Mullvad VPN Review

Here’s a summary of what we check for in a privacy policy – Mullvad logs none of it.

Mullvad’s privacy policy is clear: it does not log any traffic, user bandwidth, or your originating IP address. It used to log metadata relating to server usage, but it has since abandoned that.

Mullvad VPN does not ask for an email address or any other information in order to create an account. Instead, it gives you a random account number that you use to activate your VPN.

Mullvad doesn’t even run subscriptions anymore. Instead, it runs a one-time payment model so that it need never store any data regarding its users.

This is unique to Mullvad and shows how much it values customer privacy. Just don’t lose the account number.

Proven No-Logs In Server Seizure

Mullvad’s privacy guarantee was proven when, in May 2023, Swedish authorities raided Mullvad’s offices and no user data could be extracted.

Mullvad went even further and made its entire VPN server infrastructure and DNS server network diskless — meaning that no data is stored in physical hardware.

Sweden (EU) Jurisdiction Is Not Ideal

Mullvad is based in Sweden, which means it has to follow the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) law. There are serious privacy implications to an EU jurisdiction: Mullvad is obliged to collect your payment information should you pay via bank wire, PayPal, Swish, or Stripe.

As you can see, if you pay via bank wire your Mullvad account number is associated with personally-identifiable information. For this reason, Mullvad warns against paying for its service through bank wire. It states:

“Please avoid making payments through bank wire if you do not want your Mullvad account to be traceable to you.”

For maximum privacy, Mullvad allows subscribers to pay via Bitcoin and even cash. We like that Mullvad is transparent about this and warns potential subscribers, and suggests a way around it.

The only other data Mullvad collects is the content of emails and problem reports that you send, as well as the email address you use. Mullvad advises you to refrain from entering personal data when contacting support.

While Mullvad does receive information requests about its users, it has no information to provide. Mullvad told us:

“We frequently get requests regarding IP-addresses and if we know which user was using it at a certain time. Since we do not have any VPN activity logs, they get very similar responses […] that we have no information that could help their investigation, and that all our IP-addresses are shared by our users.”

Who Is Behind Mullvad VPN?

Mullvad VPN is owned by Swedish company Amagicom AB and run by its CEO, Jan Axel Jonsson. The owners and sole shareholders of Amagicom AB are Fredrik Strömberg and Daniel Berntsson, who describe themselves as “idealists.” The company is based at Engelbrektsgatan 28, 411 37 Göteborg, Sweden.

As more VPNs get acquired and consolidated under larger companies like Kape Technologies (owner of ExpressVPN , CyberGhost), Ziff Davis (IPVanish, StrongVPN), and Cyberspace (NordVPN, Surfshark, AtlasVPN) Mullvad remains an independent VPN service provider and the owners “are not interested in ever selling it.”

Mullvad offers strong AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption. There’s also an inbuilt kill switch, double VPN, split tunneling, and a tracker blocker for added security.

Mullvad continues to show commitment to VPN security and user privacy, from adding new security features to conducting regular penetration tests and audits.

Offers the Safest Protocols

Mullvad offers both OpenVPN and WireGuard protocols on almost every platform — Android only has WireGuard. We like that it’s left out older and unsafe protocols like PPTP and SSTP.

Mullvad actually donated money towards the development of the WireGuard protocol and was one of the very first VPNs to implement it, which has since become industry practice.

In Settings, there are also more options for each protocol. With WireGuard, you can enable multi-hop VPN servers or change your port. You can also decide between IPv4 and IPv6 connections.

With OpenVPN, you can choose between UDP or TCP and enable Bridge Mode, which is Mullvad’s anti-censorship obfuscation technology.

It’s a shame that Bridge Mode isn’t available on WireGuard and multi-hop isn’t available on OpenVPN.

Split tunneling, which lets you decide which programs should use the VPN connection and which ones shouldn’t, is also only available on Windows, Android, and Linux.

Automatic Kill Switch

Mullvad has an in-built kill switch always running. This stops your internet connection should the VPN connection drop.

Many VPNs have their kill switches turned off by default (like Surfshark). So we like Mullvad’s approach because it prioritizes security and prevents accidental exposure of your real IP address.

It’s useful if you’re someone who forgets to turn your kill switch on.

Mullvad’s iOS kill switch is always running in the background.

On Android, you have to adjust your Android device network settings: activating both Always-on VPN and Block connections without VPN. This ideally should be integrated into the Android app.

A Range of Additional Security Initiatives

Mullvad offers a wide variety of additional security features. These include an ad blocker, IPv6 support, improved protocols.

Regular Security Audits

We’re glad to see Mullvad implements regular security audits and penetration tests of its server infrastructure and apps.

These external audits can help a VPN identify bugs and vulnerabilities, which can then be fixed. Overall, they’re a great way to improve the security of a VPN service over time.

Here are some of Mullvad’s recent security audits and their results:

Year	Critical	High-level	Medium-level	Low-level
2022 – Mullvad Apps	0	0	2	2
2023 – Mullvad Account & Payment Services	0	0	0	7
2023 – Mullvad Servers	1	6	4	10

Working Ad, Tracker & Malware blocker

Under Preferences, you can find toggle options to launch the app on start up and auto-connect, as well as activate ad, tracker, and malware blockers.

