The Best VPNs for Turkey

Over the years, the Turkish government has banned hundreds of thousands of websites including news publications, streaming services, and popular social media platforms like Facebook and X.

To bypass these geo-restrictions and access the open internet, you’ll need an effective VPN that actually works to bypass online censorship.

We’ve tested 62 VPNs and we found that just 7% of popular services can bypass sophisticated web domain blocks.

If you are traveling to or living in Turkey, the VPNs we recommend above will let you access censored media, visit banned websites like Wikipedia, and communicate privately.

The table below compares our most highly-rated VPNs for Turkey based on their ability to bypass web censorship, VPN obfuscation technology, Turkish server locations, affordability, and more:

Of the 62 we’ve tested and reviewed, many popular VPN services didn’t make our list of recommendations for Turkey.

Many of these excluded VPNs have their own strengths. However, they failed to compete with the competition when it came to unblocking websites in Turkey, server coverage in Turkey, and in neighboring countries.

Below are some of the most popular VPNs we considered for Turkey recommendations:

ExpressVPN

ExpressVPN is an exceptional VPN in all testing categories. It doesn’t collect identifying data, has diskless servers, and it’s regularly audited for security vulnerabilities. It offers robust AES-256 encryption, as well as safe Lightway and OpenVPN protocols.

However, the VPN is not performing so well in countries with censorship recently. Its obfuscation currently isn’t as effective as Astrill, PrivateVPN, or Windscribe Free.

NordVPN

NordVPN is another great VPN with exceptional security standards, fast speeds, and the ability to unblock popular streaming services. But it doesn’t perform well in countries with sophisticated online censorship. In our hands-on testing, we discovered it fails to unblock websites in China 95% of the time, making it a poor choice for bypassing online censorship.

VyprVPN

We used to recommend VyprVPN for Turkey because of its obfuscation capabilities. However, its new owners, Certida, have proven to be untrustworthy.

They quietly changed the VPN’s jurisdiction to the privacy-unfriendly US. Bizarrely, they also removed its VPN privacy policy and replaced it with an auto-generated Termly policy. You should never trust a VPN that uses an auto-generated privacy policy.

Proton VPN

Proton VPN and Proton VPN Free are extremely fast, secure, and private. In fact, Proton VPN Free is the best free VPN we’ve reviewed. However, like other VPNs we considered but dismissed for Turkey, they don’t work well in countries with online censorship.

Urban VPN

Urban VPN Free claims to be a VPN service, but is in fact a peer-to-peer proxy network. This means it doesn’t encrypt your data properly and collects your IP address, and browsing activity. Overall, it’s not a safe VPN service and shouldn’t be used in Turkey.

It’s extremely easy to get a Turkish IP address using a VPN as long as it has physical servers in Turkey, or it uses Turkish virtual servers.

Here’s a short video tutorial, showing you how to get a Turkish IP address with ExpressVPN:

VPNs are completely legal in Turkey, but their use is restricted. The Turkish government continually blocks websites, but people are not held legally responsible for attempting to access them using a VPN.

Keep in mind, though, that whatever you do while using a VPN in Turkey is still subject to Turkish law.

In October 2022, just months before the 2023 presidential election, Turkey’s government passed new legislation known as the “censorship law” amending its Internet Law, Press Law, and Penal Code.

It made “disseminating false information” with “intent to cause anxiety” a criminal offense, with prison sentences between one and three years. This law was used just a couple of months later to arrest a journalist for tweeting “disinformation.”

In addition, there is legislation for prison sentences of up to two years for anyone who “publicly denigrates the Turkish nation.”

This law has been used to actively punish criticism of the Turkish government, its leaders, and its actions. Beyond this, there have been large numbers of arrests in the past four years over Twitter comments critical of the government.

If you log onto a Twitter account associated with your real-life name or identity and then start criticizing Erdoğan, you could encounter harsh consequences.

