Best/Most Reliable VPN Client for iPhone - Overseas Travel

I'm looking for recommendations on a good VPN client for installing on an iPhone for when travelling overseas - China, Middle East etc.

The three I keep seeing "recommended" are:

ExpressVPN

NordVPN

Surfshack

But not sure if these are legitimately the best or just "advertorial" type recommendations.

Comments

  • The best VPN is creating your own on your own dedicated server slot. It's not massively difficult to do, step by step guides available.

    https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-inst…

    https://openvpn.net/quick-start-guide/

    https://www.kimsufi.com/en/vps-ssd.xml


    You definitely definitely don't want ExpressVPN run by a malware company: https://restoreprivacy.com/kape-technologies-owns-expressvpn…

    • We have an OpenVPN server running, and it works perfectly for tunneling all traffic from my Galaxy Note and all Windoze laptops. But the iPad… there's some issues with DNS that I can't sort.

      This is for a manager of one of our clients. And he leaves in 2 days. So hence the reason I'm looking at something "commercial" short-term, although long-term I'd like to get OpenVPN running properly.

  • +1

    Will you be using an MDM profile to enforce it being on? Without that the chances are either he'll disable it, the app itself will go to sleep or stop running for X reason, or depending on the country a malicious actor might be able to compromise the device and just turn it off.

    I know on my personal Android phone, I had a lot of trouble getting the VPN to 'stick' and it'd constantly disable or even worse - say it was on in the notifications but actually wasn't. Have tried PIA, AdGuard and now Nord just FYI.

    On my iPad, which admittedly is purely just at home so never travelling or moving off WiFi, I found PIA would 'stick' pretty well and you'd KNOW if it didn't. AdGuard was messy and I didn't like its iOS implementation, and so far I've found Nord fairly similar to PIA - works 80-90% of the time and when it doesn't you'll see the WiFi/VPN icon spazzing out on the notifications or in Settings.

    • Probably not at this point given he's leaving tomorrow. He's actually requested it so I'll get the guy installing it to explain how to know it's working etc. Might look further next time though.

  • +2

    I use TunnelBear and it’s ok.

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