NordVPN outscores Mullvad in our comparison, 4.6/5 against 4.2/5. If you stopped reading there, you’d miss the point of both products.
Mullvad is the VPN for people who don’t want to be known, including by their VPN. NordVPN is the VPN for people who want everything to work. The overlap between those two goals is smaller than the marketing of either company admits.
What Mullvad actually is
Mullvad’s signature move happens before you connect: signing up generates a random numbered account. No email, no name, no profile. Pay with cash in an envelope if you like; Mullvad accepts it. The company cannot identify its customers because it never collected the information in the first place.
The rest of the product follows the same philosophy. Flat €5/month pricing with no discounts and no lock-in, because teaser rates are manipulation. Open-source apps. A Cure53-audited no-logs policy. A long history of saying no, including to data requests it has no data to answer.
The trade-offs are equally deliberate. Streaming scores 2/5 in our data: Netflix, Disney+ and BBC iPlayer simply don’t work. Five simultaneous devices, the lowest cap in our top tier. Sweden is an EU member and a Fourteen Eyes country, which dents the jurisdiction score, though Mullvad’s architecture is built so there’s nothing to hand over regardless.
What NordVPN actually is
NordVPN is the most complete consumer VPN we track, and its 4.6/5 reflects breadth: 5/5 on speed, 5/5 on streaming (Excellent on Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Prime, HBO Max and Peacock), audited no-logs via PwC and Deloitte, RAM-only servers, Panama jurisdiction outside every intelligence alliance, and extras Mullvad would never ship, like SmartPlay and a built-in threat blocker.
It is also a company that knows who you are: account email, payment record, the normal commercial relationship. Audits confirm it doesn’t log what you do through the tunnel, and its Panama base keeps it outside mandatory retention regimes. But anonymity from your provider, Mullvad’s core feature, is not on the menu.
Price-wise, the 1-year plan at $4.99/mo undercuts Mullvad’s flat rate, and a 30-day trial plus 60-day money-back guarantee make testing free. Our full NordVPN review covers the details.
Privacy: the interesting comparison
Here’s where lazy comparisons go wrong. “Mullvad is more private” is true in one specific sense and misleading in others.
Account anonymity: Mullvad, runaway winner. NordVPN can connect an account to a person; Mullvad structurally cannot.
Logging: a draw. Both have credible, audited no-logs policies. Neither has a logging scandal in its history.
Jurisdiction: NordVPN, surprisingly. Panama has no data retention laws and no intelligence-sharing membership. Sweden is in the EU and the Fourteen Eyes, and as we covered in our piece on the EU’s data retention push, EU-based providers face a legislative storm that Panama-based ones don’t. Mullvad’s defense is architectural rather than legal: collect nothing, retain nothing, so a retention order has nothing to attach to. Read our jurisdiction guide for how much each layer matters.
Verdict on privacy: if your threat model is “I don’t want my VPN provider to know me,” Mullvad. If it’s “I want audited no-logging in a strong jurisdiction with a polished product,” NordVPN is not the compromise it’s painted as.
Signing up: the two-minute illustration of everything
Walk through both checkouts and the philosophical gap turns physical. NordVPN’s signup is ordinary e-commerce: email, payment, discount banner, welcome sequence. Two minutes, and the company now holds a normal customer record about you, as Amazon would.
Mullvad’s signup is a button that says “Generate account.” Click it and you receive a 16-digit number. That number is your entire identity: no email field exists, no name field exists, nothing to typo your humanity into. Top it up with a card if convenience wins, with crypto if it doesn’t, or by mailing physical cash to Sweden with the account number on a slip of paper, a payment method Mullvad processes routinely.
Lose the number and nobody can recover your account, because nobody knows it’s yours. That sentence is the product. Whether it reads as beautiful or as friction tells you which provider you should buy.
What 5/5 speed means on each
Both score 5/5 in our table, but the texture differs. NordVPN’s NordLynx rides a custom WireGuard implementation across 6,000+ servers, so besides raw throughput you get consistency: wherever you travel, a nearby fast server exists, and congestion is rare because the fleet is vast. Mullvad runs stock WireGuard brilliantly on a few hundred well-provisioned servers, with publicly listed per-server details down to hosting providers; throughput matches NordVPN on a good route, and the transparency about exactly which machine you’re using is very Mullvad.
The practical difference appears at the edges: in less-served regions, NordVPN more often has a local server, while Mullvad asks you to backhaul to its nearest hub. For European and North American users, both are simply fast.
Everything else: NordVPN, comfortably
Speed is 5/5 for both, with NordLynx and Mullvad’s WireGuard both excellent. Beyond that, the gaps are wide. Streaming: 5/5 against 2/5. Devices: 10 against 5. Server fleet: 6,000+ in over 100 countries against a few hundred in around 50. Support: 24/7 live chat against email. Extras: NordVPN ships obfuscation, dedicated IPs, Meshnet and Tor over VPN; Mullvad deliberately keeps the product minimal.
None of this is Mullvad failing. It’s Mullvad not competing. The product does one thing, anonymous tunneling, and treats everything else as scope creep.
Want to compare all VPNs side by side? Check our full VPN comparison table with scores across 18 criteria.
Where each one annoys you, eventually
Long-term ownership reveals different frictions. NordVPN’s are commercial: renewal prices jump after the introductory term (our NordVPN pricing guide maps the cycle), upsell emails arrive for NordPass and NordLocker, and the apps occasionally promote bundles at you. Nothing scandalous, just the texture of a company that markets.
Mullvad’s frictions are ideological: no discounts ever means no deal-hunting, the five-device cap pinches modern households, streaming stays broken on principle, and when the company decides a feature conflicts with privacy (port forwarding, removed in 2023), it removes the feature and writes a blog post rather than a survey. You are not Mullvad’s focus group; the threat model is.
Pick the friction you can live with. People who hate being marketed to drift toward Mullvad and stay; people who hate things not working drift toward NordVPN and stay. Both companies, to their credit, are exactly what they look like.
How to choose
Choose Mullvad if the sentence “my VPN provider doesn’t know who I am” is worth €5/month and the loss of streaming to you. Journalists, researchers, people in sensitive situations, and privacy purists: this is your product, and our Mullvad review goes deeper.
Choose NordVPN for everything else: streaming, households, travel, gaming, and a privacy posture that is genuinely strong even if it isn’t anonymous. For most readers, that’s the honest recommendation.
NordVPN wins this comparison for most people, 4.6/5 to 4.2/5, because most people want their VPN to disappear into a life full of streaming and devices. Mullvad wins for a minority that knows exactly who it is: users whose threat model starts with "assume my provider gets compromised or compelled." Decide which sentence describes you, and the choice makes itself.