Mullvad vs Private Internet Access (PIA): Which VPN wins?

It’s not always easy to tell the difference between one VPN and another, at least at first glance. When so many VPN services claim to offer strong encryption, fast connections, and a no-logs policy, choosing a VPN can be all the more challenging. Mullvad and Private Internet Access (PIA) are established providers with a few things in common. The question is, what separates them, and which is better?

This comprehensive VPN comparison gets into the nitty gritty of Mullvad and PIA. Whether you’re looking to find out about their server locations, connection speed, security features, or something else, chances are you’ll find it here. This guide is divided into key categories, many featuring tables with side-by-side comparisons of all things Mullvad and PIA. We’ll determine an overall winner to help make your decision easier.

Summary: Mullvad and PIA at a glance

Mullvad and PIA pricing

Mullvad differs from most VPN providers in that it offers a flat monthly rate of €5 (roughly $5.26 a month at the time of writing). This makes it one of the most affordable VPNs, particularly if you only want a short-term subscription. Indeed, PIA’s one-month subscription costs more than double at $11.95.

The key difference is that, provided you’re willing to commit for at least a year, you can save significantly with PIA. The one-year subscription costs $39.95, which equates to $3.33 a month. This is one of the best-value one-year VPN subscription plans available today. However, a three-year subscription includes three months free and costs $79—just $2.03 a month.

It comes down to whether you prefer the flexibility but higher monthly price of a short-term subscription versus paying upfront but significantly saving over time with a long-term subscription. Whether you opt for Mullvad or PIA, you can take advantage of a 30-day money-back guarantee, giving you plenty of time to try them risk-free.

Best Deal for Mullvad:Mullvad offers a flat monthly rate of just €5 ($5.15 at the time of writing).

Best Deal for Private Internet Access:Save 83 percent and get three months extra free for just $2.03 a month when you choose PIA’s three year subscription plan.

Mullvad and PIA features

Both Mullvad and Private Internet Access make desktop and mobile apps. You’ll find them for Windows, Mac, Android, and iOS. The two VPNs also make a GUI app for Linux. Only PIA makes an app for Amazon Fire TV.

If you don’t mind going through manual setup, you can configure either VPN with your Wi-Fi router. PIA supports OpenVPN on DD-WRT, LEDE, AsusWRT, and pfSense routers. Mullvad also supports DD-WRT and pfSense, as well as Tomato, Asus Merlin, and OpenWRT. Using a router VPN ensures that all devices connecting to that Wi-Fi network are secured by the VPN.

Mullvad lets you connect up to five devices simultaneously with a single account. This isn’t quite as many as most rivals, but it should still be enough for most individual users. PIA is more family-friendly, with an unlimited simultaneous connection limit, making it ideal for sharing with family and friends at home. Still, you can always set up Mullvad with your router to bypass the connection limit because only the router would count against it.

As for the features included with your subscription, both Mullvad and PIA have many extras, albeit not quite as many as leading VPNs like NordVPN and Surfshark. You’ll find a DNS-based ad and tracker blocker. Both work well but aren’t quite as effective as the best ad blockers on the market, which tend to be standalone products.

Although Mullvad has a Firefox extension, it doesn’t encrypt your traffic. Instead, it’s a SOCKS5 proxy that protects against leaks. PIA does offer encryption for your browser with its extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. Mullvad and PIA offer Double VPN (or MultiHop) servers that encrypt your data twice for extra protection from threats.

The two VPNs offer split-tunneling via their desktop apps (Mullvad also offers it on Android). This feature allows you to choose which apps use the VPN connection and which can bypass it. PIA has port forwarding, so remote devices can bypass your NAT firewall.

Streaming capabilities

A VPN is more than just a privacy tool. Indeed, many people use VPNs to bypass geographic restrictions on content. For example, you travel abroad on vacation but want to access your usual streaming platforms from home. You may find that they’re unavailable in your location, preventing you from streaming videos you’re already paying for.

Connecting to a server in your home country can spoof your location and bypass geo-blocking. Mullvad and PIA are capable of this, but there are better options when it comes to the most popular streaming platforms. Streaming services often employ stricter measures to prevent VPN use, such as blacklisting known VPN IP addresses.

