The best VPN for streaming Netflix

For years, getting access to Netflix overseas was easy. You signed up for pretty much any VPN you wanted, connected to an American server, and that was it. Then 2016 happened. That was the year Netflix expanded into 130 new territories. In a move to calm Hollywood during its global takeover, Netflix promised to get tough and stop people from streaming Netflix content over a VPN.

Since then it’s been a cat-and-mouse game between Netflix and all the world’s VPN providers that want to provide U.S. Netflix access to their customers. That’s why choosing the right VPN is essential if you want to stream U.S. Netflix when outside the country.

Regardless of what your home billing address is, you always get access to the Netflix catalog of the country you’re currently in. If you live in Idaho, but you and your laptop are in Japan, you get the catalog available in Japan. Sometimes that can be great and you get to see a movie or TV show that isn’t available at home. Often, however, you just want to keep watching your stuff that’s only available in the U.S., or the UK, or Canada, or Germany, or wherever.

Given Netflix’s watchdog attitude towards VPNs, you need to choose a service that actively promotes compatibility with Netflix. The reason being that these services are willing to adapt their strategies to continue making Netflix available over their network. Some VPNs may accidentally work with Netflix, but if they aren’t maintaining that compatibility it’s not likely to last long. (For even more VPN options, check out our comprehensive roundup of the best VPNs in all categories.)

Why does Netflix block VPNs?

As we mentioned earlier, Netflix’s big expansion into pretty much every country on earth back in 2016 meant it had to get tough on VPNs. While Netflix produces a lot of its own content that it can make available worldwide, the company also licenses a ton of content from traditional entertainment studios.

These third parties are still working on a system of global territory licensing. Under this system, Netflix gets a package of movies and TV shows from these companies that it can show in the U.S., but that aren’t licensed to be shown by Netflix in, say, Europe. To keep those companies and their other international licensees happy, Netflix must enforce a block on VPNs to prevent people from getting content made available to Netflix subscribers in the UK, but not the U.S.

“We are making progress in licensing content across the world,” Netflix said in a 2016 blog post. “But we have a ways to go before we can offer people the same films and TV series everywhere.”

Netflix isn’t the only company that has to enforce these restrictions. Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and others do it too. However, Netflix along with Hulu are easily the most active and effective at it.

Buying VPN access for Netflix streaming

We’ve already covered this in brief, but let’s quickly deal with what you should be looking for in a Netflix VPN. First, most people should not make speed the top consideration. The minimum recommended bandwidth for a 1080p Netflix stream is 5 megabits per second (Mbps). If you’re streaming in 4K it’s 15Mbps. That’s nothing, and nearly all the top VPNs hit those speeds quite easily in most places.

Instead, the first consideration should be the basic promise of Netflix compatibility from a reputable company. That’s the rub. Any old VPN can promise Netflix compatibility, but if there aren’t a lot of reviews about the service it may not be the real deal. Stick to well-known VPN services if you can.

Next, you need to consider how many servers are available for the service–especially the number in your target country. If you want Netflix Australia and the VPN only has two Australian servers, that could be a problem. Most of the popular VPN services list their server networks online that show you how many servers are in each country.

Finally, make sure the VPN’s desktop app (and don’t forget about mobile) allows you to choose specific servers. Since this is a cat-and-mouse game you need a service with a number of servers in your desired Netflix country. That way if one server has been discovered by Netflix, it’s possible the others are still working. Often, just switching servers is enough to keep watching, and sometimes even simply reconnecting to the same server is enough to fix streaming issues. That’s the one word of warning we’d offer to anyone looking to play the international Netflix game. You will have to get used to occasional interruptions. Sometimes this can mean access to U.S. Netflix from overseas is blocked on a particular VPN entirely, though this often only lasts a day or two. Slightly more frequent interruptions may happen, where the stream will just stop. The fix for this is often just switching servers.

Finally, after all of that, consider speeds. Speeds for countries in North America and Europe are usually solid in the major VPN services. Australia and Asia can vary wildly, however. Any of our recommendations in this article will give you the speeds you need in those areas of the world.

How we tested

We only test on days that the wired internet connection hits 80Mbps or more. During the daily test we measure the speeds of five different locations around the world, running the test three times in each location and taking the average speed of each country for the day, and then we average those speeds again to get an overall daily average. Our countries are typically, but not always, the U.S., UK, Germany, Australia, and Japan.

The daily test is run on three different days at three different times of the day. We then take each daily average, and then average them again to get an overall average. We then determine that overall average as a percentage of the original daily speed.

The reason we don’t bother with printing hard numbers as a rule is that experiences in hard numbers can vary wildly. It all depends on the speed of your internet connection, the time of day, and even device types can have an impact. For that reason we feel that percentages, which can show how much speed you can expect to lose on a given service, is a more useful indicator.

Netflix is an excellent service, and while the company doesn’t like you to use VPNs, we’ve never heard of anyone being penalized because of it. Just choose your preferred VPN service wisely and you’ll be good to go.