NordVPN vs. TorGuard — Comparing Feature-Rich VPNs

Features can make a huge difference when it comes to choosing a VPN. Not that you always need every VPN feature out there, but it’s nice to have the option if and when you need it. With that, we compared two particularly feature-rich VPNs — NordVPN and TorGuard.

Our tests have shown that these two are evenly matched, at least when it comes to VPN features and functions. But as you’ll soon discover, there’s more to choosing a VPN than just looking at what it can do.

We’re comparing NordVPN and TorGuard in this guide after testing each VPN for two weeks. We learned absolutely everything we needed to pick our top choice. While we’re not surprised by the end result, you’ll want to see why we picked NordVPN over TorGuard.

Advanced Features Comparison

Let’s start with what we thought NordVPN and TorGuard both did well, and that is offering features beyond what most VPNs do.

NordVPN and TorGuard aren’t just straight-cut VPNs. They offer features we rarely see, like TorGuard’s port forwarding and NordVPN’s obfuscated servers. And again, you might not need these features on the daily, but they sure come handy at times.

Let’s zoom in and talk about those more advanced features one by one. We learned in our tests that they are NordVPN and TorGuard’s greatest selling points.

Port Forwarding

Port forwarding is useful when torrenting with a VPN. It opens a specific port on the VPN server side for incoming traffic to optimize the download speed. It’s essentially like keeping a door open so traffic can enter your network with ease, bypassing your network’s and the VPN server’s Network Address Translation (NAT) firewall.

Is that safe? Well, only if the traffic is coming from a trustworthy source. Port forwarding comes with a lot of risks, which is what the NordVPN customer support agent told us when we asked why their VPN doesn’t have the feature. TorGuard does; it makes sense because TorGuard is an amalgamation of the words “torrent” and “guard.” Port forwarding is also one of the features you’ll want to see in the best VPNs used for torrenting.

Obfuscated Servers

An obfuscated server can help you circumvent monitoring, especially in countries where VPNs are not completely legal. Any VPN can encrypt your browsing activity, but just by looking at the encrypted data, a firewall can tell that you’re using a VPN. That can get you in trouble if your school, office, or government bans the use of VPNs — like we learned when we recently went to China.

Fortunately, obfuscation helped us hide our VPN usage. NordVPN was actually one of the three best VPNs that we used in China since it let us connect to a specialty obfuscated server. And while we weren’t able to test TorGuard in China, its obfuscation mode got around our office firewall detection.

Static and Dedicated IP Addresses

There are two types of IP addresses offered by VPNs.

• Dynamic IP addresses: Most VPNs offer dynamic IP addresses as opposed to static ones. A dynamic IP address changes every time you connect to the VPN, which makes your connection stealthier as your VPN IP address is never the same. Both TorGuard and NordVPN gave us dynamic IP addresses.
• Static IP addresses: On the other hand, static IP addresses don’t change. They are useful if you need to connect to a service, website, or server with the same IP address every time. NordVPN doesn’t offer static IP addresses, but TorGuard has a pool of static IP addresses available. We used it to connect to an FTP server to transfer files.

In addition to dynamic and static IP addresses, a few VPNs offer dedicated IP addresses. Those are static IP addresses from your VPN that only you can use. It’s like having your own private VPN server.

A dedicated IP address from NordVPN costs $3.69 per month when you buy the two-year plan on top of your VPN subscription. You can choose from a pool of IP addresses from 18 countries.

On the other hand, TorGuard includes one free dedicated IP address in its Pro subscription, and each extra one costs an additional $7.99 per month. It’s more expensive, but only because it requires month-to-month payments. With the monthly plan, NordVPN’s dedicated IP address ends up costing $8.99 per month. You also get more options with TorGuard’s dedicated IP address:

• 60 regular IP addresses
• 33 streaming IP addresses
• 7 residential IP addresses

This was one area where TorGuard outclassed NordVPN.

Private DNS

This feature rarely gets talked about, but it’s necessary if you want your IP address to be completely hidden. A private DNS protects you from DNS leaks, which is one of the types of the VPN IP address leaks we watch out for. (The other type is a WebRTC leak.)

Essentially, instead of letting your DNS requests go to your internet provider’s DNS server, they go to your VPN provider’s private DNS. The VPN processes the requests itself, reducing the attack surface.

We couldn’t confirm where our DNS requests went while connected to NordVPN and TorGuard, but our DNS leak tests showed us that both VPNs did a great job hiding our real IP address.

Advanced Features Winner

TorGuard takes the win on this one, given that it offers one free dedicated IP address, a pool of static IP addresses, and port forwarding — all of which NordVPN doesn’t offer. But that’s not the end of the story. Those are advanced features a VPN user might or might not need. They’re not exactly must-haves.

On the other hand, NordVPN doesn’t offer as many advanced features as TorGuard, but it delivers where it matters. It has split tunneling, a private DNS, multihop, the option to buy a dedicated IP address, malware and ad blocking, and a free password manager from NordPass.

It all depends on what you’re looking to do with your VPN. NordVPN’s advanced features offer more privacy, whereas TorGuard’s offer more usability.