In testing, Mullvad struggled with most of the streaming services we tried it with. The good news, however, is that it worked with the US version of Netflix as well as both BBC iPlayer and ITVX. PIA had more success, successfully accessing Disney+ and HBO Max. Like Mullvad, it failed to unblock Amazon Prime Video, DAZN, and Hulu.

As for streaming, PIA proved more than capable, averaging 150 Mbps in testing. This is fast enough for streaming in 4K resolution without having to contend with performance issues such as lag and buffering. However, Mullvad proved even faster and ranks among the fastest VPNs we’ve tested, with an average global download speed of 209 Mbps.

Evading VPN censorship (China)

You can use a VPN in almost every country without issue. One exception is China, which has blocked the websites and servers of many VPN providers and uses deep packet inspection to detect and block VPN traffic.

Only government-approved VPNs are likely to work consistently in China, and this requires the VPN provider to give the Chinese government backdoor access. Of course, no genuinely privacy-respecting VPN will agree to this, and that’s why so many reputable providers have pulled their servers out of China in recent years.

It’s no surprise that the websites of Mullvad and PIA are blocked in China. We found that PIA falls a little short when it comes to circumventing censorship and doesn’t work reliably in China. Mullvad on the other hand, has been reported to work in China but is somewhat inconsistent. Its Bridge mode uses a Shadowsocks proxy, adding an extra layer of encryption to your traffic.

If you want a more reliable VPN for China, you’re best off with one of NordVPN, Surfshark, or ExpressVPN, all known for their impressive ability to bypass censorship.

Setup and interface

Getting set up with Mullvad and Private Internet Access couldn’t be simpler. Simply visit the official website of either provider, select your preferred subscription option, and download the VPN app on the device or devices you’d like to secure. The automatic setup wizard guides you through the installation process.

Mullvad offers simple, user-friendly apps with a dropdown list of server locations and the option to select specific servers. You can access the settings page with a single click, and from there, the various settings can be toggled or selected from dropdown lists. The home view of the apps clearly displays how long you have left on your subscription and clicking on the profile icon brings up your account number and the option to buy more credit.

PIA’s apps couldn’t be more different from those of Mullvad. The home view features a large quick-connect button, and you can easily see the location to which you’re connected, your VPN IP address, and your actual IP address. It’s possible to expand this view and select the data and settings most pertinent to you, be it your data usage, your VPN protocol, or even a VPN snooze feature. All of this can be dragged and dropped into your preferred order.

It takes a couple of clicks to access PIA’s settings, but once you’re there, there’s a lot to play with, including VPN protocols and features such as a kill switch, split tunneling, and MultiHop. Overall, Mullvad’s apps are easier to use and more beginner-friendly. However, power users will appreciate the high level of customization offered by PIA’s apps.

Servers and performance

The larger a VPN server network, the more options you have when it comes to server locations and the number of servers you can connect to. Just because one VPN offers more servers than another doesn’t automatically make it a better option, however. This is all relative to the number of users that a VPN serves. The key is that, whatever the number of servers, the server load is low, so you don’t have to suffer slow speeds or frequent disconnections.

Of these two VPNs, PIA offers a more extensive server network. Although we don’t know just how many servers PIA provides, this is believed to be in the thousands. This wouldn’t be surprising considering that its network covers 91 countries, more than most VPNs, Mullvad included. In fact, Mullvad has a relatively small number of servers, just over 600, that cover 48 countries.

Which VPN you choose depends on the locations you want to connect to. Both VPNs offer servers in the most sought-after locations, including the US, Canada, UK, and Australia. However, if you’re looking for a server in a country such as Costa Rica, Egypt, or New Zealand, only PIA ticks that box. Having said that, Mullvad is the only one of the two with servers in Thailand.

Country list

Here’s the full list of countries in which Mullvad and Private Internet Access offer servers:

Security

Mullvad and PIA offer a high level of security through 256-bit AES encryption, which ensures your internet traffic is essentially uncrackable. The 4096-bit keys are twice as long as the 2048-bit ones used by some VPNs, making them even harder to break.

With both VPNs, you’ll have the choice of connecting via the WireGuard or OpenVPN protocols. WireGuard is a newer VPN protocol known for being lightweight (its codebase consists of approximately 4,000 lines of code). The fast performance makes it highly suitable for bandwidth-heavy tasks like streaming, torrenting, or online gaming. OpenVPN has been around for a lot longer, so is tried and tested and has the benefit of obfuscation capabilities.

