If you’ve ever been on vacation in California and are unable to stream a Cleveland Browns game because it’s the wrong region, this could be your saving grace.Ĭhoosing your location is easy as well. The next impressive feature was the ability to not only choose a region or country, but also specific cities.

And while there was some slowdown, it wasn’t noticeable for performance. Our tests were on a new Spectrum modem with a TP-Link mesh Wi-Fi router. Internet speeds can vary, even in your own home depending on your equipment. Learn more about how we rank, test, and review services in our full methodology.Speed was the first test, and Hotspot Shield lived up to its claims. Since these are free apps, we didn't research any customer reviews and kept our focus on testing. We learned a lot in our testing but also combed through customer support articles and product pages to ensure we didn't miss any important features. Since these tests were all on the same computer on the same day, the results are mainly for comparison purposes and will change based on your device and internet service provider.At the end of both rounds, we had six results for each brand and the control we used for our comparison.We conducted one last test in each browser for each app before finishing with another control test. The second round took place 30 minutes later.After the first round, we ran two control tests without a VPN in each browser to find reference points for each app's test results.On Chrome, the speed test was only one of around 25 open tabs, so other tabs could've competed for bandwidth during the short tests.We're not sure if this was due to the number of tabs, but we may test this in a future update.

On Safari, the speed test was the only open tab-it was the faster of the two browsers.

We used the speed test built into Google Search and noted the download, upload, and latency numbers.

Our first round of speed testing included two tests for each VPN app using Safari and Chrome browsers.

Hotspot shield free vpn safe