Is Windscribe safe? What it stores, who checked, who came

Who runs it, where it sits and what it costs

Security.org describes Windscribe as a Canadian VPN and privacy company founded in 2016 that has stayed self-funded and founder-owned, without outside investors. It adds that the company is headquartered in Toronto, which belongs to the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. ProPrivacy, whose review we could not date from its text, calls Canada a less than perfect place for a VPN to be based. Windscribe’s own page answers that Canadian law does not require VPN providers to store user data, and that Five Eyes lets agencies share data but does not oblige VPN companies to collect it. Security.org’s FAQ gives the same reading of Canadian law and says Windscribe does not store identifying logs.

On plans, Security.org (updated 27 July 2026) lists a free plan with 10 GB a month in 10 countries and unlimited device connections, a Pro plan from $5.75 a month (listed as yearly) in 69 or more countries, and a Build a plan option from $3 a month with $1 per location. It says the free allowance needs a confirmed email, and that the seven-day refund comes with strict requirements. On torrenting, Security.org says it works on Pro and not on the free plan, and Rtings added a note on 4 August 2026 that Windscribe Free no longer supports it. Rtings also gives the terms of service a score of 7.0, because some statements let Windscribe define misuse and ban accounts at its own discretion.

What Windscribe says it stores

Windscribe’s “No identifying logs” page is specific, and everything in this first paragraph is its description of itself. It splits the data in two. Under “Never Stored” it lists browsing history and DNS queries, the real IP address, the VPN IP address assigned to you, connection timestamps, session duration or per-session bandwidth, and any content of your encrypted traffic. Under “Operational Minimums” it lists the date, not the time, you last used Windscribe, the total bandwidth used in the last 30 days and the app versions you have activated. Windscribe says these three exist to enforce free plan limits and to troubleshoot app issues, and that they cannot identify who you are or what you did.

Two outside reviews describe the same area differently. ProPrivacy reports that the policy it read deleted connection logs three minutes after a connection ended, which implies they existed for those minutes; Windscribe’s current page says connection timestamps are never stored. vpnMentor says the server’s memory holds your OpenVPN or IKEv2 username, the time of connection and the amount of data transferred while you are connected, and that the privacy policy says all of it is deleted when you disconnect. We cannot tell from the pages whether these are the same practice described at different times, and ProPrivacy’s review has no date we could read.

Signing up, and what a court order could reach

Windscribe’s “Can Windscribe be trusted?” page, dated 5 November 2025, says you do not even need an email address to sign up. Rtings says you can register with a randomly generated account number, and its 15 April 2026 note adds that Windscribe now supports hashed accounts. Security.org adds a condition: the free plan’s 10 GB needs a confirmed email.

On orders, Tom’s Guide reports a Reddit ask-me-anything session on 11 December 2025 with Windscribe CEO and co-founder Yegor Sak. According to that report, Sak said Windscribe “cannot be forced to log anyone” and that a court order from local law enforcement could ask for everything on an account, which Sak described as what you see in the “My Account” section of the website. Sak also said most requests concern an IP address and a timestamp, where nothing can be provided, and that Windscribe would leave Canada if the law there required logs. These are statements by the company’s CEO, reported by a reviewer; we did not verify them.

What the audits covered, and where the pages disagree

Windscribe’s audit page, dated 17 October 2025, lists three things. Packetlabs audited the server stack it calls FreshScribe in June 2024. Leviathan Security Group audited the desktop app in September 2021 and the Android and iOS apps in March 2022, and Windscribe says the issues raised were addressed and fixed. Its no-logs page says the Packetlabs work covered 20 repositories with external and internal penetration testing and found no intentional subversions of the no-logs policy. Windscribe’s August 2024 newsletter quotes the 26-page report, on page 17, as saying the test yielded “minimal security concerns” and that findings that posed risk were “promptly remediated”. The same newsletter calls the work penetration testing.

Reviewers read this differently. Security.org (27 July 2026) says there is no dedicated third-party audit of the no-logs policy, though the apps are open source and a broader penetration test was passed. CyberInsider (25 December 2025) says that a formal third-party no-logs audit hasn’t been conducted, although the apps and software stack had audits. Rtings (updated 15 April 2026) says Windscribe has published independent audits evaluating adherence to its policy. vpnMentor (updated 15 June 2025), a site owned by Kape Technologies, says the 2024 audit analyzed the complete server stack and the privacy policies, and that the apps were audited by Cure53 in 2022. The Windscribe pages we read name Leviathan for the apps and do not mention Cure53, and we did not read a Cure53 report, so we leave that one as vpnMentor’s statement.

One page that has not caught up

Windscribe’s “Can Windscribe be trusted?” page is dated 5 November 2025 and still says a third party audit is “planned for 2024”. Its audit page, dated about three weeks earlier, lists the June 2024 Packetlabs audit as done. The two pages are both Windscribe’s, and they disagree on timing. The newsletter, the audit page and the no-logs page all describe the Packetlabs work. The reviewers split on whether any audit covered the no-logs claim itself: Security.org and CyberInsider say none did, while Rtings says published audits evaluated adherence to the policy.