Only specific VPN services have been banned in Turkey.

In November 2016, Turkey’s Information and Communication Technologies Authority ordered Turkish ISPs to block access to Tor and several VPNs services including Hotspot Shield, Psiphon, TunnelBear, VyprVPN and ExpressVPN.

In 2023, the Turkish government banned access to a further 16 VPN services without a court order. Popular VPNs like Proton VPN, Surfshark, IPVanish, and CyberGhost were amongst those chosen to be blocked for allowing access to news sites that are censored in Turkey.

ISPs use deep packet inspection (DPI) to inspect, identify, and block traffic if it belongs to one of these VPN services.

However, in its current form in 2024, Turkey’s VPN detection is still not as effective as China’s VPN detection infrastructure.

For this reason, many VPNs with obfuscation technology still work in Turkey, including ExpressVPN.

Which VPNs Are Banned in Turkey?

Some banned VPNs are able to work in Turkey, despite the government’s censorship efforts. However, not all VPNs work well in Turkey.

If your VPN isn’t working in Turkey, one possible workaround is to switch to a VPN that offers port forwarding — though it is a lot more complex than just selecting an obfuscation protocol.

OpenVPN connections generally use UDP port 1194, and this can be used to identify it as a VPN connection.

HTTPS traffic, though, generally passes through TCP port 443. If you can get your OpenVPN traffic to pass through this port, it is effectively disguised as normal traffic.

To do this, you will need a VPN provider that supports port forwarding to do this. In our list of Turkey VPNs, Astrill VPN and PrivateVPN are both able to port forward your connection. Windscribe Free only offers port forwarding to users with paid subscriptions.

It can be difficult to download a VPN in Turkey because the government blocks VPN websites.

If you are planning on traveling to Turkey, we recommend downloading a VPN before leaving your home country to guarantee you can use it once you are there.

If you haven’t done this, or you are in Turkey and don’t have access to the open internet, you can use a proxy to access the website of your chosen VPN provider and download their app.

Turkey has unfortunately ramped up its censorship of VPN websites in the past few years, so it’s much more difficult to download a VPN than it was just a few years ago.

If your chosen VPN provider has been blocked, contact their customer support via email. The top VPNs for Turkey will usually provide an alternative URL that has not been banned by the censors.

There are a few ways to get access to blocked websites in Turkey. The most common ways to bypass Turkish censorship are:

1. Use a VPN
2. Use the Tor Browser
3. Use a Web Proxy

VPN software is the most versatile of these choices. A good VPN will be able to tunnel your web traffic outside of Turkey without catching the attention of your ISP or the government.

This allows you to access the free internet without risking your security or privacy.

Alternatively, you can connect to the Tor network, a global network of community owned servers or “nodes” which anonymize your activity and relocate it to another country. Tor has been banned in Turkey, so it isn’t as easy to use as it once was.

Tor comes with its own risks, too. Unless you know what you’re doing, it’s very easy to expose your identity.

The third option is to use a web proxy. A proxy is more rudimentary than a VPN, and won’t protect your activity from surveillance by your ISP using methods like deep packet inspection (DPI).

Using a proxy can be a quick way to spoof your location and access restricted information. However, it’s much safer to use a more secure tool that fully encrypts your connection.

Which Websites Are Blocked in Turkey?

Under Erdoğan’s leadership, an increasingly large number of websites have been blocked.

To access these sites and services during a government blackout, you’ll need a VPN or another reliable method of circumventing your Turkish ISP’s restrictions.

These bans have been harsh and unexpected, none more so than Wikipedia, which was banned in April 2017.

The image hosting site Imgur has also been banned in Turkey, following an incident where two men took a district attorney hostage and posted an image of him at gunpoint on the website.

There is very little transparency from the Turkish government, so it is hard to tell when a website might go down and whether it will come back online.

The fact that online censorship is implemented so casually demonstrates the need to use a VPN in Turkey, where online resources can be closed off without warning or justification.

