Name one Finnish company. If you follow security at all, you'll know at least one: F-Secure. This company is known—among security aficionados, at least—for its antivirus software, as well as its charismatic Chief Research Officer, Mikko Hyponnen. But the company also offers a VPN in the form of F-Secure Freedome. While we grant the company points for clever naming, the VPN product itself is more barebones than we expect from a major player like F-Secure. It also lacks flexible pricing, and has little to offer beyond a basic (but functional) VPN.
What Is a VPN?
When you fire up a VPN, it creates an encrypted tunnel between your computer and a server operated by the VPN company. Your web traffic flows through the tunnel, and then exits onto the internet. That means anyone snooping your network will be blind to your activity, as will your ISP—which is important, as US ISPs can sell anonymized user data. Out on the internet, advertisers will have a harder time tracking your movements because your true IP address is hidden.
VPN are enormously useful tools, but they cannot protect against all ills. We recommend that you use antivirus software on your computer, use a password manager to create unique and complex passwords for each site and service you use, and activate two-factor authentication wherever it's available.
How a VPN Works
How Much Does F-Secure's Freedome VPN Cost?
Freedome's pricing is a bit different from that of other VPN providers. Most companies offer monthly subscription plans and longer term plans at a discount. F-Secure Freedome's pricing skips a monthly option and begins at $34.99 per year for use on three devices—the industry standard is five. For $69.99 per year, you can use seven devices, or $89.99 every two years for seven devices.
Similar Products
Proton VPN
Mullvad VPN
NordVPN
TunnelBear VPN
CyberGhost VPN
ExpressVPN
Surfshark VPN
Hotspot Shield VPN
HideIPVPN
VyprVPN
I caution against starting with long term subscriptions for VPNs, at least initially. I think it's better to use a free version, or a lower cost short term subscription, so you can test out how the VPN will work at home and with the sites and services you need. The little extra you pay up front can save you from being stuck with a product that doesn't meet your needs.
The average annual cost for a VPN is $72.64. Freedome's $34.99 per year looks quite attractive, but recall that the other VPN companies will allow at least five simultaneous connections. You'll have to pay for Freedome's $69.99 per year plan in order to get at least that many. TunnelBear, meanwhile, costs under $60 per year while offering those expected five connections. The average monthly cost of a VPN, for comparison, is $10.18. Many excellent VPNs manage to beat that price, including Mullvad VPN, which costs just €5 ($5.91) per month.
Nothing is cheaper than free, and there are some free VPNs worth considering. Both TunnelBear and Hotspot Shield VPN offer free subscription tiers that cap your data usage at 500MB per month and 500MB per day, respectively. ProtonVPN has the best free subscription I've yet seen, as it places no limit on your data. F-Secure offers a five-day free trial of Freedome.
While Freedome beats the industry average for simultaneous connections for some tiers, that whole model may be on its way out. An increasing number of VPNs no longer restrict this at all. Avira Phantom VPN, Encrypt.me VPN, Ghostery Midnight, IPVanish VPN, Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN all allow an unlimited number of simultaneous connections. Note that Encrypt.me and IPVanish VPN are owned by j2 Global, which in turn owns PCMag's publisher Ziff Media.
Freedome provides basic VPN protection, but other services offer much more. Multi-hop VPN connections route your traffic through a second VPN server, ensuring that it cannot be intercepted. Split-tunneling lets you choose which apps use the VPN connection, and which send their traffic in the clear. Some VPN services let you connect to the Tor anonymization network. Freedome does not include any of these features. ProtonVPN is the only VPN I have yet reviewed that includes all three, and NordVPN among the very few to have two.
What VPN Protocols Does F-Secure Offer?
There's more than one way to create a VPN connection. My preferred option is the open-source and aptly named OpenVPN protocol. Being open-source means that it has been picked over for any potential vulnerabilities. Freedome uses OpenVPN on Android, macOS, and Windows. It uses IPSEC, IKEv1, or IKEv2 on iOS.
WireGuard is the heir apparent to OpenVPN. It's also open-source, and promises far better speeds than other protocols. It has only recently started to see adoption. Freedome doesn't yet support WireGuard, but that's fine—for now.
Servers and Server Locations
Freedome offers servers in 29 countries, which is a little over half the average offered by competing VPNs. The more countries a VPN covers, the more likely you are to find a nearby server while traveling abroad. It's also convenient to have more options for spoofing your location.
F-Secure covers the basics with its servers, but ignores large portions of the globe—like Africa, for instance. ExpressVPN has servers in an impressive 94 countries, leading the pack in diversity of options. F-Secure also does not cover many regions that are known for repressive internet policies. Several companies, such as ProtonVPN and NordVPN, have continued to maintain a presence in places like Hong Kong, despite local pushback against VPNs.
When I asked about the overall size of its network, F-Secure declined to respond, saying that the number changes based on demand and capacity management. On average, VPN providers offer 1,270 servers. CyberGhost is the current leader with 5,900 servers. It's true that there's no clear correlation between more servers and better service, but it's a little unusual for a VPN to opt out of answering a pretty basic question. Still, F-Secure must be doing something right to have racked up solid Speedtest scores, which I cover below.
