ExpressVPN Review

Here’s a list of popular streaming platforms that ExpressVPN currently unblocks:

You can read more about ExpressVPN’s streaming performance in the following sections.

Can Access US Netflix & 17 Other Regions

In every test for the past 12 months, ExpressVPN always worked with US Netflix. The videos loaded instantly and streamed in HD without any buffering.

However, we found that ExpressVPN’s default US server doesn’t stream Netflix. Instead, you’ll have to manually connect to the USA - New Jersey - 1 server location.

Other VPNs automatically connect you to a server optimized for streaming, so we’d like to see ExpressVPN do the same.

ExpressVPN unblocks all major streaming sites without issues.

Unlike most other VPN review websites, we also test every VPN with Netflix in every server location. We retest these weekly to ensure this data is accurate.

Here are the results we recorded when testing ExpressVPN with popular Netflix locations. You can see how often ExpressVPN can access each region.

Disappointingly, ExpressVPN doesn’t work at all with some popular Netflix libraries, like South Korea and Mexico. Windscribe is a better choice if you want to unblock international Netflix libraries.

Streams YouTube TV, Hulu & All Other US Streaming Sites

When using ExpressVPN, we could access US streaming services from anywhere. The VPN worked with Disney+, Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, and it works to bypass YouTube TV blocks.

Unlike Netflix, every site was accessible with any US ExpressVPN server, including New York and San Francisco.

ExpressVPN streams US streaming sites from anywhere.

In each case, videos loaded within one second. The videos always stayed at the maximum quality of 4K or 1080p and didn’t buffer at any stage.

Unblocks BBC iPlayer & Sky Go

ExpressVPN bypasses BBC iPlayer’s geo-blocks on all five of its UK servers. Using it, we streamed live and on-demand content in HD, including Match of the Day and Top Gear.

All of ExpressVPN’s UK servers work with BBC iPlayer.

Until recently, ExpressVPN was a poor choice for BBC iPlayer. Before, you’d have to use the VPN’s browser extensions or MediaStreamer Smart DNS service. We’re pleased ExpressVPN has focused on improving its streaming performance.

We also found the VPN to be a top choice for accessing other UK streaming platforms. It worked with Sky Go, Now, Channel 4, and ITVX. It’s also the best VPN for France, able to unblock every French streaming service.

Safe Choice for Kodi Streaming

With its excellent app for Firestick and Android TV Kodi boxes, ExpressVPN is a top choice for hiding Kodi activity from your ISP.

Connected to it, we streamed non-copyrighted content from popular Kodi add-ons, including Popcornflix and Crackle.

ExpressVPN works to bypass geo-blocks on legitimate Kodi add-ons.

To test ExpressVPN’s speeds, we connected to ExpressVPN servers in six different continents. We use a 100Mbps internet connection, similar to your baseline speed at home.

Here’s a table showing ExpressVPN’s speed test results:

As the data shows, connecting to a nearby server barely impacted our download speed, with a loss of just 3%. Regardless of your location, you can expect similar high speeds when connecting to nearby servers.

To put this into context, you can see how ExpressVPN’s local speed performance compares to other leading VPNs in the chart below:

As you can see, ExpressVPN is 16Mbps faster than PureVPN when connected to a nearby server. It’s also slightly faster than CyberGhost and NordVPN, with an average of approximately 2%.

However, we’ve observed a decline in ExpressVPN’s international speeds recently, and it’s no longer the fastest VPN for far-away servers. Compared to our previous tests, its speeds have decreased by 27% in South Africa and 7% in Germany.

Fast Ping for Lag-Free Gaming

ExpressVPN’s strong speed performance makes it a top choice for gaming. We recorded a ping time of 8ms on a nearby server, which is faster than almost every other VPN we’ve reviewed.

Using ExpressVPN on Xbox, our connection was quick enough for fast-paced games, like Warzone and CS:GO. The VPN was always fast enough for competitive gaming on every local server we tested.

ExpressVPN is the best VPN we’ve used for gaming.

The VPN also has servers in countries like Egypt and Argentina, where you’ll encounter easier gaming lobbies. But as is typical, ExpressVPN’s ping time increases significantly on further-away servers. Unless you’re playing a slower-paced game, we recommend you stick to servers in your country.

Here’s a table summarizing the information that ExpressVPN logs:

ExpressVPN collects less data than the vast majority of VPNs. It also offers an anonymous payment method when signing up, and its diskless server network means the service can’t log any activity data.

However, ExpressVPN does collect some anonymous connection logs, such as the date of your last connection and your bandwidth usage. This data is only used for diagnostic purposes and to improve the service.

