How to Safely Torrent with Mullvad VPN

Setting up a VPN for torrenting involves more than just a standard server connection. If you don’t configure Mullvad properly, you still risk leaking your IP and revealing your P2P activity.

In the steps below, we’ll tell you exactly how to configure Mullvad to maximize the VPN’s speed, security, and privacy.

1. Choose a Safe Torrent Client

No operating system comes with a built-in P2P client. You’ll have to install third party software.

We strongly recommend qBittorrent as the best torrent client. It’s open-source, safe, and doesn’t include ads. It also allows network binding, for added security.

Other popular options include Vuze, Deluge, uTorrent, and BitTorrent. Whichever you choose, make sure to download it from its official website

2. Download the Mullvad VPN App

Download Mullvad on the device you’ll be torrenting on. If you don’t already have an account, you can subscribe to Mullvad for $5.50 a month. Mullvad doesn’t offer any discounts for longer-term plans.

For greater privacy, we suggest paying via cash or cryptocurrency. This way, it’s not possible to link your Mullvad account back to you.

3. Enable All Mullvad Security Settings

Before connecting to a server, make sure Mullvad is set up with maximum security.

Thankfully, Mullvad doesn’t allow the kill switch to be turned off. A kill switch is the most important security feature for torrenting, but there are still some essential features that are not enabled by default.

To change the VPN’s security settings, open the Mullvad app and click the settings cog icon in the top right.

4. Bind Mullvad to Your Torrenting Client

For additional security, bind Mullvad to your torrenting client. By enabling this, torrent files will only download when you’re connected to a Mullvad VPN server.

In practice, this works similarly to a kill switch. If the connection to the VPN drops or you accidentally disconnect, your torrent file will stop downloading and your true IP address will remain hidden.

Watch the video below to see how we set this up. We used qbittorrent, but the process is the same for most popular torrenting clients.

5. Test Your Connection for Leaks

The final step is to ensure your VPN and torrent client is set up correctly.

To do this, use our torrent IP leak test tool. It’ll check that you’re not accidentally leaking any IP or DNS information through the VPN tunnel.

If the tool doesn’t detect any leaks, you’re ready to download torrent files as you usually do.

Out of all the 65 VPNs we tested, we rank Mullvad as the fourth-best for safe torrenting.

Mullvad uses strong AES-256 or ChaCha20 encryption, it doesn’t collect any user or activity logs, and it downloads torrent files extremely fast.

To compete with the very best torrenting VPNs, Mullvad needs to improve the reliability of its speeds. We also wish it still had port forwarding, to maximise torrenting speeds.

Here’s a summary of Mullvad’s strengths and weaknesses at torrenting:

Pros	Cons
P2P traffic supported on all servers	Inconsistent speed performance
Fast torrenting speeds in most locations	Removed port forwarding feature
Strong kill switch and other security features
Uses best-in-class protocols and encryption
Doesn’t log any activity data
Accepts cash payments

In the section below, we’ll explain in-depth the features that make Mullvad good and bad for P2P file-sharing.

Mullvad Is Fast Enough for Torrenting

Most popular torrent sites distribute content with extremely large file sizes, like movies and TV shows. A fast VPN can make the difference between waiting minutes or hours for a file to download.

Speed is the main area where Mullvad excels. When using it, we could download torrent files almost as quickly as with no VPN.

While using its New York server, our speed dropped from 10MiB/s to 9.8MiB/s. This is one of the fastest results we’ve ever recorded.

The only issue is that Mullvad’s torrent speeds change depending on the server you use. When connected to its New Jersey location, our download bitrate dropped to 2.1MiB/s. This meant our files took almost five times as long to download.

Here are our results when testing Mullvad’s torrenting bitrate when connected to nearby servers:

Mullvad Server	Download Bitrate	Time To Download 50GB Torrent File
No VPN	10MiB/s	1 hour 19 minutes
New York Server	9.8MiB/s	1 hour 21 minutes
New Jersey Server	2.1MiB/s	6 hours 18 minutes

Because of the variance in performance, we strongly recommend trying multiple Mullvad servers and sticking to the one that gives you the fastest speeds. Otherwise, you might be waiting longer than you need for your files to download.

With that said, Mullvad’s speed performance is very impressive on the vast majority of servers. It’s even faster than most top torrenting VPNs, like ExpressVPN and PIA.

Mullvad Is One of the Most Trustworthy VPNs

Mullvad can be trusted to keep your torrenting activity hidden from your ISP and other third parties.

The one downside is Mullvad’s base in Sweden. Sweden is part of the 14 Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, as well as the EU. As a result, Sweden shares surveillance data with other countries.

However, this isn’t a major concern as Mullvad doesn’t log personally-identifiable data. Mullvad doesn’t have any information to provide if it’s ever requested.

In fact, Mullvad’s privacy protections are so strong that it has not been able to provide any user data when requested by a court of law.

