Brave VPN Review – In-Depth Breakdown (2025 Edition)

Some people claim that if you have nothing to hide, you shouldn’t mind invasions of privacy. Our response is to that is to quote the wily Cardinal Richelieu: “If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.”

The fact is that even innocent, innocuous bits of information can be used for nefarious purposes. That’s especially true in the age of the internet, where your browsing history and personal data can, at best, be used to sell you stuff, while at worst it can be used in cybercrimes.

VPNs help reduce your risk, protecting your personal info and diminishing the ability of others to track your activity.

Brave is primarily a FOSS (free and open-source software) browser, but the developers have steadily added premium tools to enhance their product. The most popular of these enhancements is the firewall and VPN, which hides your internet traffic, blocks potential threats and masks your IP address location.

In this review, we’re going to look at Brave’s speed and security features, as well as how these attributes compare to other VPNs on the market.

Company Background

American born and bred, Brave was founded in San Francisco in 2015, unveiling its first browser in 2016. Operating as a private, independent company, it’s run by a pair of computer programmers who started their business to combat the overbearing influence of Big Tech.

Since its initial release, Brave has added an AI assistant, a search engine, a video conferencing tool, a news feed, a crypto wallet, a playlist creator, a rewards program and, of course, a VPN. All these features have been built directly into the browser, which now has more than 80 million monthly active users.

While most of Brave’s software is run in house, the VPN aspect is powered by Guardian, a fellow San Francisco company with a similar privacy-minded philosophy that has been selling firewall software since 2012.

In general, people tend to have privacy concerns about VPN services based out of the US – quite understandably in the wake of Edward Snowden’s revelations. Brave has attempted to combat that with a robust no-logs policy, which means they do not record and store information on your browsing habits.

Core Features

Brave VPN is built into the Brave browser but operates throughout your device. Once you turn it on, it will encrypt data coming from all your browsers and apps.

One subscription currently covers up to 10 devices, including any that run on either Android, iOS, macOS or Windows systems. Linux is in the works but is not currently available.

As we’ve already mentioned, Brave VPN is essentially run by Guardian, which deals with hosting the VPN servers and ensuring the functionality of the software. That means that it’s mostly Guardian’s policies that determine things like encryption, logging and speed.

Security & Privacy

Brave VPN has two types of protocols: WireGuard, which uses ChaCha20 encryption, and IKEv2, which uses AES-256 encryption. Both encryptions are considered top of the line – you’ll find the same ciphers on almost all the best VPNs.

Also like all the best VPNs, there is a no-logs policy. This means the company doesn’t store any data related to your browsing habits, including connection information like your IP address and time stamps.

Guardian, which hosts the VPN, just started undergoing independent audits for its server security and logging policy last year, which is reassuring for anybody that wants evidence that they are living up to their promises. The company publishes the reports on their website, so you can review the findings and any recommendations.

As for security tools, Brave has a fairly pared-down offering, at least compared to other VPN products. Its features include:

• Kill switch. The software automatically blocks your connection if the VPN temporarily drops, ensuring that none of your data is transmitted through an unsecured tunnel.
• DNS leak protection. Internet service providers (ISPs) and/or hackers can monitor your browsing habits using DNS data, but leak protection stops this information from being sent.
• Tracker blocker. This stops all kinds of trackers embedded in websites, emails and the like from monitoring your location and online behavior.

Performance & Server Network

Brave VPN uses Guardian’s 300+ network of 10 Gbps servers, although the exact number available isn’t specified.

Their servers are in about 40 regions, including Australia, Brazil, Chile, Japan, Singapore, South Africa, the USA and several European nations.

That might sound impressive on the surface, but it’s significantly fewer countries than big VPN providers like Proton and Surfshark, which boast coverage in more than 100. Depending on where you are living as a nomad, this could have a big effect on the speed of your internet connection.

All VPNs slow down browsing because the data you send out and receive is passing through additional encryption processes. This can get even more sluggish if you are further away from a server, because this increases the latency, aka ping, aka the time it takes for data packets to travel to the destination of the server and back to your device.

For example, if you’re in India or Saudi Arabia trying to connect to Brave VPN, the nearest server options are going to be either in Singapore or Europe – neither of which is very close! That’s going to translate into slower browsing speeds.

On the other hand, if you’re a nomad based in the Czech Republic or Romania, there’s a server in the vicinity, so you should find your connection speed doesn’t slow down all that much with the VPN active.

Special Features

Brave VPN’s signature feature is its ad blocking. That, after all, is the main point of the whole Brave browser, which was made to reduce the number of virtual sales pitches that pop up on your screen.