Some VPN companies use virtual servers, which is when a single hardware server plays host to multiple, software-defined virtual servers. These can be configured to appear as if they are in a location other than where the host machine physically resides. Most VPN companies use virtual servers to some extent, sometimes to extend coverage to dangerous regions by keeping the servers somewhere safer. F-Secure did not indicate how much of its server fleet is virtual, but it did say that all servers are located where they claim to be. That’s great.
Your Privacy With F-Secure Freedome
A VPN could have the same kind of access to your information as an ISP, and potentially abuse that access for profit or become a surveillance tool in its own right. That's why it's important to read the company's privacy policy to understand what information the company gathers and what measures it takes to protect your privacy.
According to the company's privacy policy, F-Secure will not sell or share customer traffic, nor will it monitor that traffic, nor maintain a method by which web traffic could be tied to a specific person. That's great. The policy also outlines some commitments: the company will encrypt your traffic and does not have any backdoors. That might sounds obvious, but it shows a certain degree of consideration on the part of F-Secure.
Things get a little more confusing after that because F-Secures anonymization is doing most of the privacy heavy lifting. For instance: The company says it does not log your data, but it does outline the information that is logged. Device information, including IP address, is logged when you first use the VPN as part of "service provisioning logging." The company also logs VPN connection duration, a device ID generated by F-Secure, amount of data transferred, public IP address, host name (of your computer), as well as traffic variations that could indicate an abuse of the service. These logs are kept for 90 days, which seems quite long. Other companies have taken greater effort to retain less information for less time, and F-Secure should strive to do the same.
Two features in Freedome require more information than most competitors: cloud scanning of files and URLs for malicious content and the Tracker Mapper tool. For the former, F-Secure says it further separates and anonymizes the data, and destroys it. The Tracker Mapper shows how your data can be tracked online, and therefore must retain some information. These logs can be cleared manually, whenever you create a new log, or every three days automatically. Those are both excellent efforts.
F-Secure is located in Helsinki, Finland, and operates under Finnish law. The company's privacy policy says that it will respond to legal requests for information from law enforcement when required to by law. That's a fairly common policy, but some companies take extra steps to guard against over-reach from law enforcement. Notably, the company does not appear to have a warrant canary, which would indicate if it had been subject to a secret order to hand over information. Nor does the company publish a public transparency report that outlines how it responds to requests for information. Both of these are valuable demonstrations to consumers that a company is working to stick to its principles. F-Secure should provide both.
Several companies have begun releasing the results of public, third-party audits in order to establish their privacy bona fides. These aren't always useful, unfortunately. F-Secure has not released any audits. For all the caveats, a third-party audit is a valuable tool for holding a company accountable.
The company says that it does lease server infrastructure from third parties, but that it does not disclose details out of concern of attack. Other companies have been far more open with their efforts. NordVPN and ExpressVPN, for example, tout their diskless servers which are resistant to tampering, among other security measures to protect their infrastructure and your information.
Unlike most VPN providers, F-Secure is not a new company. It's a known entity, and has an established reputation. That said, the company should consider taking additional measures to protect the privacy of its VPN customers, or making its protections and the limitations clearer to the public.
Hands On With F-Secure Freedome
I had no trouble downloading and installing Freedome on an Intel NUC Kit NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon) desktop running the latest version of Windows 10. Interestingly, I was not required to log in. Instead, I copied an activation code from the F-Secure site after my purchase went through, and pasted it into the app. That's smooth, similar to how Mullvad operates.
The Freedome client app is much slicker and more responsive than I remember. It consists of a single blue window with a large button in the center that reads "Protection OFF." Click it, and you'll be automatically connected with what F-Secure thinks is the best server, which is displayed at the bottom of the screen. I really appreciate that the client makes it very easy, and obvious, how to start using the app.
F-Secure deserves a lot of credit for building an app that looks nice and is easy to use. Still, I found TunnelBear's bright yellow, bear-centric design to be a bit friendlier. That said, few people will be put off by F-Secure's offering.
Clicking your current location opens a new pane where you can select a different server location from a list. Clicking on one causes an animated globe to swivel, showing the area in question. That's a nice touch. It's not as useful as an interactive map, which can help you find a place near to where you were looking. That's a bit of a moot point here, as the app doesn't let you select specific servers, just cities or sometimes only regions. This will be fine for most people, but those seeking total control over their VPN will be disappointed.
Similarly, the Settings pane has meager options, the kill switch control being the only notable feature. This prevents your apps from sending information should the VPN become disconnected.
F-Secure takes a unique focus on harmful sites and online trackers that follow you from site to site. The main page shows a running tally of how much data you've used, how many sites Freedome blocked, and how many times a tracker tried to get a fix on you. The Tracker Mapper tool is intended to visualize that information, showing how companies are able to follow you from site to site. You can toggle these off in the Browsing Protection and Tracking Protection pane.
