ScribeForce at $5 per seat a month, with a five-seat minimum, central billing and a static IP that every member can share.

The yearly plan at $69 is the one most people should buy. It is not the cheapest VPN you can find, because some rivals sell two-year deals at a lower monthly rate, but Windscribe says you renew at the same price rather than jumping to a higher one after the first term. Proton VPN, for comparison, charges $3.49 a month on a two-year deal billed at $83.76, and then renews at $83.88 a year.

The weak spot is the refund. You have 7 days from your first payment and must have used less than 10GB on the paid plan. Renewals are never refunded, and crypto payments over $10 come back in Bitcoin only. Proton VPN, Surfshark and ExpressVPN each give 30 days. The free plan softens this, because you can test the apps for as long as you like before you pay.

Support

Help comes through a large knowledge base with setup guides for each app, router brands and torrent clients, a support chatbot that hands you on to a ticket when it cannot answer, and the ticket queue itself. Windscribe says paid users get priority. We found no live chat with a person and no published response times.

There is also an active community on the r/Windscribe subreddit and a Discord server, where staff post. If you are used to a 24/7 chat window that answers in two minutes, Windscribe will feel slower. If you are happy to read a guide first, the help center answers most setup questions.

Windscribe vs Proton VPN

Proton VPN is the free VPN most people weigh against Windscribe. Proton, based in Geneva, has no data limit on its free plan and shows no ads, but the free plan works on one device, and streaming and P2P are paid features. Windscribe caps free data at 10GB a month and, in exchange, lets you use it on every device you own and keeps split tunneling and the firewall on the free plan.

On paid plans, Proton VPN Plus covers 10 devices, costs $3.49 a month on a two-year deal and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Windscribe Pro covers unlimited devices for $69 a year with a 7-day refund.

Choose Proton if you want a free VPN for one laptop and never want to watch a data meter. Choose Windscribe if you want free cover across a phone, laptop and tablet, or if you would rather pay a few dollars for two or three countries than buy a full plan.

Windscribe vs Surfshark

Surfshark also sets no device limit, so the two are close for a household with many gadgets. Surfshark has no free plan, but it has a 7-day free trial on its 1-year and 2-year plans and a 30-day money-back guarantee, which makes it the easier paid VPN to try without risk. Its 2-year Starter plan costs $67.23 for the first 27 months (about $2.49 a month) and then renews at $79 a year, so it is cheaper than Windscribe Pro at first and costs a little more from the third year.

Windscribe's advantages are the free plan, Build A Plan for light users, a price that it says stays the same at renewal, and deeper app settings such as the three firewall modes, Stealth and WStunnel connections, and network rules. Surfshark suits someone who wants a single paid plan and a month to change their mind. Windscribe suits someone who wants to start free and control the details.

Pricing and value

Windscribe has a free plan with 10GB a month (2GB without a confirmed email) in 10 countries. Build A Plan costs $1 a month per country, with a $3 minimum and a seven-country maximum, and each country adds 10GB. Pro costs $9 a month or $69 a year ($5.75 a month) with unlimited data and every location. ScribeForce team accounts are $5 per seat a month for five seats or more. Static IPs cost $24 a year (datacenter) or $96 a year (residential). There is no free trial of Pro; refunds are available within 7 days if you have used less than 10GB. Prices checked November 4, 2026.

Who should buy it

Use Windscribe if you want a free VPN for travel and public Wi-Fi and 10GB a month will cover you, or if you want one account for every device in the house. Build A Plan is the right pick if you only ever connect to one to three countries, such as a UK or US server for home banking abroad. Pro suits people who connect from networks that block VPNs, who want ad and malware blocking on phones and TVs, or who need a static IP and port forwarding for remote access or a game server. Start on the free plan, check the countries and apps you need, then buy the yearly plan.

Who should skip it

Skip Windscribe if you want a long refund window before committing, since you get 7 days and 10GB; Surfshark and ExpressVPN both give 30 days. If you want a free VPN with no data limit for a single device, Proton VPN fits better. Torrent users on a budget should note that the free servers block P2P. And if you need quick live chat with a person when something breaks, Windscribe's ticket-based support will feel slow.