Unsurprisingly, we found Brave’s ad blocking was superior to almost all the other VPN providers we tried – so it is at least living up to its USP!

For Android users, it is also possible to engage in split tunneling through the Brave app. This allows you to choose for some apps to connect normally, rather than via the VPN, which can be useful if you’re having trouble with speeds.

Speed, Streaming & Torrenting Performance

Speed is always such a difficult thing to definitively state, since it’s so variable according to the time of day and where you are based. However, through repeated tests, we’ve tried to give you an accurate(ish) prediction of what to expect.

Speed Test Results

Brave claim they can get up to 500 Mbps in the best of all possible worlds, which isn’t as fast as providers like Proton and Surfshark, which can get up 950+ Mbps.

However, we’re more interested in how much the VPN slows down our connection than we are in ultimate speeds, since most nomads aren’t necessarily going to have access to killer internet abroad.

Connecting to a European server from Europe, we noticed very minimal decreases in speed and very reasonable latency compared to our normal connection without a VPN.

Downloading: 3.65%

Uploading: 4.55%

Latency: 184.62%

When we connected to the fastest available servers in the US and Singapore, the speeds (unsurprisingly) were a little down, but still very manageable. The latency went up enormously (again, unsurprisingly), which did slow down the browsing but not unbearably so.

We should add that Europe is the best place possible (aside from North America) for Brave VPN to work. Given the lack of servers in Asia and Africa, we’d expect there to be slower speeds and more lag connecting from those regions.

Streaming & P2P Support

If you read reviews of Brave VPN from a couple of years ago, a lot of them talk about how bad the service is for streaming, but we didn’t have any problems at all. This could be down to the fact that there was a significant update released last year, which seems to have fixed a lot of the proxy issues.

We found it was easy to connect to the Netflix libraries in both the US and Singapore, as well as other countries in Europe. We didn’t have any issues with buffering – everything played normally and without any apparent resolution issues.

We also tested Amazon Prime across different locations, as well as connecting to BBC iPlayer in the UK.

Torrenting also worked fine, although it isn’t officially supported by Brave VPN and there aren’t P2P-optimized servers that you can choose in the app. In other words, it’s not the best option for torrenting, but you could do worse!

Security and Data Protection

We’ve already talked a little bit about the security features of Brave VPN, but for people who want a bit more detail, we’ll deep dive into what’s on offer.

Encryption & VPN Protocols

Brave mainly uses WireGuard, which is the fastest, most lightweight tunneling protocol available on the VPN market. The only thing we’ve seen that is (arguably) better are some of the custom protocols developed by companies like NordVPN – and these are built atop WireGuard.

The other tunneling protocol that is supported is IKEv2, which is less secure but tends to have better stability on mobiles.

No-Logs Policy & Audit History

Brave has a no-logs policy, which means they don’t store any information about your IP address, your browsing activity or anything else to do with your connection.

Just last year, Guardian, which enables Brave VPN, had its first third-party audit of their logs policy. This was undertaken by Sweden-based Assured Security Consultants, who combed through both Guardian’s data privacy and security infrastructure.

The results of their findings are openly published on Guardian’s website, with the plan being to commission third-party audits every year from now on.

Jurisdiction & Privacy Implications

There’s no beating around the bush with this one: the US is not a privacy-friendly jurisdiction. It’s been well documented that their intelligence services can and will request user data.

In the past, they have even forced companies with active no-logs policies to log user data, while preventing them from revealing this using a court-mandated gag order.

As if this wasn’t worrying enough, the US is also part of multiple intelligence-sharing organizations around the world, which means any data they gather from, for example, Brave can be shared with other governments around the world.

All this isn’t to say that getting Brave VPN is pointless, since you can still clearly use it to mask your IP address and browse anonymously, protecting your data from suspect third parties and streaming across borders. It just means that you should be aware that Brave VPN isn’t the best choice if you’re worried about the US government snooping on the downlow.

Pricing and Subscription Plans

Brave’s browser is available for free, but the firewall and VPN are paid add-ons that can be purchased through a monthly or annual subscription.

Plan Breakdown

The VPN subscription offers protection on up to 10 devices across Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It automatically comes with a 7-day free trial for new users, before you are fully subscribed to the service.

Single-month subscription: $9.99.

12-month subscription: $99.99 (approximately $8.33 per month).

Payment Options & Refunds

Brave’s payment options are limited, relying on credit card and debit card payments taken through Stripe. In the future, they are planning to allow people to purchase their VPN using Brave’s version of crypto, BAT, but that’s not currently possible.

