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For those looking to migrate away from Mullvad VPN, what are some alternatives that the community recommends? (reddthat.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/privacy@lemmy.ml
74 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

I've heard a lot about AirVPN, but it doesn't have an app on Fdroid or anything. Yes you can download it directly from their site, but that is a little cumbersome.

Another option I'm considering is Windscribe.One major knock against it (and the same thing for AirVPN) is that htere is no tutorial available for installing the wireguard version on openwrt.

I really don't know enough about these. Windscribe has been sort of tested in court (again that was in Greece, and they don't have the same might of an authoritarian state as the US or some place), so that's a plus.

I don't know, I'm so confused that it sort of makes sense to stick with Mullvad at times.

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[–] 28 points 2 months ago (5 children)

ivpn is worth a look

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    Completely agree most people have recommended proton and perhaps wind scribe. But something people tend to miss is proton, mullvad & others tend to use rented vps servers. Ivpn claims they own all of their servers hands down. If that is the case and you may need to look into this then go with them.

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I believe mullvad owns most of their servers. Ivpn does not claim to own their servers.

    Not sure if linking is allowed but if you go to IVPN's server status page, they have a quick faq at the bottom where they mention they rent from datacenter partners.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I did get that claim wrong (and will update the post) but this is what they specifically say in their site.

    No virtual servers

    We operate VPN gateways in 41 countries on dedicated bare-metal servers. No shared VPS, no virtual locations. source

    What is bare metal, and how are IVPN’s servers set up?

    Every IVPN gateway is a bare-metal server: dedicated physical hardware rented from a datacenter partner, not a virtualised instance and not a virtual location. Servers use LUKS full-disk encryption, mandatory access controls, and firewalled IPMI. A small number of pilot gateways also run a RAM-only (diskless) architecture, extending it across the network is an ongoing project.> source (scroll to bottom of page ivpn> web)

    This is important because one slight issue with other services are vpses. Some servers run on shared or cheaper resources, so you'll be paying a premium (per month) for others services. But those providers "servers" are cheap and easy to setup. I may have been wrong on what I have said (but we all are at some point and I'm sorry.)/ I Still think their a pretty good alternative. Ivpn also rotates the wire guard keys per day which mullvad doesn't yet and they are aware of you can read their post here Mullvad blog

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    No worries. Just want to make sure people are fully aware. Thanks for linking the info.

    IVPN is certainly a good contender. I'd also consider AirVPN purely for port forwarding. I'd swap to IVPN in a heartbeat if they had that feature.

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    • [–] 18 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    airvpn and ivpn appear to be the only ethical ones.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Agreed. These are the only real options at present.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    I really want people to tell me about other options, neither airvpn or ivpn seem awesome for the southern hemisphere and linux, for the majority of users they look like the best choices though. It is a dodgy industry.

    Looking up vpns is a pain in the butt due to how manipulated 99% of sites about them are, plus the usual fan blah blah

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  • [–] 4 points 2 months ago* (1 child)

    I use ivpn on my Linux computer and found it very easy to use.

    https://www.ivpn.net/en/apps-linux/

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    There was some weird arse package in it 'npm' that failed while trying to install ivpn, looking it up at the time said it was suspect (maybe true or not)

    End of the day they did not have servers where I needed them (a southern hemisphere problem)

    They were very quick to reply and appeared genuine with their customer supportthough.

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    • [–] 17 points 2 months ago

    I’ve been using IVPN for a few months and I’m happy with it. Was on mullvad before.

    🎯 1
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    [–] 15 points 2 months ago

    I've seen IVPN recommended a lot compared to Mullvad but I have no experience with it personally

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    [–] 12 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Why would you migrate from Mullvad?

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago

    One of the owners of Mullvad donated a vast sum of money to a Swedish Nazi political party, accounting for 70% of their funding, which resulted in boosted popularity there.

    This is the leader of that political party:

    https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

    Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
    "I'm prepared to cross corpses," he said.

    One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to "Sweden is the country of Swedes".

    In a section of Yoshi's Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to "go over corpses" to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. "It's not going to be pretty to send these people home," he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

    He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There's a difference. It's a qualitative difference," Allard said.

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    • [–] 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    OpenVPN on a VPS from Njalla paid for in Monero

    I'm not being silly (other than that I'm a freakin' tinfoil hat compared to most people)

    This is my actual setup.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Depends on your reason for using a VPN. Presumably your Njalla VPS has a static IP address. I like being able to rotate servers if one is being blocked by a given service (ie YouTube).

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  • [–] 10 points 2 months ago*

    Seconding electric nan's comment. There is a valid use case for that model IMO, but it also ties your identity to a different fixed IP. Maybe if you were PERFECT about opsec it wouldn't tie to your ID, but in practice nobody is going to be. That's nearly impossible in today's tracking centric world. So data brokers will learn user X has IP Y, nobody else uses that IP, so other connections from IP Y are probably user X too.

    There's a benefit to sharing an IP with many other ppl and rotating the IP around. There are drawbacks too ofc.

