Whether you’re connecting to a UK service from abroad or you’re looking to protect your traffic while visiting, these are our top tested VPNs for the United Kingdom.
When you switch on a VPN, it routes your traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a server controlled by the VPN provider. This can protect your privacy, bypass censorship, and grant access to region-locked streaming content. Anyone looking for the protection of a VPN in the United Kingdom is spoiled for choice, as all the biggest players maintain a large presence there. These are our favorites. Unlocking Content With a VPN We know from our own surveys that most of our readers use VPNs to access region-locked streaming content. An example might be tunneling into a different country to access Netflix movies and shows that aren’t available with a US subscription. This likely breaks the terms of service for some streaming platforms, so be aware. The UK is a particularly interesting target for streaming unlockers because of the BBC iPlayer. Thanks to the advent of streaming video services, watching BBC shows outside of the UK is easier than ever, but the ability to use iPlayer is still a much sought-after feature. With access to the iPlayer, you can watch just about any BBC program, for free. Note that not all VPN streamers who might benefit from reading this story are from outside the UK. If you live in London and are traveling abroad (in non-COVID times, obviously) you might find you’re unable to watch your favorite Netflix or BBC shows. With a VPN you can pick up where you left off—in theory, at least. What’s the Best VPN for the United Kingdom? For streaming video, having more servers is usually better. If you find that one server doesn’t work, jumping to another may do the trick. In this roundup we took our top-rated VPNs and then ranked them by their apparent presence in the UK—the number of servers, where available, and by score when server counts were not available.
