The best VPNs for small and home-based businesses

We chose NordLayer as the best VPN option for businesses, as it offers end-to-end encryption, integration into a single sign-on, and other business-friendly features. This table shows you how the best VPNs for small and home-based businesses compare on key features:

It depends on how many users your company has, your operating budget, and what other security features you hope to gain from the VPN service. This table helps you see which of the best options might be the best fit for your needs:

Finding the right participants for this list was an interesting exercise. I wanted to stay away from the larger-scale corporate VPN solutions because anything that requires special certification or multiple full-time IT people was for larger businesses than I was trying to reach in this article. So everything had to be reasonably deployable by an experienced tech user, not a formally-trained and certified IT professional.

Second, everything had to have some kind of unified billing. It didn't make sense to call something a business plan if you had to make 10 individual credit card payments each month for your ten employees' VPN accounts. While the checkout mechanism for ExpressVPN and Surfshark do not offer unified billing, both companies advised us that you can contact them and they'll set up account management services for multiple accounts.

And, finally, we've been testing most of these products for going on years now. While I don't use any one VPN constantly, I have run most of these through my testing process, and the results are provided along with the recommendation.

Keep in mind that everyone's needs are different and VPNs are particularly challenging because your performance is determined by the country you're in, your ISP, your connection, and even the current weather conditions. I always recommend choosing vendors with a liberal refund policy (at least 30 days), and test, test, test to see if the service performs as you need it to.

Beyond that, keep an eye out for any egregious renewal pricing and conditions. Most of the vendors I spotlight either don't have renewal fees that slam you after a few years or, if they do, I point them out so you can watch out for them.

One more thing I recommend is you start a dialog with the various customer and tech support teams. If you're running your company on these services, find out how responsive and communicative they are.

Yes. Somewhat. Whether you're using a VPN for work or for personal use, you want your network traffic to be secure. Personal users often want to hide their location or spoof remote servers (sometimes for good reasons, sometimes just to location-shift entertainment). Business users don't need that capability as much, although executives traveling may not want their locations to be triangulated. 

Considerations are also different if you're a worker assigned to use a business VPN, compared to the manager choosing a VPN for use by employees. Again, communications security is the top priority in a business VPN, followed by performance, and often management features like access control and billing.

That totally depends...on everything. Here's the thing. If you have a tiny company of just a few employees, a good consumer VPN should do just fine. Your biggest issue will be consolidating payments, followed by assigning and revoking accounts. 

But if you're in a big small business, say with a thousand employees, you're going to need a much larger set of IT-level features. In this article, we're focusing on very small companies and those working from home, and for those businesses, a business-class VPN or even a good consumer VPN will do just fine.

Uh. No. VPNs encapsulate data from one point to another so it can't be monitored. In theory, you could monitor communications once packets reach your corporate network, but that's a lot more complex than setting up a basic VPN, and it's pretty slimy and reprehensible as well. 

Don't spy on your employees. Judge them by their actions and whether they meet their commitments. Just sayin'. Don't.

We chose a diverse selection of VPNs to accommodate different business needs. However, if these solutions don't fit what you're looking for, here are other options worth exploring: