Norton VPN review: A VPN that fails to meet Norton's standards

One thing I need to make clear right from the start: this is a review of Norton VPN (formerly Norton Secure VPN, and briefly Norton Ultra VPN) as a standalone app, not of the VPN feature in the Norton 360 package. They're similar, but Norton VPN has a few more features, including the ability to choose cities as server locations in countries with more than one option.

I'll state my opinion up front. Norton VPN isn't a bad service, but it's not good enough to get ahead of its direct competitors. ExpressVPN, Surfshark, Proton VPN and NordVPN are all either faster, more feature-rich, more secure, more affordable or some combination of the four. There's no reason to go with Norton as your VPN unless you're getting it as part of another Norton 360 bundle.

For this review, I ran rigorous tests that ...