With so many VPNs on the market, each different in terms of functionality, speed, and security, it’s often difficult to accurately compare each service yourself. To make things easier, we’ve taken two leading VPNs and created an easily digestible side-by-side comparison. In this post, we compare NordVPN vs CyberGhost: we’ll discover which is better for the average user when all the marketing and personal preferences are stripped away.

Comparing VPNs is no easy task. Our team has personally tested NordVPN and CyberGhost, examined all of their features, and created an in-depth comparison so you can tell at a glance what each has to offer:

While both of these services are worthy of your time, NordVPN is our first choice. Its security toolkit is second to none, it works with almost every streaming service we’ve tested, and at the moment there’s a steep discount that makes it an even better deal. CyberGhost is faster and equally versatile, of course, and we have an exclusive discount that can help you try it out for as little as possible.

Highlights

NordVPN vs CyberGhost pricing

While NordVPN offers lower month-to-month prices, CyberGhost is actually the less expensive option if you only need a year’s coverage.

NordVPN

  • Can unblock numerous popular streaming services abroad
  • Extensive, in-depth support section
  • Offers specialized servers for torrenting and browsing the dark web
  • Includes a wide range of security features

CyberGhost

  • One-click unblocking of popular streaming sites
  • Faster than most other providers
  • Novice-friendly service with comprehensive security built-in
  • View all relevant server information ‘at-a-glance’

CyberGhost offers a 14-day money-back guarantee for monthly subscribers. Those on longer plans get 45 days, which is longer than most of its rivals. In comparison, NordVPN has a flat 30-day money-back guarantee on all of its plans. This means that you can effectively use NordVPN for a month, free of charge. Additionally, as 30 days is usually long enough to decide whether you like the service or not, there’s actually very little to be gained from CyberGhost’s extended guarantee.

BEST DEAL FOR NORDVPN:Save up to 68% with NordVPN’s two-year subscription.

BEST DEAL FOR CYBERGHOST:Save up to 84% with CyberGhost’s two-year subscription.

NordVPN vs CyberGhost features

Each of these VPNs offers excellent multi-platform support. Both have FireTV and Linux apps. Further, NordVPN permits up to six simultaneous connections, while CyberGhost goes even further and allows up to seven. If this still doesn’t allow you to protect all of your devices, you can manually install either VPN on your home router to protect every internet-connected device in your home.

While similar, these services are geared towards slightly different target markets. NordVPN, for example, includes several advanced features aimed at increasing user security. On the other hand, CyberGhost put a major emphasis on ease of use. Both provide ad and malware-blocking, but CyberGhost allows you to choose a task and have a suitable server automatically assigned, so it’s the better choice for less technologically-capable users.

Both NordVPN and CyberGhost offer browser extensions for Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. That said, it’s important to understand the difference between a VPN app and a VPN browser extension. These extensions only protect your browser traffic. As such, they won’t encrypt data from other applications, allow you to file-share safely, or protect yourself from DDoS attacks.

Unblocking capabilities

NordVPN is known as one of the best VPNs for unblocking geo-blocked content when abroad. It allows you to access a huge range of services, and generally finds a way around updated geo-blocking measures fairly quickly. CyberGhost also unblocks numerous streaming platforms, including multiple Netflix libraries. It even enables you to choose a suitable server for a given service with a single click. However, it can be a little slower to adapt, which occasionally means you’ll see a service in the unblock list that (usually temporarily) can’t actually be accessed.

Both of these VPNs enable you to choose not just your country, but also your city. This means you can even access platforms with stricter geo-restriction measures in place. This kind of blocking isn’t something you’ll see every day, but it’s commonly used on local TV streams or sports networks like MLB or NHL.

China

CyberGhost freely admits that its service rarely, if ever, works in China. Its website is blocked by China’s Great Firewall. Even if you find a workaround, you may still find that your local Internet Service Provider (ISP) blocks it. There are currently no working mirror sites, and there is no reliable way to use the service from this country, so we do not recommend CyberGhost when in China.

NordVPN has historically worked very well in China, though it’s currently having difficulty overcoming the government’s latest firewall updates. Still, in the past, it’s only ever been a matter of time until users were able to connect as normal. In the meantime, you can try using one of the obfuscated servers or manually configuring your connection.

