Hide.me VPN review: An advanced VPN that falls short on performance

Hide.me is a VPN service that can protect your privacy and disguise your location by routing your internet connection through a secure remote server. Its strong encryption means that even your ISP can’t monitor what you’re doing online and, by choosing a server in a different country, you can gain access to websites and streaming services that aren’t normally accessible in your location.

One thing that’s immediately unusual about Hide.me is that you don’t need to pay to use it: you can sign up for a free account and enjoy secure browsing forever. However, free users get only five server locations to choose from – Canada, Germany and the Netherlands, plus two in the USA – and are limited to 10GB of data transfer per month. That’s plenty for posting messages anonymously or checking websites that are blocked in your location, but if you want to use the VPN for peer-to-peer downloading then it will get eaten up pretty quickly, and free users aren’t allowed to use video streaming services at all.

A paid Hide.me subscription lifts all of those restrictions. You can choose from the full set of 2,000 servers in 47 different countries, use as much data as you like, and connect up to ten different devices at once.

Hide.me offers apps for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus Android, iOS and Fire TV devices. There are extensions for the Chrome, Edge and Firefox browsers too, or you can configure your router to use the VPN connection for all your network traffic. Since Hide.me supports the L2TP and PPTP protocols, you can even set it up on many routers that don’t have native VPN support. These protocols aren’t entirely secure, but they should be fine for whole-home location spoofing.

Hide.me shows their prices in US dollars, with a monthly subscription to Hide.me advertised at $9.95, but this pricing is exclusive of VAT. Longer subscriptions are much better value: you can sign up for six months for $35 plus VAT, which in practice means you’ll pay around $7/mth. The best deal is a two-year subscription at $70, which, including three free months, works out to just $3.11 including VAT. That’s eminently affordable, although there certainly are even cheaper VPN services out there – for example, sign up for Atlas VPN’s three-year deal and you’ll pay just £1.49/mth.

Hide.me VPN review: What’s it like to use?

We tried out the Hide.me app for Windows and, to be honest, we found it a bit confusing. The window opens with a big button in the middle labelled “Enable VPN” – this connects you to the last location you used, which is shown above the button. Below, you can see your current location as it appears to external sites, while buttons along the bottom let you browse available server locations or jump to a list of streaming-optimised servers.

The location list is easy enough to navigate. It shows a long list of countries, some of which can be expanded to select individual towns, and a “10G” icon next to servers with a 10-gigabit connection, which should give you a speedy service. By default the list is alphabetical, but click the little arrows above the list and you can choose to order servers by ping time instead, so you can see precisely which ones are likely to be most responsive.

Meanwhile, the streaming list offers video-optimised servers in 18 countries – along with a feedback button that you can use to request new locations – and if you click on the Multihop tab you can define your own double-VPN route, from a choice of 68 entry points around the world and 104 exit points. While this will be overkill for most people, it gives you a lot more control than most VPNs when it comes to covering your tracks. Another idiosyncratic touch is that, while there’s no true static IP option, you can keep your external address consistent across sessions by reconnecting to a specific server.

In the bottom-right of the main app interface, you’ll see the final buttons: Messages just lets you keep up to date with announcements from the developers, but Settings opens an impressively extensive set of options. You can choose from five different VPN protocols – with fallback options in case of connection problems – and configure advanced settings for each one. You can also tell the software whether or not to automatically enable the VPN for multiple types of known and unknown networks, enable a kill switch and even create custom scripts that trigger automatically when the kill switch activates. Split tunnelling options are on hand too, to specify which apps should always or never use the secure connection.

The Android client looks similar and is laid out almost identically, with Location, Streaming and Settings buttons along the bottom of the screen. You get the same extensive auto-connect options – with an option for mobile data connections – plus kill switch and split-tunnelling options. The mix-and-match Multihop feature is available too.

In short, whether you’re using it on desktop or mobile, Hide.me is one of the most configurable VPNs around. Plus, if you need help, there’s 24/7 live chat support, as well as the option to open a request for assistance via a form on the website.

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Hide.me VPN review: How fast is it?

