Surfshark and NordVPN both offer 3 months FREE, but there's a clear winner between these duelling VPN deals

If you're concerned about starting a two-year plan with a VPN provider that you haven't used before, don't worry.

Surfshark VPN offers a no-questions-asked 30-day money-back period with its longer subscriptions. And with 24/7 customer service, you'll be able to speak to someone no matter what timezone you're in to resolve any issues or request a full refund.

At the end of the 30-day period, if you're happy with the selection of VPN server locations, Surfshark VPN's selection of desktop and mobile apps, download speeds, and features... then you'll be able to continue using your subscription at £1.49 a month.

Surfshark doesn't limit the number of devices that you can use its VPN service on at any one time, so you can sign-in on your iPhone, Android, Smart TV, Fire TV Stick, iPad or tablet, Wi-Fi router, and dozens of other popular gadgets with the same subscription details.

Surfshark offers fast RAM-only servers in more than 100 countries, so you can spoof your IP address and browse as if you've visiting dozens of different countries with minimal impact to the broadband speed you pay for at-home. Surfshark also includes its Alternative ID system in every subscription, which generates a separate set of details to sign-up for online accounts without ever using your real name, email, or address.

If you subscribe to the £1.49 a month plan... that's about everything you'll find included. Dubbed Surfshark Starter, this entry-level package is designed for those who only want a VPN to encrypt their online activity and manually change their IP address.

Surfshark offers two other price plans: Surfshark One and Surfshark One+.

As you'd expect, these subscriptions all ship with access to Surfshark's popular VPN, but bundle additional apps and features. With Surfshark One, you'll also gain access to real-time credit card and ID breach alerts from the Dark Web. Surfshark monitors forums and other sites frequented by hackers and will preemptively warn you when your details have been shared in a data breach.

Surfshark One — just £1.89 per month in the latest sale, when you agreed to a two-year plan — also comes equipped with 24/7 antivirus protection, webcam protection to ensure cyber criminals can't peer through your camera and secretly film you — a common tactic in blackmail scams, and malware protection.

And finally, the top-tier Surfshark One+ plan comes with everything already listed, plus a bundled subscription to Incogni. Available as a standalone subscription, this system will pressure data brokers to delete everything that have stored on you.

Everything siphoned by data brokers is publicly available or purchased from other companies, like credit card providers, which package up and anonymise some purchasing data. It can include details like your ethnicity, religion, marital status, hobbies, shows you're watching, online purchases you’ve made, address and phone number, search history, and political affiliation.

This data is then sold to the highest bidder. Thankfully, under privacy laws, data brokers are required to wipe your information from their database when you ask them. If you want to start removing your information from these vast repositories, you’ll need to look-up the data brokers operating in your country and send individual opt-out requests to each one.

Or, with a service like Incogni, it will bombard hundreds of data brokers worldwide with the necessary paperwork to ensure that everything they have stored on you is wiped from their records.

Incogni usually costs $7.49 per month as a standalone service, while Surfshark One+ will set you back £2.99 per month in the extended Black Friday sale. That's an 81% discount and you'll get an extra 6 months access for free.

What about NordVPN?

Like Surfshark, NordVPN has combined with 3 months free access with a 73% discount.

Like the rival deal above, you'll need to subscribe to a two-year plan to unlock the maximum discount and free months, which are automatically applied to the end of your contract.

NordVPN offers a 30-day no-quibbles money-back guarantee on all subscriptions.

That means you can treat the first month of your subscription like a free trial and walk away without spending a penny if you're not happy with the VPN service. If you stick around, you'll get 27-months at a huge discount.

NordVPN works across a dizzying number of platforms, including Android, iPhone, iPad, Fire TV Stick, Windows, Linux, Mac, Google Chrome, and dozens more. With a single subscription, you'll have access to its complete line-up of browser extensions, desktop and mobile apps.

