Every VPN is different, which can make deciding which one to use a daunting prospect, especially if you’ve never used one of these services before. That’s where we come in: we’ve thoroughly compared two leading providers, listing every feature they have to offer in an easy-to-read format. This should give you a better understanding of what exactly you’re paying for, or at least, what to look for in other services moving forward.

Highlights

Pricing and discounts

CyberGhost is the most inexpensive choice for long-term protection: its annual subscription costs just $29.85 for the first year, rising to $64.85 afterward. This is still lower than ExpressVPN by a considerable margin. On the other hand, on monthly and six-monthly plans, the pair are roughly similar, with a few cents between them once introductory prices are factored out.

ExpressVPN

  • Simple installation, even on routers
  • Ranks highly in terms of speed
  • Excellent unblocking capabilities
  • Allows users to sign up anonymously

CyberGhost

  • Designed with novices in mind
  • Great for streaming
  • A huge network of servers
  • Ad-blocker and malware-scanner

Both of these VPNs offer money-back guarantees. This means that you can test each VPN, and if you’re not impressed, cancel for a full refund. In each case, you’ll have to pay upfront, but it’s easy to get your money back; you don’t even have to give a reason for it. ExpressVPN offers a 30-day money back guarantee, while CyberGhost offers a 45-day money back guarantee for the longer plans.

EXPRESSVPN DEAL: Get a 49% discount and three months free.

CYBERGHOST DEAL: Save over 80% and get three months free on the one-year deal.

Features

ExpressVPN has exceptional multi-platform support, with apps for all the major operating systems, including Linux. It even offers a flashy new-look router app with enhanced speed and stability.

In contrast, while CyberGhost has apps for the major platforms, it must be manually installed on supported routers. However, CyberGhost recently released its own password manager and security-management app for Windows. When combined with the VPN app’s ad-blocking and malware-scanning, this makes it an easy-to-use all-in-one solution for novice users.

ExpressVPN offers extensions for a wide range of browsers, including the privacy-conscious Brave. These serve as an easy-access control hub for the main app, and automatically change your browser’s geo-location settings to match your current server. Also included is the ExpressVPN Media Streamer app: this is a Smart DNS proxy which bypasses geo-locking without encrypting your traffic, allowing you to compromise between speed and security as needed.

Unblocking capabilities

The only issue with ExpressVPN on this front is that it has had reliability issues with BBC iPlayer of late. That’s not to say it never works; only that the BBC seems to be blocking it more consistently than before. Regardless, this VPN is still able to unblock a huge range of other popular platforms.

China

ExpressVPN is capable of bypassing China’s Great Firewall. The government has blocked the service’s homepage, however, which means you’ll have to register on an alternative site.

CyberGhost customer support was very open about the fact that their service rarely works in China. The website itself is blocked, and allegedly, local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have also begun restricting access to the service. With no official mirror available, and no guarantee that CyberGhost will work anyway, we don’t recommend it when in China.

Setup and interface

CyberGhost and ExpressVPN work as well on small screens as they do on desktop computers. Their respective mobile apps are easy to use and allow users to connect to the VPN with just one tap. CyberGhost even gives users additional information about servers before they connect. This includes, for instance, their current load and whether they’re intended for file-sharing.

CyberGhost uses a simple tabbed layout to distinguish between servers intended for streaming anonymously and bypassing geo-restriction. It offers a stripped-down selection of options, however: users can only choose to automatically start the VPN when connected to a wireless network, block ads, or compress website content to lower costs when using mobile data.

This isn’t unusual. Even ExpressVPN’s mobile app only offers a handful of options compared to the desktop version. In the desktop app, users can change protocol, set up split tunneling, or tell the app to start on boot. CyberGhost has a similar set of options, but also allows users to set exceptions or configure a proxy.

Servers and performance

ExpressVPN has servers in more countries than most of its rivals, including CyberGhost. However, CyberGhost has more servers overall. Unfortunatly, ExpressVPN doesn’t provide details as to how many servers are in each location. On the other hand, CyberGhost provides a breakdown of exactly how many are in which countries — there’s always at least four, but some places have hundreds to choose from.

Speed-wise, there’s no contest. ExpressVPN provided an average speed of 135 Mbps whereas CyberGhost averaged about 58 Mbps. To be clear: this is still very fast, but ExpressVPN is on another level. The only time you’re likely to notice a difference is when multiple people are using the same connection for data-intensive tasks like streaming or torrenting.

Take a look at the table below to compare ExpressVPN and CyberGhost’s server availability by country:

Security

Both CyberGhost and ExpressVPN allow the use of the OpenVPN and IKEv2 protocols, but they each offer something the other doesn’t. In ExpressVPN’s case, this is the L2TP protocol, which offers high speeds and decent security, plus its own Lightway protocol, which is claims is faster and less resouce-intensive than OpenVPN. CyberGhost, on the other hand, offers WireGuard support. This is an extremely speedy, open-source technology that’s widely expected to become the new standard moving forward.