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    • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (6 children)

    I've heard a lot about AirVPN, but it doesn’t have an app on Fdroid or anything. Yes you can download it directly from their site, but that is a little cumbersome.

    Consider using Obtainium. It might be a little cumbersome to get it set up, but once you do, Obtainium will handle checking for and installing updates whenever they are released.

    Install Obtainium from GitHub or F-Droid. Then you can add Eddie (the AirVPN client app) by using the install button on this page:
    https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/apps?categoryMode=inclusive&category=vpn&sort=popular&q=Eddie

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    I'll give that link a shot. I installed Obtanium for the first time, and tried adding their installation link (maybe not that one, I don't remember what I tried adding), but I couldn't get it to wokr.

    But maaaan, their android client looks so amateurish. I mean it's fine as long as it works, but as an ad for your company...this isn't it.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    Obtainium is annoying a lot though, its probably not a fault of theirs necessarily but there is so often failure due to locating an installable build from a repo link

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    What? It fails because it locates an app to install?

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah I would try to install from their git as much as possible but it is very inconsistent. Nothing found or no installable build found, so have to hope they are on fdroid.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

    Oh, it fails to install anything when Obtainium does not find an installable build.

    That's because not every git repo necessarily hosts installable builds at all. The main purpose of git is just to host the source code for that project. With that said, many repos do also build an installable release (*.apk, *.exe, whatever) of each major version and host that in the "Releases" section.

    As an example, here is Obtainium's GitHub repo. If you scroll to the bottom of the page, you see the "Releases" section that contains the most recent APKs and everything:

    image

    But not every git repo hosts releases. Eddie is one of those. The git repo for Eddie is just for hosting the source code. They host the releases on their own website instead. In that case, you can often just take the URL for whatever website is actually hosting the APKs and paste that into Obtainium and it will do its usual web scraping method to find the appropriate APK files for each update.

    On the other hand, that web scraping often does not work and requires more complicated techniques to get Obtainium to find the appropriate APK files. That is where https://apps.obtainium.imranr.dev/ comes in handy. This is a crowdsourced list of popular apps that require more complicated techniques to add to Obtainium, and each has a neat little "Install" button to quickly and easily add that app to Obtainium by applying that complex config in the background for you.

    But there are also some projects that don't host releases anywhere other than F-Droid. In that case, by all means, just use F-Droid for that app.

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    • [–] 8 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Highly recommend AirVPN. The Eddie App is perfectly fine.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago* (2 children)

    Last I looked the eddie app didn't even have split tunneling?

    people on their reddit frequently recommend against using eddie too

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Again, it's fine - not the bees knees. You can exclude local networks from the VPN. If there is another VPN/Wireguard app that does app based split tunnelling or whatever you're looking for just use that with AirVPN instead of Eddie.

    Maybe WGTunnel? Haven't tried it myself.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    airvpn can fix their software if they want my money.

    mullvad has good software and the browser extension, which together makes a very usable system. Unfortunately they completely failed ethically.

    It shouldn't be too much to ask for decent software and ethics.

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    • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    There's Proton, but given the controversy... yeah (though I did look at what they donate to and it seems to not be right-wing companies).

    IVPN is perhaps your best bet.

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    • [–] 6 points 2 months ago

    IVPN is very good imo, I'm using it, and I love it

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    [–] 5 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I know you mentioned AirVPN only having an app on their website, but you can use it with the wireguard client (you just have to make the conf file names short enough and remove special characters to import them). This is how I personally use AirVPN on Android.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    That's how I do it. I use WG Tunnel (on FDroid), make the conf on the website, rename it to something short ('airvpn' for example) and import it. I only connect to one server though (Azelfafage), so I have no clue how it behaves with multiple exit nodes...

    Hope this helps OP!

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  • [–] [S] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    I tried adding their client via Obtanium, it didn't work.

    But man, that client looks so outdated. It looks like a kid's idea of a website.

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    • [–] 12 points 2 months ago* (5 children)

    I switched to Xeovo, works great so far. Winscribe was a no after this: https://x.com/Windscribe/status/1991176084662964688

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Please don't make us visit twitter. Windscribe makes some transphobic statement in that tweet.

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    • [–] 3 points 2 months ago* (2 children)

    Ivpn, Ovpn, Azire VPN, VP.net are serious alternatives. For more control, build your own VPN (or directly via Njalla, 1984...). For more encryption, full post-quantum VPN might be an option. Most of all, never forget that any VPN is a potential honeypot. VPN are necessary to limit the impact of surveillance capitalism (i'm not an Ads man !), or to watch other countries streaming series. Dont expect beeing anonymous (advanced fingerprinting, and in some cases Hénéssay, do not care about your super VPN). Of course, staying away from free VPN is a sign of good prudence.

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  • [–] [S] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Your latter point is something I've been considering for a while; VPN really won't protect me if a 3 letter agency is after me.