Three times authorities came, in date order

Ukraine, July 2021. TechRadar reported on 28 July 2021 that, after the seizure of a couple of Windscribe servers in Ukraine the month before, the company said the servers were not encrypted. It quotes founder Yegor Sak as saying the servers in question were running a legacy stack. TechRadar adds that the unencrypted server held an OpenVPN server certificate with its private key, and that Sak admitted anyone with the private keys could have impersonated the servers to capture and decrypt traffic. Windscribe said it had “no reason to believe” the servers were compromised before the seizure. TechRadar also reports that Sak revealed the OpenVPN configuration used the compress parameter, which by Sak’s own admission was deprecated in 2018 after security researchers showed it could be exploited to decrypt data. vpnMentor says the Ukrainian authorities could not recover information because Windscribe does not store session logs. Windscribe’s current page presents the episode as the start of Operation FreshScribe, an overhaul to RAM-only servers.

Greece, April 2025. TechRadar reported on 30 April 2025 that Sak, co-founder and CEO, was charged over an alleged offence by an unknown user in June 2023, and that an Athens court dismissed the case on 11 April 2025 for lack of evidence of wrongdoing. According to TechRadar, an anonymous user allegedly used a Windscribe-owned server in Finland to breach a Greek website. TechRadar reports Sak as saying Greek authorities issued no subpoena to the VPN company and instead charged the account holder of the Finland data center. Sak is quoted as saying that because Windscribe does not log user activity, it “cannot hand over what we do not have”. The accounts of the reason differ slightly: TechRadar says lack of evidence, Tom’s Guide says Sak was cleared of any wrongdoing, and CyberInsider and Windscribe say the data did not exist.

The Netherlands, February 2026. TechRadar reported on 6 February 2026 that Windscribe posted on X that Dutch authorities seized one of its servers “without a warrant” and said the authorities told it they would give the server back after they “fully analyze it”. The report is Windscribe’s account. The company said it uses RAM disk servers, so what the authorities will find is “a stock Ubuntu install”. TechRadar says it was unclear why the raid happened. It also quotes John Scott-Railton, a senior security researcher at Citizen Lab, who wrote that hotplugs that let authorities seize a server without cutting power are commonplace, and who argued that commodity VPNs are not the right tools for people who need strong privacy. The pages we read do not say what the analysis of the Dutch server found.

What the labs measured

Security.org says it used the free and Pro tiers for four weeks on an iPad, a Pixel 9, a ThinkPad and a MacBook Pro. For leaks it ran IP address, DNS and WebRTC checks on four servers in the United States, Japan and the Netherlands, connecting twice a day for four days with WireGuard and OpenVPN, which makes 32 tests, plus eight on free servers, and reports that Windscribe did not leak. vpnMentor reports no leaks on more than 10 servers. CyberInsider and ProPrivacy also report none in their tests, and ProPrivacy says it could not test for IPv6 leaks because its provider does not offer IPv6.

Security.org lists five protocols: WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 and two of Windscribe’s own, Stealth and WStunnel. It says WireGuard uses ChaCha20, OpenVPN and IKEv2 use AES-256, and that post-quantum encryption is offered on WireGuard. It describes Windscribe’s Firewall as blocking all traffic outside the VPN tunnel by default and tested it with a continuous ping while ending the VPN process in the task manager, where the ping dropped instead of falling back to the real IP. Our page on the kill switch shows how to run that kind of test yourself.

On speed, Security.org used WireGuard on a Pro account against a baseline of 94.6 Mbps: 91.8 Mbps to a nearby United States server, 85.3 Mbps to Europe and 68.4 Mbps to Singapore, with latency of 16, 52 and 187 ms. On the free plan it saw speeds periodically drop by up to 90 percent, roughly twice every three hours.

Who it suits, and what is left open

Security.org says Windscribe makes the most sense for someone who wants to try a VPN’s full feature set before committing, or likes fine-tuning a setup. It says a person who needs an independently audited no-logs policy, or faraway servers, will likely be better served elsewhere, and names NordVPN and Proton VPN as having independently verified no-logs policies, with NordVPN based in Panama and Proton in Switzerland. Security.org also notes that Proton VPN’s free plan, which it says it tends to prefer, offers unlimited data but caps you to one device, against Windscribe’s 10 GB and unlimited devices, and that all of NordVPN’s plans are paid with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Those two have their own pages here, on NordVPN and Proton VPN, and there are pages on Mullvad VPN and on free VPNs as a group.

The pages we read do not say what the Dutch analysis found, and they do not say whether any audit examined live servers to confirm that logs do not exist. We did not run any test on a VPN.