The 2 Best Free VPNs For Torrenting of 2026  

Hotspot Shield Free is the least-compromised free VPN for torrenting we've tested, but that comes with a heavy asterisk. It earns the top spot on practicality since it's the only free plan we've tested that allows P2P with no cap on how much you can download. It also posts the best speeds of any free VPN we've tested, so large torrents aren't a problem. The VPN effectively hides your IP address and DNS requests, and it doesn't require an account, so there's less personally identifiable information at risk of compromise if you use it.

Here's why we still can't recommend it without a serious disclaimer: this service has the worst privacy policies and business practices of any VPN we've ever tested. Its own terms allow it to collect and sell your usage, device, and location information, along with a complete history of the sites you visit. Point Wild, the parent company behind Hotspot Shield, isn't particularly forthcoming about its own level of ownership and hasn't directly acknowledged its extensive history of security incidents. The VPN also lacks port forwarding, which can increase the number of sources you download from and speed up transfers, especially on older or poorly seeded torrents. If your only goal is to hide torrent activity from your ISP, those trade-offs may seem manageable, since your traffic is still encrypted. However, you're ultimately trusting one of the least accountable providers in the VPN space with your most sensitive activity. Its kill switch is also unreliable and can leak unencrypted traffic if the app crashes or your device restarts. If you do plan to use it, we recommend binding the VPN to your torrent client for better security.

TunnelBear Free is the only other free VPN we've tested that allows P2P traffic, but we don't recommend it. It scores poorly across the board, and its 2GB monthly data cap isn't realistically high enough to handle torrenting in the first place. It also doesn't support port forwarding, which can severely hamper the download speeds and availability of certain torrents. It does have more built-in features than Hotspot Shield Free, such as obfuscation tools to disguise VPN traffic on networks that block it, a choice of WireGuard, OpenVPN, and IKEv2 protocols, AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption, servers in more than 20 countries, and unlimited simultaneous connections.

None of these features, however, offset the VPN's core problems: its kill switch leaks unencrypted traffic and can expose your IP address mid-download. There's also no anonymous signup, so you have to hand over an email address and password that could easily wind up exposed in a data breach. TunnelBear's privacy policies even allow the company to collect device hardware details and geolocation data, and no independent security audit has been published since 2023, so all of its no-logging claims are effectively baseless. None of the company's previous audits addresses whether it adheres to its own privacy policy. And since free users can't choose a server manually, TunnelBear Free might just connect you to a region where torrenting won't work at all.