    It is merely an attempt to obscure myself from ISP and it's tracking.

    So even though I'm not fully sold on Windscribe, that's why I'm kind of leaning towards it.

    What's Henessay? An online search and the top hits aren't what I think you're referring to.

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    • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    Wanted to say I will move to ivpn when mullvad runs out, but seems like the whole comment section already agrees on airvpn and ivpn

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    [–] 2 points 2 months ago (4 children)

    I'm in the same boat. I'm giving Mozilla VPN a try now that I'm in the last couple of weeks of my Mullvad subscription. They only have subscription options through the Play store or App store, which is not ideal, but I'm willing to compromise a little to support Mozilla.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    "Mozilla VPN is powered by Mullvad. While they use Mullvad servers the software used is mostly their own."

    https://embed.kumu.io/9ced55e897e74fd807be51990b26b415#vpn-company-relationships/mozilla-vpn

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    • [–] 4 points 2 months ago (15 children)

    Why should I migrate from a trusted vendor?

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  • [–] 21 points 2 months ago (11 children)

    Co-founder donated huge sums to extreme right party.

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  • [+] -17 points 2 months ago (10 children)

    I am aware of https://mullvad.net/en/blog/donation-controversy and https://dberntsson.info/2026/07/20/orebropartiet/ and

    • extreme right wing moniker seems a smear campaign against Örebro

    • the company has nothing to do with private affairs of the founder

    This whole campaign smells of something intelligence services would do if they're facing a problem they can't make go away another way. And it is actually working because of people like you, who amplify this attack.

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  • [–] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    It definitely is an extreme right party, and the founder's riches are a direct result of the company's success.

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  • [–] 5 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    They are nationalist racists trying to cloak themselves with populist leftist ideas. This is the leader of that party:

    https://www.friatider.se/markus-allard-om-andra-generationens-invandrare-de-ska-ocksa-ut

    Örebro Party leader Markus Allard goes to the election on expulsions. He opens to withdraw citizenship and also expel second generation of immigrants – even if they were born in Sweden.
    "I'm prepared to cross corpses," he said.

    One suggestion that he has is that citizenship and permanent residence permits can be torn up – with reference to "Sweden is the country of Swedes".

    In a section of Yoshi's Podcast, Allard develops his view on expulsions and explains that he prepared to "go over corpses" to bring home unwanted immigrants. The host notes that there will be no beautiful sight when, for example, immigrant mothers who have been on maternity leave for 15 years are to be deported together with their children. "It's not going to be pretty to send these people home," he said. Markus Allard agrees, but says: I think you can handle that optics. Even the children will need to be deported, he explains.

    He further explains that many of the problems relate to second-generation immigrants. They are going out too. Even if they were born in Sweden, because they have no natural connection to Sweden. They are not Swedes. They have not become Swedes. It says Sweden in the passport, but they have not been interested in becoming part of Sweden. There's a difference. It's a qualitative difference," Allard said

    Remember; the Nazi's did the same thing by strategically calling their party the National Socialist German Workers' Party, despite them not being socialist nor a working class party. This was chosen because Socialism was gaining popularity, and thus the Nazi's thought it would help their chances of getting votes and public support.

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  • [–] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    So you are making that speculation purely on vibes without any sort of backing information?

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  • [–] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    The recent issue with one of Mullvad's founders/co-owners is very well known.

    https://lemmy.zip/post/68295409

    https://lemmy.zip/post/67067247

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (1 child)

    Thanks. Ironically, can't see it since lemmy.zip uses Cloudflare, which uses broken bot captcha which blocks Mullvad tunnels.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago*

    I have no idea how that equates to you not being able to see lemmy links on lemmy, but the internet is daft due to being made by humans.

    A search for mullvad on lemmy should bring up a couple of pertinent threads, otherwise these are their titles

    • Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

    • I don’t like that he made this donation' — Mullvad CEO reacts to co-founder’s donation to controversial Swedish populist party

    Lots of comments there, an 'interesting' look into human psychology as much as anything

    One of the biggest issues for me was that the company did not react in a way that suggests they really give a shit.

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    • [–] 2 points 2 months ago

    I'm looking to switch to Windscribe.

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    [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    obscura?

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    [–] 0 points 2 months ago

    Air is my go to piracy vpn. Their app is garbage, use the config file generator instead. Air is my go to piracy VPN because it is a piracy vpn service. I would not use them as a shield from any sort of serious threat.

    I use windscribe for stuff that doesn’t matter like bypassing geoblocks. I don’t trust them, their abilities or my ability to limit my own exposure to their malice, compliance or incompetence. It’s a confusing service.

    People are suggesting ivpn and I have used it. It’s a downgrade from mullvad in every way but it might be safe. I can’t say because it hasn’t been tested in the same way.

    I use mullvad when it actually matters. It’s really hard to screw up and they have the best app of any vpn service I’ve ever used.

    There are a lot of people saying why they would want to move away from mullvad, why do you? What devices and operating systems do you use it on? How do you pay?

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