CyberGhost

Best for: people who want a clean non-Eyes-alliance jurisdiction backed by infrastructure the provider actually owns outright, at one of the lowest long-term prices reviewed — not for anyone who needs port forwarding or a dedicated censorship-circumvention protocol.

Pros

• Incorporated in Romania, outside every Five/Nine/Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing tier, with no mandatory data-retention law forcing the issue
• NoSpy servers are physically owned and run by CyberGhost itself in its own Romanian data center — no third-party hosting company has physical access, a genuine step beyond simply renting rack space
• Three Deloitte Romania audits since 2022 on a roughly annual cadence, most recently adding the dedicated-IP token system to scope
• RAM-only server architecture backed up by a real quarterly transparency report: 56,053 DMCA complaints and 2 police requests in Q4 2025 alone, zero data produced in any case
• Genuinely cheap long-term pricing ($2.19/mo intro, confirmed ~$4.75/mo-equivalent renewal — same $56.94 charged, shorter 12-month cycle) with an unusually long 45-day money-back guarantee on 6-month-plus plans
• Consistently well-reviewed apps (4.4/4.3 app store ratings) and fast 24/7 live chat
• Netflix and other major streaming libraries unblocked reliably in independent 2026 testing via dedicated streaming-optimized servers

Cons

• Owned by Kape Technologies since March 2017 — CyberGhost was Kape’s first VPN acquisition, made while the company still operated under its earlier Crossrider name (an adware-adjacent advertising-technology business) before the 2018 rebrand; the same ownership disclosure applies to two other VPNs reviewed on this site
• No port forwarding at all, by explicit policy — a real limitation for torrent seed efficiency, even though P2P/torrenting itself is allowed on optimized servers
• No dedicated obfuscation or stealth protocol for heavily censored networks — WireGuard, OpenVPN, and IKEv2 only
• Independent 2026 speed tests are genuinely inconsistent across testers, from solidly mid-pack to noticeably behind other reviewed providers depending on route and methodology
• The commonly cited ~$4.75/mo renewal price comes from third-party aggregators, not confirmed directly on CyberGhost’s own current pricing page in this review’s research
• Streaming results, while strong on major libraries, are less consistent on some smaller regional Netflix catalogs

No-Logs Audit & Trust

CyberGhost has commissioned three independent audits from Deloitte Audit Romania since 2022 — September 2022, January 2024, and a third completed sometime in 2025 — all under the ISAE 3000 (Revised) standard, each confirming server configurations align with the stated no-logs policy and finding no evidence of activity logging. The most recent engagement extended scope to CyberGhost’s dedicated-IP token system. Beyond the audits, CyberGhost operates RAM-only servers and, distinctively, owns and runs its “NoSpy” server cluster itself in a Romanian data center with no third-party physical access — most VPN providers rent server capacity from third-party data centers, so full self-ownership is a real (if partial, since it doesn’t cover the entire fleet) step further. A quarterly transparency report backs this with concrete numbers: in Q4 2025 alone, CyberGhost logged 56,053 DMCA complaints and 2 police requests, producing zero user data in response to any of them.

Pricing

The monthly plan costs $12.99 with no discount and a shorter 14-day money-back window. The 6-month plan runs $6.99/month, auto-renewing at $41.94 every 6 months. The longest 26-month plan (24 months plus 2 bonus months) costs $2.19/month, $56.94 total for the first term — CyberGhost’s own checkout page confirms this renews at the identical $56.94 annually afterward, among the cheaper steady-state rates reviewed on this site. The effective monthly rate still rises to about $4.75/month at renewal purely because the billing cycle shortens from 26 months to 12, not because CyberGhost charges more per renewal transaction. Plans of 6 months or longer carry an unusually generous 45-day money-back guarantee.

Security & Protocols

CyberGhost supports WireGuard, OpenVPN, and IKEv2, with a standard kill switch and split tunneling included. RAM-only servers and the self-owned NoSpy infrastructure (see above) are the standout security-adjacent features here rather than any specific protocol trick. There’s no dedicated obfuscation or stealth mode for defeating deep packet inspection on heavily censored networks — a real gap compared to providers that offer one. Port forwarding isn’t available at all; CyberGhost’s stated position is that open ports are a potential security weakness, a defensible but restrictive stance for torrent users chasing better seed connectivity.

Servers & Torrenting

CyberGhost operates in 100 countries with 10-Gbps server hardware and unlimited bandwidth; the company doesn’t publish an exact current total server count on the pages checked for this review. P2P and torrenting traffic is allowed, with a portion of the network specifically optimized for it, though the lack of port forwarding caps how much that optimization can help with connection speeds.

Jurisdiction & Ownership

CyberGhost was founded in 2011 by German entrepreneur Robert Knapp, who relocated the company to Bucharest, Romania. Romania sits outside the Five, Nine, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence-sharing alliances and has no mandatory data-retention law applying to VPN providers. The company itself was acquired by Crossrider (renamed Kape Technologies in 2018) in March 2017 — Kape’s first VPN acquisition, and notably one made before the Crossrider-to-Kape rebrand had even happened.

Our Rating

Rating: 7.7/10