Only Mullvad offers cloaking. That is, the ability to disguise your use of a VPN. Mullvad’s Bridge Mode uses Shadowsocks proxies, making your VPN traffic appear like regular web traffic. As such, Mullvad is the safer bet if you’re in a country with high internet censorship, where you may face legal consequences for what you say or do online.

Importantly, Mullvad and PIA each offer a kill switch feature. Should the VPN connection drop, your internet traffic and real IP address could be exposed. A kill switch prevents this by cutting your traffic and ensuring no data leakage. This is available on the desktop and mobile apps. You can’t disable Mullvad’s kill switch.

Privacy

The best VPNs respect your privacy through no-logs policies. This means they don’t keep any logs by which you can be identified as a user, such as your IP address or browsing activities. Some VPNs keep connection logs such as timestamps, but that’s not the case with Mullvad or PIA. That puts Mullvad and PIA among the most private VPNs you can use.

PIA is headquartered in the US, which is a Five Eyes member. Should the US government obtain data from PIA, they could then share it with other member countries. Having said that, Sweden is part of the 14 Eyes alliance. The fact that neither VPN logs identifying user data to share should ease any concerns.

Overall, it’s Mullvad that comes out on top in terms of privacy. That’s because instead of asking you to provide an email address, it generates a random account number and that’s all you need to remember to access your account. Furthermore, Mullvad gives you the option to pay in cash and, as such, it’s possible to sign up with Mullvad completely anonymously.

PIA doesn’t provide a truly anonymous payment option. Like Mullvad, it gives you the choice of cryptocurrency. The difference is that BitPay processes payments and this doesn’t provide anonymity, nor do the cryptocurrencies accepted (Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin). In contrast, Mullvad lets you use a one-time payment address to credit your account and pay for your subscription. What’s more, it accepts Monero, which is one of the most private cryptocurrencies available.

Configuration

Like most VPNs, Mullvad and PIA use shared address allocation. When you connect to a server, you’ll share the same IP address as other users on that server. As such, all of your online activities are mixed up with other users, making it very difficult for someone to link you with a particular action.

There are times when having a dedicated IP address has its benefits however. When you’re the only owner of an IP address, it’s likely to have a better reputation than a shared IP address. You shouldn’t come across as many CAPTCHAs as a result. Furthermore, there’s reduced risk of websites and services blacklisting you.

Only PIA offers dedicated IPs as an optional paid add-on to your VPN subscription. A single month costs $5 but the price drops the longer you commit (just £2.50/month for three years). Some 26 locations are available across 10 countries: US, Canada, UK, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, and Singapore.

Customer service

Of these two VPNs, only PIA offers live chat support. This provides a level of convenience in that you can very quickly get an answer to your question. What’s more, it’s available 24 hours a day. This is common with major VPN providers so it’s a shame that Mullvad hasn’t followed suit.

Both Mullvad and PIA offer email support. With this, you can generally expect an answer to queries on the same day. I often found it took around 8 hours to get a reply in both cases. If you’re not in a hurry, that’s probably fine. However, it’s nowhere near as fast as ExpressVPN which, on the occasions when I got in touch, often took less than an hour.

The replies I received from Mullvad were generally good, if a little short and occasionally lacking in detail. Those from PIA were excellent and went into more depth regarding specific features or settings I’d enquired about. Neither VPN offers phone support but this isn’t unusual. In fact, IPVanish is one of the only VPNs that offers this.

You may prefer to search for an answer yourself, in which case both VPNs have handy help sections on their websites for you to peruse. These include FAQs as well as setup guides with step-by-step instructions and screenshots. Unfortunately, I was unable to view PIA’s guides via desktop where they failed to load on several different browsers. They did load fine on mobile, though.

Mullvad vs PIA: Who wins?

If you’re looking for privacy above all else, Mullvad is an excellent choice thanks to anonymous signup and payment and a comprehensive no-logs policy. Also impressive is its very fast server speeds, beginner-friendly apps, and low single month subscription price. However, there’s a few reasons why Private Internet Access ultimately comes out the winner.

PIA works out to be far more affordable if you don’t mind committing for a year or more. It also happens to have a much larger server network, an unlimited simultaneous connection limit, and superior unblocking of popular streaming platforms. PIA is just a stronger all-rounder. Its balance of performance and privacy make it one of the best VPNs we’ve reviewed.