Hide.me may be loaded with features, but we haven’t found it to be a particularly fast VPN. We tested its performance using the Google Speed Test tool on a Windows 11 laptop, connected to a domestic Virgin fibre line.

Without the VPN connected, we recorded a download speed of 381Mbits/sec; however, once we connected to a Hide.me server in London, this plummeted to just 54.5Mbits/sec. That’s still enough bandwidth for most purposes, but it’s a considerable drop compared to other VPNs – ExpressVPN and NordVPN both topped 200Mbits/sec in the same configuration.

Switching to Hide.me’s New York server yielded an even lower download speed of 36Mbits/sec. That’s starting to get uncomfortably slow, and it can’t be blamed on the transatlantic link as we’ve seen much better performance from other VPNs, with the abovementioned rivals delivering 128Mbits/sec and 196Mbits/sec respectively.

We also tested the VPN on a Samsung Galaxy Tab S7, running Android 13. With the VPN disabled, we got a download speed of 374Mbits/sec, but connecting through a UK server once again gave us a mediocre speed, clocking in at 89Mbits/sec. Choosing a server in the US saw that fall further to a bare 80Mbits/sec.

It’s a pretty disappointing showing, but the good news is that, as we mentioned earlier, the Hide.me software supports split tunnelling on both desktop and mobile platforms. This means that only the apps that need to go via the VPN will be slowed down, while everything else can continue to use the full bandwidth of your ISP connection.

Hide.me VPN review: Is it good for video streaming?

It’s generally reckoned that a 25Mbits/sec connection is fast enough to stream 4K video in HDR. Based on our tests, we would say Hide.me is fast enough to handle that, but you might run into issues if you want to watch multiple streams simultaneously, or if you want to kick back with a movie while downloading torrents.

Still, the range of content on offer is pretty good. Connecting a Windows laptop to Hide.me’s US-based streaming server enabled us to access the American libraries of Netflix and Disney+ in a web browser, and we were even able to log into the US-only Hulu. Switching to the UK server allowed us to watch homegrown content without a hitch on BBC iPlayer, ITVX, Channel 4 and Now TV – great news for holidaymakers and expatriates.

Switching to the native streaming apps on our Android tablet yielded mostly the same results. Again, all of the US services opened and played without a hiccup, as did most British sites. The sole exception was Channel 4’s on-demand app, which refused to connect until we disabled the VPN.

All of this makes Hide.me a fair choice for unblocking streaming services; however, cinephiles might prefer a service with a bit more bandwidth to ensure you get perfectly smooth 4K performance.

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Hide.me VPN review: Is it secure?

Hide.me’s company headquarters is in Malaysia, far away from the British authorities and well outside the “Five Eyes” and other data-sharing alliances. That means that you can be pretty confident that no one in Europe or the US will get their hands on the company’s records.

Even if they do, the company promises that it doesn’t monitor your activity and doesn’t keep records of the sites you’ve been accessing. Hide.me has even been audited and certified by an independent security expert to confirm that no user data is stored – although that was back in 2015, so it’s not quite as impressive as NordVPN, which was audited by PwC in 2018 and again in 2020.

As we’ve mentioned, the Hide.me software itself also has plenty of features to safeguard your privacy. The multi-hop feature applies a double layer of obfuscation to your location, while the auto-connection options and kill-switch help ensure that you’ll never accidentally send sensitive information over an unencrypted link.

Hide.me VPN review: Should you buy it?

The subscription packages aren’t especially cheap, and it’s far from the fastest VPN around, yet Hide.me does have its strengths.

For occasional use, the free 10GB tier is an outstanding offer. It does a sterling job of opening up the most popular online video services. And Hide.me is without a doubt one of the most configurable VPNs we’ve seen: we love the way you can tweak its behaviour to suit your needs and preferences, and the fixed IP and IPv6 options mean it’s more likely than most to cope with tricky servers.

So while Hide.me isn’t ideal for speed demons, it has a place of its own in the VPN pantheon. For technical users, it may well be worth compromising on raw speed for a VPN service that puts you firmly in the driving seat.