IVPN vs Mullvad 2026: Two Very Similar Choices
Both are anonymous-signup, flat-pricing, no-affiliate-program VPNs with heavy audit histories. The real differences are network size, speed, and who owns each company.
Published July 22, 2026· By Juan Martinez
IVPN and Mullvad are the two most philosophically similar VPNs this site has reviewed. Both charge one flat price forever with no renewal-price jump. Both let you sign up with no email at all. Both have zero affiliate program — IVPN closed its program in 2016 after finding most affiliates weren’t disclosing paid rankings, Mullvad has never had one. Both have genuinely heavy, multi-year independent audit histories. If you’re choosing between these two specifically, the usual VPN-comparison questions (price games, anonymity, trust) mostly don’t apply — what’s actually left is network size, speed, and a few structural differences worth knowing.
| IVPN | Mullvad | |
|---|---|---|
| Rating | 8.1 | 8.4 |
| Renewal price (flat, both) | $5.00/mo | $5.72/mo |
| Devices | 5 (Standard/Plus), 10 (Pro Suite) | 5 |
| Protocols | WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 | WireGuard, OpenVPN |
| Jurisdiction | Gibraltar | Sweden |
| Est. | 2009 | 2009 |
Network and speed: Mullvad is meaningfully bigger and faster
Mullvad runs 582 servers across 50 countries against IVPN’s roughly 77 servers in 40–41 countries — a real gap in raw footprint. Speed is harder to compare directly: the two reviews cite different testers using different methodologies that don’t reduce cleanly to a single head-to-head number. Mullvad averaged 2,140 Mbps in one 2026 WireGuard benchmark. IVPN’s cited test rated it 85% (“Very Good”) overall, but flagged real slowdown and added latency on long-distance routes specifically (19.71 Mbps, 380ms ping on distant servers versus 31 Mbps nearby). Read together, Mullvad looks like the faster of the two on raw throughput, but IVPN’s own long-distance-route weak spot is a narrower issue than “IVPN is slow” — it passed the same test with a solidly positive overall grade.
Ownership and audit cadence: different kinds of trust signal
IVPN is independently owned by its founder with no outside investors — a specific, unusual claim in a market where most VPNs eventually get acquired. Its audit history is a clean, unbroken annual Cure53 engagement every year since 2019, with the scope rotating across different parts of the service each time. Mullvad has run more total audits (11 since 2018, across three different firms — Cure53, Assured, X41 D-Sec) but without the same single-auditor-every-year cadence. Both publish their reports in full. Neither trust signal is objectively stronger than the other; they’re different shapes of the same thing.
Multi-hop: included on IVPN’s base tier
IVPN bundles Multi-hop routing (sending traffic through two VPN servers instead of one) starting on its entry-level Standard plan. This site’s Mullvad review doesn’t document an equivalent multi-hop feature for Mullvad at all — worth confirming directly if double-hop routing specifically is something you’re choosing a provider for.
What we didn’t compare, and why
Jurisdiction differs in kind, not clearly in either provider’s favor. Mullvad is Swedish, a confirmed (if the loosest-tier) member of the Fourteen Eyes alliance. IVPN is based in Gibraltar, where the company’s own legal argument is that UK surveillance law doesn’t extend to the territory — a position independent commentary is genuinely split on. One is a settled classification in a broad alliance; the other is a disputed classification outside any alliance. Neither is simply “better.”
Split tunneling platform coverage tilts toward Mullvad (Windows, Linux, Android, and macOS 13+) over IVPN (Windows, Linux, and Android, no macOS) — a real gap if you’re on a Mac specifically.
Port forwarding isn’t a differentiator: both removed it in 2023, for similar abuse-related reasons.
Bottom line
Read the full IVPN review if Multi-hop on the base plan and single-founder ownership matter to you, and a smaller server network is an acceptable tradeoff. Read the full Mullvad review if network size and raw speed matter more than which specific company structure sits behind the audits.