Mullvad doesn’t have the best VPN ad blocker we’ve tested, but it does block the majority of social and analytic trackers, and some pop-up ads.

It’s worth enabling if you’ve already got Mullvad, but it’s not as effective as uBlock Origin.

Open-Source Apps

All of Mullvad’s desktop and mobile apps for fully open-source.

This means anyone can easily view its code on GitHub and report vulnerabilities.

Other privacy-focused VPNs, like PIA and IVPN, have made their code open-source, but it still is quite rare in the VPN industry.

Full IPv6 Support

Many VPNs are incompatible with IPv6 and cause subsequent leaks — they simply block IPv6 connections and redirect you to IPv4.

But Mullvad is one of the VPNs to have a solution. This makes it a great solution if your ISP supports IPv6.

Improving Wireguard

Mullvad is a VPN at the forefront of the industry’s security innovations. We’re impressed to see it’s constantly future-proofing its service.

For example, Mullvad recently released a Defense against AI-guided Traffic Analysis (DAITA) feature on Windows, which protects you against FBI mass surveillance by adding random background traffic to distort recognizable data patterns.

However, you should bear in mind that this feature increases the amount of data packets sent, which can negatively impact speeds or make you run out of data quicker.

In addition, Mullvad implemented quantum-resistant WireGuard connections in 2023.

Mullvad Browser

Mullvad Browser was created in collaboration with the Tor Project, and works to prevent tracking and browser fingerprinting.

It does this by:

• Deactivating telemetry data collection
• Blocking third-party trackers
• Deleting cookies, cache, and history after each session

You can use it on Windows, macOS, or Linux.

We connected to Mullvad’s servers on six different continents, using a 100Mbps internet connection similar to the speed you might have at home.

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

A 7% difference between our normal internet connection and a VPN-connected internet is very good, but not quite as fast as some other VPN services.

Connecting to Canada we recorded speeds over 95Mbps, which is very good for such a distance. Likewise, we picked up best speeds of 90Mbps connecting to Brazil.

However, download averages of 87Mbps to the UK are a little less impressive. As you can see the chart above, it struggles compared to some popular rival VPNs.

There are better VPNs for long-distance connections, like Hotspot Shield, but we think you’ll be satisfied with Mullvad’s performance.

Here are the few streaming services we found Mullvad worked to unblock:

Mullvad doesn’t unblock streaming sites and doesn’t pretend to. It no longer works with Netflix and it hasn’t bothered to develop any streaming-optimized servers or an app for Amazon Fire TV Stick.

We tested it on all the major streaming sites and recorded very little success. Only Amazon Prime Video (US), HBO Max, and Australia’s version of Netflix became available to us outside those regions. It won’t bypass Hulu blocks.

Like with Astrill VPN, it’s fair enough that Mullvad is focused on privacy. But a VPN can do both. We’d love to see Mullvad expand into unblocking streaming sites, especially unblocking Netflix. Then we can recommend it wholeheartedly.

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

Torrenting Attribute	Result
Average Download Bitrate	9.8MiB/s
No. of P2P Servers	674
Logging Policy	No Identifying Data
Kill Switch	Yes
Port Forwarding	No

Mullvad is a top torrenting VPN. All of its servers are optimized for P2P activity. Some VPNs, like TorGuard, now ban popular torrenting websites, but Mullvad still has no restrictions in place.

We tested Mullvad VPN on safe torrent clients like qBitorrent to see how it performed as a torrenting VPN. We found that the download speeds were quick and stable; we recorded an excellent average torrenting bitrate of 9.8MiB/s.

While Mullvad wasn’t as fast as the best VPNs for torrenting, it is still a fast and private choice – kill switch protection and a safe logging policy make sure of that.

SOCKS5 Proxy Is Available, But Port Forwarding Has Been Removed

SOCKS5 is available on all of Mullvad’s servers once you activate it for the application you wish to use it on. This is great for torrenters and even reduces the chance of seeing CAPTCHAs.

However, citing “avenues for abuse,” Mullvad no longer allows you to use port forwarding for faster P2P connections. Port forwarding is a useful manual tool for gamers who use VPNs, as it allows you to optimize speeds, change your NAT type, and reduce lag.

Mullvad’s Bridge Mode works by first connecting you to one of Mullvad’s ‘Bridge servers’, which use the Shadowsocks proxy to avoid fingerprinting, and then connect you into the country you wish to bypass web blocks in.

This technique for bypassing censorship doesn’t always work: we tested Bridge Mode on our server in Shanghai and it wouldn’t get around the Great Firewall of China, which has the strictest web censorship in the world.

Bridge Mode is more likely to work in countries with less sophisticated censorship technology, such as the UAE, Turkey, and Russia.

Mullvad has servers close to Russia, including Estonia and Latvia, should you need to get around Russian web blocks and access banned websites like Twitter and BBC News.

Mullvad’s help center is genuinely useful, with straight-to-the-point, clearly-written troubleshooting fixes, user guides, and suggestions, as well as explainers of Mullvad’s features.

You can access the help center via the FAQ & Guides link in the app. You can also report a problem within the app itself.

If you want to contact Mullvad directly, you can send an email. We sent an email at 2:37pm and got a response at 2:50pm. 13 minutes isn’t a long wait for an email response, so we were impressed.

We’d like to see Mullvad invest in 24/7 live chat support for instant assistance. Most top VPNs have this level of support on hand.