Although not publicly known, a representative from Mullvad told us that “since we do not have any VPN activity logs […] we have no information that could help their investigation.”

Real-world tests like this are the best way to assess a VPN’s trustworthiness. You can be sure that Mullvad will protect your sensitive P2P activity.

Strong Encryption and Security Features

Mullvad includes all the security settings you’d expect from a top torrenting VPN.

It supports the AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption ciphers, depending on whether you use OpenVPN or WireGuard. The app also includes a system-wide kill switch, IP leak protection, and a malware blocker. We explain the necessity of these in the instructions section of this page.

Mullvad’s server infrastructure and apps have also been audited by a third party. No privacy-compromising information was discovered during the audit. However, the latest of these was in 2021, which is not as recent as we’d like.

To check how well Mullvad encrypts traffic, we tested it ourselves using Wireshark. We inspected packets of data to ensure nothing was viewable in plain text.

Mullvad successfully encrypted our DNS, HTTP, TCP, and UCP requests. All information within the VPN tunnel was obfuscated.

Unlimited Torrenting on Every Server

Mullvad allows you to torrent on all 674 of its servers. All of its servers are optimized for P2P file-sharing and have unlimited bandwidth.

Mullvad is also impressively transparent with its server network. For added security, you can view its server list to make sure you’re connected to a server wholly owned by Mullvad.

No Longer Supports Port Forwarding

As of July 2023, Mullvad no longer supports port forwarding on any of its apps.

The VPN service announced the removal of port forwarding on its website, explaining that some users had abused the feature to host malicious and illegal content.

This led to Mullvad receiving law enforcement enquiries as well as several of their IP addresses becoming blocked.

As a result, you can no longer use port forwarding to improve Mullvad’s torrenting speeds.

If you need a VPN for port forwarding, we recommend using one of our top-rated VPNs with port forwarding support.

Although Mullvad performed well in our torrenting tests, there are still better options available.

Other VPN services, like PIA VPN, allow you to download torrent files faster, log less data, and are easier to use.

Here’s Mullvad’s torrenting performance compared to the best paid and free VPNs for torrenting:

As shown above, Mullvad is a great VPN for torrenting but PIA’s no-logs policy, port forwarding tool, and simpler apps make it the better option for most users.

Windscribe is a serviceable free alternative, but Mullvad beats it in every metric. This includes a faster bitrate than Windscribe, a more private logging policy, and unlimited data compared to Windscribe’s 10GB.

We’ve evaluated both alternatives, in greater depth, below:

1. Private Internet Access: Best Overall VPN for Torrenting

Pros	Cons
Fast file-sharing speeds	Port forwarding isn’t permitted on US servers
No-logs policy & transparency reports	Apps can be confusing for beginners
Allows port forwarding	Port numbers assigned randomly
Reliable kill switch & IP leak protection	US jurisdiction
Cheap on long-term plans
Diskless servers

Private Internet Access is an excellent VPN for safe torrenting. It’s fast, its privacy policy is superb, and it’s available for cheap on long-term plans.

Though it requires an initial learning curve, PIA VPN is much easier to use than Mullvad. Its features are clearly labeled and its apps use an attractive user interface.

PIA also allows P2P traffic on all 18,651 servers across 91 countries compared to just 674 servers in 44 countries with Mullvad.

As such, you’re more likely to find a close-by server with PIA, plus server congestion is less likely. Both of these factors contribute to faster and more reliable torrenting downloads.

However, PIA doesn’t allow you to port forward on any US servers. It’s also more expensive than Mullvad, if you pay month-by-month.

In short, Private Internet Access is our favorite VPN for torrenting, but Mullvad is still a good choice if you want to pay monthly.

Windscribe: Best Free VPN for Torrenting

Pros	Cons
Faster file-sharing speeds than other free VPNs	10GB monthly data cap
Torrenting permitted on all 11 servers	Based in Canada (Five Eyes member)
No payment details required	Port forwarding & malware blocker limited to paid plan
Robust encryption & open-source protocols	Removed SOCKS5 proxy
‘Firewall’ kill switch & IP leak protection	Logging policy hasn’t been audited
Private logging policy	No human live chat

Windscribe is a great alternative to Mullvad, if you don’t want to pay for a VPN subscription. As you’d expect from a free service, though, it’s worse than Mullvad in every way.

You can torrent safely with Windscribe thanks to its AES-256 encryption and advanced ‘Firewall’ kill switch. It’s also free to use and won’t require your payment details at any point.

It is limited by a 10GB monthly data cap. In our experience, this often wasn’t enough to download a movie in high resolution. It’s only usable for torrenting movies in a lower resolution, individual episodes of TV shows, or music.

It’s also 36% slower than Mullvad, with an average bitrate of 7.2MiB/s. This result is acceptable for a free service, but it doesn’t come close to Mullvad or PIA’s file-sharing speeds.

Overall, there’s no reason to choose Windscribe over Mullvad unless you prioritize value above all else.