LGBTQ+ content and news have also been a persistent target for censorship, offline and online. In September 2019 TikTok banned all depictions of homosexuality from its platform in Turkey.

In July 2019, the Turkish news site Bianet was also banned. This was particularly alarming, as Bianet is one of very few independent news sources operating in Turkey.

It later emerged that the ban was made by accident, and only specific articles were supposed to be blocked. The other 135 independent news sites were not as lucky as Bianet, and remain offline.

A huge number of social media platforms were blocked in Southern Turkey while the Turkish Armed Forces and the Free Syrian Army moved to invade Syria, against the Kurdish PKK and YPG, dubbed “Operation Peace Spring”.

Banning just part of the country is part of the growing technological capabilities of Turkey’s censorship regime.

To make sure our recommendations are accurate, we use a scientific rating system to find the best VPNs for Turkey.

We test every VPN in five key areas, each of which are weighted according to their importance. We then combine this data to calculate an overall rating for Turkey.

The table below summarizes how the best free and paid VPNs for Turkey performed in these key testing categories:

VPNs with a data cap receive a reduction to their overall rating.

Here’s a more detailed overview of the five categories we test for and how much of the overall Turkey rating they account for:

1. Bypassing Turkish Censorship: 40%

A VPN’s ability to work in Turkey and unblock websites is the most important attribute for a Turkey VPN, which is why it is weighted highest in our ratings.

We test to make sure that every VPN we recommend is capable of functioning safely in Turkey without being identified by authorities.

VPN services that work in Turkey on the majority of its international servers are rewarded, while those that are banned or blocked by ISPs are penalized.

2. Obfuscation Technology: 20%

Obfuscation technology is a key feature for any anti-censorship VPN. Obfuscation protocols disguise your VPN traffic as normal HTTP traffic, which helps it evade detection.

We test every VPN’s encryption and security settings to find out whether it offers obfuscation. VPNs with AES-256 encryption, no IP leaks, and a range of obfuscation settings are rewarded in the overall rating for Turkey.

To evaluate a VPN’s obfuscation technology, we take into account how many obfuscation protocols and features it has, and how effective they are at bypassing online censorship.

3. Privacy & Logging Policy: 10%

A good privacy policy is important for every VPN, not just those for Turkey. It reveals how much sensitive data is monitored and stored about your identity and activity.

To evaluate a VPN’s privacy policy, we analyze every policy and note which data points it saves about its users. The best VPNs for Turkey do not store identifying data and use diskless VPN servers to avoid storing sensitive information that can be exposed.

We only recommend VPN services that log as little identifying information as possible.

4. Speed: 10%

We manually test the average download speed, upload speed, and ping time of every VPN before and after connecting to servers in Turkey.

Furthermore, we calculate a percentage speed loss rating that reflects the impact each VPN is likely to have on your VPN speeds.

VPNs with an average speed loss of 20% or less perform better in the overall ratings.

5. Turkey Server Locations: 10%

The availability of nearby VPN servers is also tested when rating VPNs for Turkey.

The best VPNs for Turkey offer reliable servers in Turkey, as well as servers in nearby countries. A virtual or physical Turkey server is a necessity for getting a Turkish IP address.

In addition, if you want to connect out of Turkey, having a VPN server close to your physical location will give you the best speeds.

To qualify for recommendation, a VPN must have at least one server in Turkey and in nearby countries like Armenia, Greece, and Bulgaria.

6. Security & Technical Features: 10%

We use packet-inspection software to assess how well a VPN encrypts our traffic. The best VPNs offer AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption to completely scramble your activity.

We also test every VPN’s kill switch to judge whether it leaks your real IP address, and conduct a DNS leak test to judge the security of a VPN.

To achieve a high rating in this category, a VPN must avoid all leaks and offer WireGuard, OpenVPN, or another safe proprietary protocol.