Buffered

FAST, BUT THE LACK OF MOBILE CLIENTS IS A PROBLEM.

WITH THE NETFLIX logo brazenly slapped on its web page, Buffered sells itself on its capacity to overcome content geoblocks. And in our tests, we found that it really delivered. We didn’t even have to contact support; we just connected to the nearest US server and visited Netflix and everything went smoothly. Netflix came down in HD with only a modest amount of initial buffering.

Running the Speedtest.net benchmark indicated a speed of 18.3Mbps from that server, an impressive speed nearly rivalling that of ExpressVPN and NordVPN.

Other than its ready support for Netflix, Buffered is a relatively conventional VPN service. The Windows client is very simple — there’s not much to it other than a basic country selector. We do like that it gives you a live speed and data indicator, as well as a ping indicator for the different servers (though it would have been nice to see current load as well). Unfortunately, there are no mobile clients, which is a major issue. You can to configure mobile clients manually, meaning no easy server switching.

It’s an expensive service, but connecting to Netflix is a little easier than ExpressVPN, despite its speeds not being quite on par — or at least they weren’t when we tested it.