Unfortunately, F-Secure's tracker protection and mapper fall far short. I wasn't able to get it to register any trackers despite browsing several ad-heavy sites with all browser-based tracker blocking switched off. That's because F-Secure can only block and analyze trackers on HTTP sites. At one point that would have been fine, but far more of the web is now protected by HTTPS, making both of these features rather moot. The company said it plans to expand into HTTPS traffic soon, but it's still disappointing.
You want your VPN to protect you information, not leak it everywhere. Using the DNS Leak Test Tool, I confirmed that F-Secure Freedome was hiding my IP address and did not appear to be leaking my DNS requests. Note that I only tested one server; other servers may not be correctly configured.
F-Secure Freedome and Netflix
Netflix often blocks access by VPN, but is by far not the only company to do so. Sometimes, companies block VPNs in order to prevent fraud, or because of geographic restrictions. Unfortunately, I found I was unable to use Netflix while connected to a US-based VPN server from Freedome.
That could be a problem, but you should bear in mind that the success of sites at blocking VPN changes constantly. A service that works today may block you tomorrow, and vice versa.
Beyond VPN
Many VPNs have begun to diversify their offerings. TunnelBear, for example, offers the Remembear password manager, and NordVPN the NordLocker encrypted file service. Both of these require separate subscriptions from the VPN products, but Hotspot Shield VPN offers a password manager, a robocall blocker, and an ID theft protection service for free with a subscription.
F-Secure is a major player in the antivirus space and has a robust collection of products. For instance, you can purchase a Freedome subscription on its own or as part of the F-Secure Total package, which includes the F-Secure Safe security suite, ID theft protection, and Freedome VPN. This bundle costs $89.99 per year for three devices, $109.99 for five devices, and $129.99 for seven devices.
Speed and Performance
No matter which VPN you use, you're likely to see an increase in latency and a decrease in upload and download speeds. That's par for the course, because a VPN is routing your traffic through more machines and fiber. To get a sense of the impact of each service, we run a series of tests with the Ookla Speedtest tool, and find a percent change between when the VPN is running and when it is not. Note that Ookla is owned by PCMag's publisher, Ziff Media. For more on how we test VPNs, and the limitations of that testing, be sure to read the aptly named feature: How We Test VPNs.
F-Secure performed surprisingly well for a smaller VPN service. We found that it decreased download speed test results by 61.7 percent, and upload speed test results by 74.9 percent. The former is a bit less than the median result and the latter a bit more. Its latency score was surprisingly good, increasing latency by 51.3 percent. This puts it in the top half of the services that we reviewed.
You can see how Freedome compares with the fastest of the nearly 40 other VPNs we evaluated in the chart below.
Our testing shows that Hotspot Shield VPN has earned the title of fastest VPN, based off its excellent download and latency results. Surfshark, however, is close behind, and sports a shockingly good upload score. Do note, however, that your results will almost certainly differ from mine.
Due to COVID-19, we have been unable to perform new speed testing using the PCMag Labs network. Home internet connection is significantly slower, and more crowded. This test suggests it's possible that Freedome may have underperformed in our initial ranking. While interesting, these results are purely anecdotal, and cannot really be compared to our other results. We look forward to being able to resume testing, once it is safe enough to do so.
F-Secure Freedome on Other Platforms
F-Secure offers apps for its Freedome VPN for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. It does not appear to offer browser proxy plug-ins, or a Linux version. Some VPNs, like Express VPN and others, offer instructions on how to configure your router to connect via VPN, or even sell pre-configured routers. This has the advantage of extending protection to every device in your home but can lead to other headaches.
Known Unknowns
The biggest problem with the VPN industry is that it is extremely young to be so profitable. A series of unlikely global events, a rising awareness of privacy, and the monetization revolution of affiliate marketing have made VPNs a hot commodity, but it's been hard to know who to trust when many of the companies have existed for only a short time.
We'd hoped that established antivirus companies entering the fray would bring some kind of order to the industry, but the big security brands have treated VPNs more as a sweetener—something added to existing product bundles, rather than robust products in their own right.
Hampered by High Costs
F-Secure deserves a lot of credit for trying to make a VPN product that is actually unique. Its attempt to illustrate how websites track individuals is laudable, and while I am skeptical of any VPN's ability to scan for malicious files, F-Secure has a better claim to actually pulling that off. Importantly, it isn't a faceless scam operation that will vanish overnight. It's a real company, with years to prove itself trustworthy.
Unfortunately, F-Secure Freedome just doesn't do enough to fully justify its high up-front cost. It lacks the advanced features found in Editors' Choice winners ProtonVPN and NordVPN. It isn't as easy, or as cheap, as co-winner TunnelBear. Surprisingly, its privacy policies aren't as ironclad as those of co-winner Mullvad VPN. Tracker mapping and protection should be its standout feature, but it's effectively useless on the modern internet.
Of all the antivirus companies dipping their toes into the VPN pool, F-Secure's Freedome is probably best positioned to make a splash. What it needs to do now is lead by following: Match other company's transparency, add more features, expand the service's global presence, and revisit its pricing model. The great things we expect could still be on their way.
F-Secure Freedome is a simple, approachable VPN from a trusted name in the security industry. But it's light on features, is comparatively expensive, and has some unfortunate quirks.
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