Setup and interface

NordVPN’s desktop app is very straightforward. The main screen enables you to choose a server either from a list or on a map, and the settings menu offers simple toggle buttons for the most commonly changed options. Plus, the advanced settings are kept in their own section, behind a warning message, so there’s less chance of you accidentally changing something you shouldn’t.

CyberGhost no longer has a tile-based user interface, instead opting for a more streamlined design. The main screen contains a quick-connect button and a drop-down menu for your preferred location. Additionally, the entire process of choosing a server has been further simplified. There’s another screen with a search bar: you can enter a country or streaming service and find suitable servers instantly.

NordVPN’s mobile app is very similar to its desktop version. You can still choose a location on the map and connect in a single click, but there’s also a shortcut to the service’s specialized P2P, dedicated IP, double VPN, or Tor over VPN servers. The settings menu is similarly revamped, with fewer options and some functionality (such as the kill switch) removed.

CyberGhost’s mobile app has also had an update, making the interface more consistent between mobile and desktop apps. The sliding task-based panel is gone and has been replaced with a new, cleaner home screen. You can connect to the best location from the main screen, or select a specific location from a drop-down menu. There’s even a separate category for streaming-friendly servers, each of which lists the service it’s best suited for.

Servers and performance

NordVPN has 5,400 servers in total. CyberGhost now has around 9,700 spread across 90+ countries, compared to just 60 countries with NordVPN. In general, this puts CyberGhost ahead. However, it is worth noting that both services are of a very high caliber when it comes to servers.

Many VPNs heavily prioritize a few high-traffic locations but both CyberGhost and NordVPN try to offer higher numbers of servers in areas that often don’t get much support, like Japan (NordVPN has more than 80 servers and CyberGhost has 53), Sweden (NordVPN has 140 servers and CyberGhost has 100), and Singapore (NordVPN has 110 servers and CyberGhost has 24).

CyberGhost offers at least eight servers in each of its served countries, with its highest number (1,690 servers) in Germany. By comparison, NordVPN has just a single server in some countries, but also offers more than CyberGhost elsewhere. A prime example is the US, where the service has more than a third (1,970) of its servers.

Below, you can see a full list of countries where these VPNs operate servers:

We regularly speed test leading VPN providers to see how their performance has changed over time. At the moment, CyberGhost is the fastest service on the market, averaging 548 Mbps on a 5 Gbps connection. NordVPN isn’t too far behind, though, with an average speed of 369 Mbps.In other words, both providers are fast enough for any task you can think of, including streaming, torrenting, or gaming.

Security

Both of these services enable you to use the OpenVPN, L2TP, and IKEv2 protocols. However, NordVPN also provides its super-fast NordLynx protocol which is a custom fork of WireGuard. CyberGhost and NordVPN both provide users with the option to connect using 256-bit AES encryption and 4096-bit RSA keys, which, at the time of writing is considered secure and futureproof.

NordVPN has a customizable kill switch that allows specific applications to continue transferring data after connection to the VPN is lost. This provides a rare degree of flexibility to the service, but unfortunately, is only available in the app’s desktop versions. CyberGhost, on the other hand, features an always-on kill switch that is built into both desktop and mobile versions.

Although both CyberGhost and NordVPN offer automatic network protection, NordVPN’s is slightly better. NordVPN enables you to start the service automatically whenever you connect to a wireless network. In comparison, CyberGhost only offers this protection on networks you’ve joined previously. This obviously isn’t ideal when using potentially unsafe public wifi. CyberGhost does allow users to compress data, however, which is a great way to reduce mobile internet costs.

Privacy

NordVPN is based in Panama, a country with no mandatory data retention laws. This means that this VPN isn’t required to keep any logs, and accordingly, doesn’t. In fact, the only information that NordVPN records is the email address you use to sign up. It also accepts several popular cryptocurrencies, so signing up anonymously is trivial.

CyberGhost is based in Romania, part of the European Union. As bulk data retention is illegal in the EU (except in extreme circumstances), there’s no need to worry about your activities being traced back to you. This service isn’t completely log-free, but it only stores statistical information regarding whether you logged in on a given day. This is cleared at the end of each month and cannot be used to identify you. Privacy-conscious users can sign up with a throwaway email address and pay in Bitcoin for maximum anonymity.