Of course, if you purchase through the Apple App Store or Google Play Store, you can pay using their accepted methods.

There is NO 30-day money-back guarantee, as there is with VPN specialists like Surfshark, ExpressVPN and NordVPN. Although Brave will offer a refund in some circumstances – like if you accidentally overran the trial period and forgot to cancel or if your annual subscription auto-renewed – it’s purely at its discretion.

If you do want to stop your subscription, all you have to do is log in to your account on Brave and cancel the plan. If you purchased through the Google Play Store or the Apple App Store, you just do the normal thing of navigating to your subscriptions and canceling there. It’s all very (dare we say it) idiot proof.

Customer Support Experience

Brave doesn’t have the most agile customer support, with no live chat or even email.

The first port of call is its help center, which has a very limited range of posts on how to activate and use the VPN. Partly, that’s down to Brave VPN’s narrow range of features.

If your question isn’t resolved by the help center posts, you can also post on the community forum, which is monitored by a mix of admins and volunteers. We found this quite useful for some of our questions, but it did take quite a bit of effort to unearth what we were looking for – and often the posts shown were out of date.

The best thing to do for more complex problems is to contact the technical support team through the Brave VPN settings. This raises a service ticket with Guardian.

What we find most annoying about all this is that Brave’s website doesn’t clearly signpost any of these three options. Both the help center and the community forum are buried in a messy footer, while we had to root around for quite a while to find out how to contact the VPN-specific technical support.

What’s most bizarre is it’s not explained on Brave’s firewall-VPN page OR in the VPN FAQs how to get in touch with technical support. Sure, you could stumble upon it if you’re exploring the settings of your VPN, but it’s not obvious.

Granted, Brave is a free browser, so they probably don’t want to dedicate a lot of resources to customer support. BUT if we’re paying what is one of the most expensive VPN subscription prices on the market, we do kind of expect a little more service!

Pros and Cons

Pros:

✅ Easy to use

✅ Excellent ad blocking

✅ No-logs policy

Cons:

❌ Limited extra features

❌ Basic customer service

Comparison With Other VPNs (300 words)

*We’ve selected the midrange option for each service listed above, rather than the basic or premium plan. Speeds and prices will vary according to geography.

We don’t know if we were just experiencing really good speeds for some weird reason on the days that we trialed Brave VPN, but it massively exceeded our expectations. It has a lower download speed loss than almost any other VPN we tested, while the upload speed loss was also impressively minimal.

The price, however, is a bit insane. It’s way more than every other VPN mainstay on the market, despite offering fewer features. That said, perhaps it’s worth it for people who like the company, its privacy-centered ethos and its suite of features that are built into a FOSS browser.

User Reviews and Ratings

Brave’s ratings on sites like Trustpilot and the Google Play Store are based on feedback about its browser’s overall performance. That means that it’s impossible to assess how positively people view its VPN as its own service.

With that caveat in mind, Brave scores a pretty abysmal 2.8/5 on Trustpilot. Part of the reason for that low rating is undoubtedly that they don’t engage with Trustpilot, which always leads to a greater proportion of negative reviews. It’s also notable that a lot of comments are about the political opinions of the owner, rather than the software.

Reviews on the Google Play Store and the Apple App Store are more positive, with Brave scoring 4.7/5 and 4.8/5 respectively.

What people like:

The ad blocking. Many users are pleased with the ability to filter out most ads and pop-ups.

The commitment to privacy. There’s a lot of positive feedback about the company’s ethos.

It’s easy to use. Getting the VPN set up is as easy as clicking a button.

What people don’t like:

The customer support. The process for getting in touch with a company rep is unclear and overly burdensome.

That it sometimes slows down sites. Several users have complained that the browser and its features throttle their connection.

Final Verdict & Recommendation

Brave isn’t a VPN specialist. That’s why it uses Guardian to provide this feature in its browser. It’s also why the functionality is limited compared to some of the top dogs in the market.

For people who want more options and customizations, this is not the VPN for you. It doesn’t come with advanced features like double VPN or Onion over VPN, neither does it give you much leeway to toy around with configuration.

That said, we had a pretty positive overall experience with Brave. We didn’t ask it to do anything too taxing, but the connection speed was good and it successfully prevented DNS leaks or sites recording our IP address.

While it is worth noting that the number of Brave VPN servers (via Guardian) does seem to be growing all the time, it’s still way short of what you can get from the market leaders – who are also continuously upgrading their server network.

As long as you are in one of the covered regions though, it’s a great product for people who want an easy-to-use product that’s ready to go out of the box and boasts a top-of-the-line ad blocker.