Importantly, a third party can’t use this information to identify you from your web activity. Real-world tests, like server raids and third-party audits, have confirmed this fact several times.

Although ExpressVPN has proven itself, we’d still much prefer if the VPN adopted a true no-logs privacy policy instead, like Private Internet Access and PrivateVPN.

You can see how ExpressVPN’s logging policy compares to other leading VPN services in the table below:

Based in a Privacy-Friendly Jurisdiction

ExpressVPN is headquartered in the British Virgin Islands (BVI), an excellent jurisdiction choice for a VPN service. The BVI doesn’t have any mandatory data retention laws, making it easier for ExpressVPN to maintain the assurances made in its logging policy.

The BVI is not part of any data-sharing alliance like the Five Eyes, meaning other governments and agencies cannot force ExpressVPN to hand over any user information.

ExpressVPN Is Owned by Kape Technologies

In 2021, ExpressVPN was purchased by Kape Technologies. This acquisition was criticized as Kape previously created a software development kit (SDK) used by ad injectors and malware distributors.

Despite the controversy, we found that Kape Technologies wasn’t involved with the ad and malware distribution. Those were created by third parties using Kape’s platform.

This development platform was shut down in 2016, long before it acquired ExpressVPN. In fact, ExpressVPN’s logging and privacy practices have only improved since the acquisition. Kape also now owns two other popular VPN services: CyberGhost and Private Internet Access.

In the table below, you can see which encryption ciphers, connection protocols, and additional security features ExpressVPN uses:

ExpressVPN Uses a Proprietary VPN Protocol

ExpressVPN uses a different VPN tunneling protocol than other VPN services. We’d prefer if the VPN used more established technologies, as these have been tested for longer and by more people.

ExpressVPN’s default protocol is Lightway, which was developed by ExpressVPN and is exclusive to it. Thankfully, Lightway encrypts traffic using the AES-256 cipher, a very secure encryption method you can trust to conceal your most sensitive data.

Lightway is open-source, meaning anyone can inspect its code base. Although this is an excellent way to build trust in a proprietary tunneling protocol, it’s still not as trustworthy as a widely-used open-source protocol like WireGuard.

Lightway has performed well in our security tests, but we’d like to see ExpressVPN at least add WireGuard as an option.

Like most other VPN services, ExpressVPN uses Perfect Forward Secrecy, a 4096-bit RSA key, and SHA-512 HMAC authentication. Put simply, this conceals your web activity and ensures an attacker can’t alter your internet data in real time.

Kill Switch Stops IP Address Leaks

All of ExpressVPN’s apps include its ‘Network Lock’ kill switch. We rarely see kill switches available on every platform, especially Fire TV and iOS, so we’re pleased ExpressVPN has maintained functionality across all devices.

To verify ExpressVPN’s kill switch works as expected, we tested it using our in-house kill switch testing tool. This checks for IP address leaks after an unexpected connection drop.

As you can see in the screenshot below, ExpressVPN’s kill switch successfully prevented our true IP address from leaking outside of the VPN tunnel.

ExpressVPN’s kill switch isn’t fully secure on macOS.

That said, we did discover that ExpressVPN’s macOS app leaks IP addresses when changing to a different server location. The app shows you a warning message before you do this, but it’s disappointing that ExpressVPN has not fixed this vulnerability altogether.

Passed Our IPv6, DNS & WebRTC Leak Tests

We ran ExpressVPN through our IP, DNS, and WebRTC leak tests. The VPN passed all tests, meaning we recorded no network traffic leaks and all our personal information was hidden.

As shown in the screenshot below, ExpressVPN masked our real UK network details.

ExpressVPN passed all of our leak tests.

ExpressVPN also uses first-party DNS servers. In other words, ExpressVPN handles and encrypts your DNS requests, not your ISP. Very few VPN services have these servers.

For added security, we’d like to see ExpressVPN support IPv6 addresses in the future. Currently, ExpressVPN simply blocks your true IPv6 address and doesn’t replace it with one from the VPN server. This risks leaking your IPv6 address if the blocking functionality fails.

Browser Extensions Securely Encrypt Traffic

Many other VPN browser extensions we’ve tested are basic web proxies that don’t encrypt network traffic.

ExpressVPN’s apps and browser extensions successfully encrypted all our traffic, including internet activity outside of the web browser. We checked for this using Wireshark, a tool that allows you to analyze individual packets.

We found that the VPN successfully concealed the websites we visited, and obfuscated data on insecure HTTP websites.