NordVPN has a slight edge here because it has had its apps and infrastructure audited, meaning users don’t have to take the company’s security claims at face value. CyberGhost has had its network audited but has yet to allow independent auditors to verify the safety of its apps.

Customer service

NordVPN and CyberGhost both offer live chat, as well as email and ticket-based support. We tested each service’s live chat at several different times of day and found that each usually replied in under a minute. Additionally, a copy of the chat transcript is automatically sent to your email address in case you’d like to refer to it later.

While live chat is likely the best way to contact either service, we also sent each provider three questions via email. This allowed us to gauge their response times in circumstances where live chat was unavailable or when you wanted to speak to in-house support. The first two of our questions were relatively straightforward, and the support teams almost certainly had pre-prepared answers for them. The third is intentionally a little more complex. It’s designed to see how prepared customer support is to engage with users experiencing more difficult problems.

Although neither service has responded particularly quickly, it’s worth bearing in mind that they mainly address problems over live chat. NordVPN tended to reply slightly faster, but their answers were often brief. CyberGhost, on the other hand, was less likely to use pre-prepared paragraphs, at least when addressing the main part of your question.

The winner: NordVPN

While these are both high-quality VPNs, each with its own strengths, we had to choose a winner. It was a very close call, but we believe NordVPN is a slightly better choice for most people.

Although CyberGhost is excellent for less tech-savvy users or those looking to quickly unblock streaming sites when abroad, it lacks the more advanced functionality that NordVPN offers. With its customizable kill switch, Tor over VPN, and double VPN options, NordVPN enables users to create a highly advanced, finely-tuned security setup. It also accepts a wide range of cryptocurrencies, making anonymous registration easier.

Admittedly, CyberGhost has more servers than NordVPN does. However, we found NordVPN to provide exceptional speeds for its users (in part thanks to its NordLynx protocol), and we never suffered congestion. So unless you specifically need one of the extra locations provided by CyberGhost, it doesn’t seem to make enough difference when compared to the other advantages you get with Nord.

Additionally, NordVPN has specific servers for browsing the dark web, static IP addresses, and servers designed to be used in countries with strict internet censorship, making it the more versatile of the two.

Methodology: How we compared NordVPN and CyberGhost

If we were to provide a fair, comprehensive comparison of NordVPN and CyberGhost, we first had to create a robust testing methodology. We began by identifying a few important areas of operation and deciding upon a minimum set of acceptable standards. Here are just a few of those:

  • Network: Scale isn’t everything but it certainly helps ensure you’re getting the best speeds and access to the largest range of content. We examined the number of available locations, which countries were exclusive to one provider, and how many servers were available in each place.
  • Performance: Thanks to improvements in VPN technology, there’s now no excuse for a slow connection. We ran a series of tests on different servers at different times of day to find out which provider was the fastest on average. Note that this also method also allowed to us to check for consistency, since a VPN that’s only quick sometimes is effectively useless.
  • Versatility: Ideally, you’d never have to turn a VPN off. As such, we checked to see if NordVPN and CyberGhost were suitable for torrenting, evading detection, and gaming. Further, our team tested these services against popular streaming platforms such as Netflix, Disney+, and Hulu.
  • Security: Part of our testing involves looking for adequate encryption, protection against data leaks, and ways that a VPN safeguards your data. We prefer providers that have had their apps audited for security, and any other relevant tools (such as stealth modes or enhanced security servers) are always very welcome.
  • Privacy: It’s rare to find a VPN that keeps no logs whatsoever. However, we’ll never recommend a service that records data which could identify you personally. We checked to see whether either provider had their infrastructure audited to prove their no-logging claims, whether they allowed users to pay anonymously, and whether they included tools such as tracker-blocking.
  • Usability: Everyone deserves to browse privately. That’s why we value providers with easy to use apps, 24/7 support, and clear explanations of what each setting does. We also go out of our way to contact support ourselves and measure their response time.
  • Value for money: Because we review so many VPNs, it’s immediately obvious if a service is overcharging for what it offers. Needless to say, we’ll only ever recommend fairly-priced providers. They also need to include a money-back guarantee, and where possible, we’ll let you know about any available discounts.

Want to learn more? Our full VPN testing post breaks down our methodology in more detail.