It comes soon after the popular VPN brand, which is an official shirt sponsor for Atlético de Madrid, announced upgrades for all customers. It has increased the number of simultaneous connections from 6 to 10. That means you can run NordVPN across 10 devices with a single subscription.

NordVPN has increased the number of countries with its secure VPN servers up to 118. You'll get unlimited bandwidth as standard with NordVPN, which makes it a good choice for streaming video and playing online video games.

Like Surfshark, NordVPN divides up its offering into multiple tiers: Standard, Plus, and Ultimate.

All of these plans unlock access to its award-winning Virtual Private Network (VPN) service, ad blocker, and malware protection. So, even the Standard Plan will offer more features than you'll get with the stripped-back Surfshark Starter plan — that goes some way to explain the price difference.

Upgrading to Plus or Ultimate will include access to password manager NordPass, which encrypts and stores your login details for every website or online service. It can create unique alpha-numeric passwords, which are synced across your devices, so you'll be able to login with a tap.

NordPass also warns about any data breaches that might impact your personal information, which is especially handy given the unprecedented leaks that have already taken place this year. Finally, Ultimate is the only subscription that also bundles 1TB of encrypted cloud storage for your files, photos, and backups, known as NordLocker. This is designed to replace the likes of Google Drive, Microsoft OneDrive, of Apple's iCloud.

You can securely keep encrypted copies of your photos, documents, or backups in servers, so that if anything happens to your devices — you'll be able to restore all of your information with a few taps.

What is a VPN?

For those who don’t know, Virtual Private Networks, more often referred to simply as VPNs, create a tunnel for everything you do online, shielding your website history and personal information from prying eyes. Since anything routed through this tunnel is encrypted, it’s impossible for your broadband provider, advertisers, or hackers to keep tabs on what you’re doing.

This unlocks a number of perks. For example, if your broadband supplier restricts your download speeds for certain types of traffic (online gaming, streaming video at peak time), then encrypting everything you're doing online will mean it's impossible for them to impose these limits on you. It also means advertisers won't be able to track your activity to target you with eerily-accurate ads.

It’s the reason that employers usually insist that you switch on a VPN when working remotely on a company laptop. But VPN providers, like NordVPN, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and others, offer that same enterprise-level protection to your personal devices and web browsing.

Without a VPN, security experts compare browsing online to sending a postcard – your message is easily visible as it passes through the system to get to the intended recipient.

But by switching on a VPN before you do anything, you’re adding a (metaphorical) envelope to that postcard, keeping everything shielded from view until it lands in the right hands. Both NordVPN and Surfshark rely on A-256 encryption for everything you do — keeping all of your data safe from prying eyes.

Where these brands do diverge is the protocols used, with NordVPN using its proprietary NordLynx, while Surfshark leans on WireGuard. For those who don't know, a VPN protocol is a set of rules that dictate how data is transmitted between your device and a VPN server. It determines how your internet data is encrypted and routed, impacting the speed, security, and stability of your connection.

But using a VPN isn’t just about privacy and protection.

Whenever your devices connect to the internet, it's assigned an IP address, which includes information like the name of your broadband supplier and a rough approximation of your location.

This is what enables websites to find the takeaways or stores nearest to your current location. If you're not using a VPN, any website can determine your current location — as demonstrated with this creepy demo at the very top of the NordVPN website.

Several streaming services use this location data to adjust the library of titles available to you (usually based on the licencing deals struck in each country) or block its service entirely.

VPNs allow you to manually change your IP address by routing your traffic via one of thousands of server locations scattered around the globe.

This can change the films, documentaries, and shows available to watch on your Netflix or Prime Video app. It can also unblock the likes of Hulu, Max (née HBO Max), Sky Go, ITVX, and BBC iPlayer when travelling.

For example, if you don't want to wait weeks to watch The Handmaid's Tale season 6 in the UK, you can stream new episodes when they're broadcast in the USA and Australia. You’ll just need to check the small-print of each streamer to make sure you’re not breaking the rules by spoofing your location to unlock more shows to watch.