These services both utilize 256-bit AES encryption and 4096-bit RSA keys to keep your traffic private. ExpressVPN also uses cipher block chaining to help obscure the fact that you’re connected to a VPN; this will be especially helpful if you’re in a country with strict VPN usage restrictions.

CyberGhost’s cloaking mechanism is simply connecting via a port that most VPN-detection methods don’t check.  Also, it has a kill switch built into both its desktop and mobile apps. You might notice that there’s no way to turn the kill switch off: this is by design and ensures you never browse or stream unprotected.

Privacy

Neither of these VPNs is based inside a 5 Eyes country, which means that they are under no obligation to comply with requests for data from the UK, US, Australia, Canada, or New Zealand governments. ExpressVPN operates out of the British Virgin Islands, a location with no mandatory data retention laws, and CyberGhost is based in Romania, part of the European Union. In 2016, the EU deemed bulk electronic data retention illegal, except in cases where public safety is at risk. As both VPNs allow anonymous registration and don’t keep traffic logs, your activities cannot be traced back to you.

That’s not to say these companies don’t keep any logs, however. ExpressVPN, for instance, records the server you use, the date (but not time) you connect, and the data volume transferred. It does not log your real IP address, the sites you visit, or what you do on a particular site. Further, with the ability to pay via Bitcoin or Mint, it’s entirely possible to sign up and browse anonymously.

CyberGhost also keeps some connection logs. Once a day, it checks to see if you’ve logged in. This is for statistical purposes, and all record of your logins is deleted at the end of the month. Again, this service does not log the sites you visit, connection times or duration, your activities on a webpage, or source IP address. While it only offers a single anonymous payment option, it’s still absolutely possible to register and use the internet safely without giving up any personally identifiable information.

Configuration

Both of these VPNs use shared address allocation, meaning every user who connects to a specific server at the same time is given the same IP address. This helps obfuscate your activities, effectively making it impossible to tell one user’s activities from another. CyberGhost allows you to pay an extra $5 per month for a dedicated IP address if you’d like, but most people won’t need one. ExpressVPN currently doesn’t provide this option, or even static IP servers.

While neither service has specific anti-DDoS servers, they do provide some level of protection. When using a VPN, your real IP address is hidden. This means that if you are attacked, it will actually be the VPN server that is flooded with requests. Companies are naturally reluctant to go into detail as to how they prevent these issues. That said, CyberGhost’s customer support revealed that if a DDoS attack is detected, the server simply switches IP address. This might result in a few seconds of downtime, after which you’ll be able to resume whatever you were doing.

Each of these services includes a NAT firewall. Your router already has one installed, but as your VPN traffic is encrypted, the router’s firewall can’t tell which device specific packets are intended for. This is where the VPN’s firewall comes in; it decrypts the packets, sends them to the relevant device, and discards any that seem suspicious. It’s important to note that while these filter out a large percentage of unsolicited traffic, it’s not foolproof. That’s why NAT firewalls work best when paired with a secondary, OS-level firewall.

Customer service

CyberGhost and ExpressVPN both offer live chat functionality. We tested this at various different times of day and found that in almost every case, we received a response within seconds. Each also offers email and ticket-based support systems for less time-critical problems. ExpressVPN has a selection of video tutorials in its knowledge base, whereas CyberGhost’s use screenshots instead. There is a small selection of video walkthroughs on CyberGhost’s YouTube channel, though.

We tested the response time of each service by asking three questions via email. Two of these are common enquiries which the support teams will most likely have pre-written answers for. The third, however, is intentionally a little vaguer and is intended to provoke a more detailed response.

ExpressVPN took significantly less time to respond to emails than CyberGhost does. Initial responses arrived in less than an hour for each of our three enquiries. Its answers were usually in-depth enough to address the issue at hand, but not so detailed that an average person would be overwhelmed.

CyberGhost, on the other hand, regularly took several hours to reply. However, these replies included extensive background on the issues we were asking about, particularly regarding logging and encryption. This VPN didn’t even flinch at our more difficult question, instead,  providing a step-by-step guide to optimizing their service (and the user’s system) for a better experience.

The winner

ExpressVPN

While ExpressVPN and CyberGhost are both exceptional VPNs, we believe ExpressVPN is the better choice for the average user.

With servers in more countries as CyberGhost, it permits streaming from a wider range of geo-blocked services. Additionally, ExpressVPN can be used somewhat reliably from inside China, increasing its usability even further. Of course, the fact that it’s the second-fastest VPN we’ve tested doesn’t hurt, either.

ExpressVPN’s ease of use is another deciding factor. You can quickly install it on your home router thanks to this service’s custom firmware, removing the need to manually configure each device. This helps offset the service’s low number of simultaneous connections — its only real weakness. Even if you run into difficulty, ExpressVPN allows you to get help at a moment’s notice. Its customer support staff are quick to reply and knowledgeable about the service. With video walkthroughs for the most common tasks, ExpressVPN makes it easy to protect yourself online, and even easier to get started.

See also: Latest ExpressVPN coupons