Price Comparison

The downside of going with a feature-rich VPN is the slightly steeper cost. NordVPN and TorGuard aren’t obscenely expensive, but they do cost more than most of the VPNs we tested. You also have to consider the fact that if you’re choosing them for their advanced features, you need at least the mid-tier subscription. That’s the NordVPN Plus subscription plan and the TorGuard Pro plan that we compared above.

NordVPN Plus Plan

The reason we picked the NordVPN Plus plan was that it included features missing from the Basic plan that we initially bought. Those features were:

• Malware protection
• Tracker and ad blocker
• Data breach scanner
• Password manager

For context, here’s what you’ll get with every NordVPN subscription.

TorGuard Pro Plan

As for TorGuard, we picked the Pro plan for the free dedicated IP address. The Standard plan (which is entry-level) offers a pool of static IP addresses, but a dedicated IP address comes at an extra cost. We also liked that the Pro plan can have up to 12 simultaneous connections, whereas the Standard plan allows only up to eight.

Here’s how TorGuard’s plans compare.

Price Winner

TorGuard is marginally cheaper than NordVPN. You’ll be paying about $0.50 to $1 less per month with TorGuard’s mid-tier subscription than with NordVPN’s mid-tier plan. That price difference is so minimal though that we encourage that you pick whichever offers the features you need. What’s a dollar’s worth of savings if you don’t get what you want? Objectively, though, TorGuard wins this round by a hair.

Performance Comparison

TorGuard has the slight upper hand right now, but the thing about comparing VPNs is that it’s not always objective. There are critical factors such as speed and app user experience that you can only get a feel for by testing the VPN. That’s why we do hands-on testing.

Here’s our take on the NordVPN versus TorGuard comparison on various performance metrics.

Speed

This is arguably one of the most important for most users. Using a VPN will almost always cause you to lose some speed, but some VPNs are better than others at managing the speed loss.

>> Read More: Speed Test Results From the Top VPNs Available

To compare NordVPN and TorGuard’s speed, we first connected our Windows laptop to our fiber-optic network via an Ethernet cable. And then we tested our baseline speed. After that, we connected and tested each VPN’s speed. We made sure to connect to the same location, which in this case was California. Then, we repeated the speed tests several times and averaged the results. After that, we computed the average speed loss (because lower speed loss means better speed).

NordVPN wins this round by a huge margin and it wasn’t surprising given that NordVPN is one of the fastest VPNs we tested. Moreover, TorGuard’s speed loss slightly exceeded our maximum standard for calling it a fast VPN. It wasn’t too slow given our 250 Mbps fiber-optic connection, but by our standards, it’s not a fast VPN.

App Experience

We have been testing NordVPN on-and-off for quite some time, and one thing we always praise about it is its well-designed app. It has evolved over the years, but it remains user-friendly and customizable. It has a very tech-y feel to it but it’s super-easy to use, what with the map-like interface for selecting servers and the very customizable settings menu. Our only gripe with it is that it uses up a lot of resources, especially the smartphone versions. They tend to use up battery power much faster than the more simplistic TorGuard app.

On the other hand, TorGuard’s app feels a little raw. It’s functional, but it looks like a software program from the early 2010s. It’s also a bit buggy. For instance, throughout our two-week testing program, it had us log-in repeatedly everytime we opened the app. We’re not sure why, and neither did TorGuard’s customer support. None of the troubleshooting steps they suggested fixed the issue either.

Other users seemed to agree with us as well for the Android app, but most users seem to have had a better experience on TorGuard’s iOS app. Here’s an overview of the ratings each VPNs app got:

It’s clear; when it comes to VPN apps, NordVPN is the winner.

Privacy Policy

How much you trust a VPN to keep your data private is also a huge part of the VPN experience. Think of it like this: A VPN encrypts your browsing data so that the rest of the internet can’t intercept it, but the encryption keys and servers used belong to the VPN. So if the company wanted to, they could steal the very data you were looking to protect. That happens to a lot of free VPN users, where their browsing history is logged and sold to advertisers.

In fairness for NordVPN and TorGuard, both have a strict “no-logs” policy. It’s written right in their respective privacy policies that they do not log identifiable data about how customers use their services. Most importantly, the data they don’t log include the user’s IP address and browsing history. The question is, can you trust that they follow those protocols?

NordVPN makes a strong case here because it regularly submits its privacy policy and server network to third-party audits. An independent firm comes in to check NordVPN’s security and privacy protocols to see if they are in line with the VPN company’s privacy policy. NordVPN has passed all four independent audits it had gone through thus far. TorGuard, on the other hand, hasn’t been audited yet. We trust both companies, but we trust NordVPN more because of its willingness to be checked.

What’s the Verdict? NordVPN vs. TorGuard

It started close, but NordVPN eventually pulled away in the performance department. So our overall winner is NordVPN.

TorGuard isn’t a bad VPN by any means. It managed to outdo NordVPN in terms of advanced features and it’s also a little more affordable. It’s just that NordVPN proved to be better. Not only does it have the technical prowess to offer what most other VPNs can’t; it backs that up with a solid performance in terms of speed and privacy. And in the end, those are what should matter most to an average VPN user.

That’s not to say that NordVPN is the best choice for everyone, though. It has downsides too, like its 10-device limit for simultaneous connections and limited torrenting features. Before making a final decision, be sure to check out our NordVPN review.