Head of Research, Simon Migliano, tested ExpressVPN’s encryption with Wireshark.

Diskless Servers Prevent Logging

Unlike most other VPNs that store server information on hard drives, ExpressVPN’s servers are diskless. Named TrustServer, this feature prevents the VPN from logging any of your usage data and it makes it impossible for a hacker to extract data from the server.

ExpressVPN is one of the only VPN services to have had its diskless server network audited by a third party. Cure53, the auditor, confirmed that all of ExpressVPN’s servers are diskless and that “No IP addresses or PII [personally identifiable information] can be written to physical disk”.

All of its servers are owned and operated by ExpressVPN, too, meaning they aren’t rented from a third party. We prefer this as it minimizes the possibility of a server being interfered with by a hacker or other bad actors.

Threat Manager Is an Adequate Ad & Tracker Blocker

ExpressVPN’s apps include an ad and tracker blocker, named Threat Manager.

According to our data, Threat Manager only blocked 60% of ads and trackers. Private Internet Access and Atlas VPN prevented over 80%.

As it stands, Threat Manager is a useful feature that’ll enhance protection of your web activity from data profiling. But there are better alternatives available.

Technical Features We’d Like to See

ExpressVPN has fewer advanced features than other top premium VPNs. Here are some technical features we’d like ExpressVPN to add:

Although ExpressVPN is missing some common VPN features, like those above, the app’s simplicity is one of the VPN’s most significant advantages. If it adds the requested features, we hope it implements these in the background to avoid overloading users with confusing options.

Here’s a quick summary of showing how ExpressVPN performed in our torrenting tests:

With its strong AES-256 encryption and private logging policy, ExpressVPN is one of the safest VPNs for torrenting. Unlike some other VPN services, there’s no record of ExpressVPN ever forwarding DMCA requests to users.

We tested ExpressVPN with torrent clients like qBittorrent, uTorrent, and Deluge. In every instance, the VPN concealed our IP address and all other personal information. All of our activity was masked from our ISP and other third parties.

ExpressVPN is a top VPN for downloading torrent files.

Fast P2P File Transfers, but No Port Forwarding

We also measured ExpressVPN’s torrenting speeds when running it through our in-house P2P speed test process.

Even though it doesn’t support port forwarding, we found that ExpressVPN is one of the fastest VPNs for torrenting. ExpressVPN’s average speed was 9.4MiB/s, meaning we could download any sized torrent file almost as quickly as without a VPN.

Here’s how quickly we could download a 20GB torrent file with ExpressVPN compared to other top VPNs:

It’s not the very fastest P2P VPN we’ve tested, but ExpressVPN’s impact on torrent download times is almost unnoticeable.

Unlike other VPN review websites, we test ExpressVPN every week using a PC in China. Over the past year, ExpressVPN has had a success rate of 64%. Other VPNs, like Astrill, worked 100% of the time.

ExpressVPN works intermittently in China.

Unlike every other VPN, obfuscation technology is built into all of ExpressVPN’s servers. There’s no manual configuration required and no specialized apps to install, making it the easiest VPN we’ve used for circumventing internet censorship.

ExpressVPN disguises your VPN traffic as regular web traffic, letting you access restricted websites and apps. It’s so effective that the VPN also circumvents internet censorship in the UAE, Russia, Iran, and all other restrictive nations.

That said, we wish the VPN would disclose the type of obfuscation it uses. It needs to clarify if it’s using a third-party solution, like Shadowsocks or Obfsproxy, or if ExpressVPN has developed a proprietary solution.

If your connection ever stops working, ExpressVPN helpfully publishes an up-to-date list of servers that work in China.

You can contact ExpressVPN’s customer support team in the following ways:

The best way to get help with basic queries is by contacting ExpressVPN’s knowledgeable 24/7 live chat support team. We contacted it over 50 times in our testing and the agent was always able to resolve our issue there and then.

Its customer support team is available 24/7.

The one downside is that ExpressVPN’s support agents take longer to respond than other VPN support staff. We had to wait an average of 126 seconds to get an answer. With NordVPN, the average was 38 seconds.

This is partly because ExpressVPN’s live chat agents will only answer your question once they complete a set conversation script. We’d prefer it if this requirement was removed so the agent could instead provide an immediate answer.

We’d also like to see ExpressVPN add an automated chatbot to answer basic questions, like finding compatible streaming servers. Chatbots can provide instantaneous answers, plus you wouldn’t have to wait for a human to become available.

With that said, ExpressVPN still leads the industry when it comes to customer support, thanks to its wide range of support guides, FAQs, video tutorials, and troubleshooting options available on the website.