Best VPNs for Brave Browser 2026: 4 Tested + Brave VPN Review

How a VPN Interacts With Brave’s Built-In Privacy Features

Brave does more privacy work out of the box than any other mainstream browser. That raises a fair question: is a VPN even necessary? Our tests revealed that Brave lacks a few critical capabilities. While there is some overlap, using a VPN alongside Brave browser offers more privacy than either could offer on their own. Before digging into the details, here’s a quick overview:

Let’s dive into the details of how a VPN interacts with each of Brave’s privacy-focused features.

Brave Shields

The Shields feature blocks ads, trackers, and cross-site cookies at the browser level. A VPN takes this a step further by operating at the network level, masking your IP and encrypting traffic. Combining these two levels of protection covers different attack surfaces. Shields stops trackers from loading; the VPN prevents anyone snooping on your network activity from seeing what you’re doing.

Fingerprinting Protection

To prevent sites from fingerprinting your activity, Brave randomizes browser fingerprint data to make you harder to track across sites. While a VPN masks your IP, it doesn’t touch fingerprinting data stored on your browser. These two capabilities work in tandem — one covers your network identity, the other your browser identity.

>> Learn About: What Can Someone Do With Your IP Address in 2026?

Tor Integration

Brave’s Private Window with Tor routes traffic through the Tor network for maximum anonymity. Adding a VPN before Tor hides the fact that you’re using Tor from your ISP — useful in countries where Tor usage is monitored or restricted. For most users, Tor or a VPN alone is sufficient, with VPNs generally offering better performance. The VPN-over-Tor combination is for high-risk situations only.

WebRTC Leak Protection

A WebRTC leak can publicly expose your IP address during video chats or other types of real time communication. Brave blocks these leaks natively, which is better than most browsers. That said, premium VPNs offer an additional layer of protection that applies to all browsers, as some video chat software opens in a new application. Running both is the safest default.

DNS-over-HTTPS

Brave has its own DNS-over-HTTPS (DoH) implementation. When a VPN is active, DNS requests should route through the VPN’s servers instead. While it might seem like using both Brave’s DoH and your VPN’s DNS servers would offer the best protection, conflicts can occur causing errors with your connection. I recommend disabling Brave’s DoH when your VPN is running and letting the VPN handle DNS entirely.

Brave Search + VPN

Even though Brave Search doesn’t track queries, our IP is still visible without a VPN. Pairing the two gives you genuinely private search — no query logging, no IP association.

Brave Rewards (BAT)

During my tests, BAT earning continued normally with a VPN enabled. No issues.

Brave Leo (AI Assistant)

Leo doesn’t log conversations by default, but without a VPN your IP is still tied to each session. A VPN adds an additional layer of separation between your queries and your identity.

Brave Wallet

For crypto transactions, a VPN prevents your IP from being associated with wallet activity — a meaningful privacy addition that Brave Wallet alone doesn’t provide.

Does Brave Have a Built-In VPN?

The Brave browser does not have a built-in VPN extension, but it did release a stand-alone service in 2016. It costs $9.99 a month or $99.99 per year, and you can protect up to ten devices on one subscription. You get access to over 300 servers in 40 regions, which isn’t a lot compared to our top VPNs. The list of regions you can connect through includes:

• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• France
• Germany
• Italy
• Japan
• Netherlands
• Singapore
• Spain
• Switzerland
• U.S. (Central)
• U.S. (East)
• U.S. (Mountain)
• U.S. (Northwest)
• U.S. (West)
• United Kingdom

As far as VPNs go, though, it’s a little bare-bones. It doesn’t offer the advanced features or extra security of any of the VPNs on this list. For $9.99 per month, you can definitely subscribe to something a little more robust.

Brave VPN Extension vs. Desktop App: Which Do You Need?

All four VPNs on my list offer both a Brave-compatible browser extension and a full desktop app. They’re meaningfully different tools, and choosing the wrong one for your situation can leave you either over-protected or under-protected.

Extension vs. App: At a Glance

To give you some context, here’s a high level overview of the differences between using a VPN app and a Brave VPN extension:

How They Differ

A browser extension encrypts only the traffic passing through Brave. Everything else on your device — other apps, background processes, system traffic — goes through your regular unprotected connection. A desktop app works at the operating system level, routing all device traffic through the VPN tunnel regardless of which app generates it.

Both are legitimate tools. The right choice depends entirely on what you’re trying to protect.

Brave-Specific Extension Features

Using a Brave VPN extension limits the features offered by the VPN. For instance, even though each of my four favorite Brave VPNs offer a kill switch in their desktop app, none of them offer it in their Brave extension. They also differ in the features they offer with ExpressVPN lacking split tunneling, but it includes automatic HTTPS upgrading and WebRTC blocking.

Installation and Resource Usage

Extensions install in a single click from the browser and add negligible overhead — you’ll never notice them running. Desktop apps require a download and installation, use some of your computer’s RAM and CPU, and run as a persistent background process. For most modern devices, the resource difference is minor, however it’s noticeable on older devices.

Brave Sync

Brave Sync keeps bookmarks, history, and settings consistent across devices. A VPN extension doesn’t interact with Sync — it operates independently and won’t carry settings across installations. A desktop app has no interaction with Brave Sync at all, since it operates outside the browser entirely.

When to Use Each

Use the extension when you’re doing everything in Brave and want a lightweight, low-friction privacy layer. It works well for streaming, browsing, or bypassing geo-blocks without touching the rest of your device. Use a dedicated VPN app when you need everything protected: torrenting clients, communication apps, gaming clients, or any situation where a kill switch matters. The app maximizes your protection and is what I recommend for most users.

Methodology

We take testing VPNs very seriously, so we want you to know exactly how we do it. Our methodology is a combination of looking at features such as encryption standards, the VPN’s logging policy, its customer service, and other factors to confirm the service does everything a VPN should do.

We then put each product through performance and security tests to make sure the trade-off between safety and speed is worth it and that nothing slips through the cracks data-wise. We’ll define exactly what that looks like below.

Security

Security is one of the biggest reasons to use a VPN in the first place, so it’s non-negotiable that we feel safe when using the internet with a VPN.

We test for DNS leaks by using DNSLeakTest.com. By comparing our computer’s IP address with the IP address the website shows, we can tell if there was a DNS link while using the VPN. We then test for WebRTC leaks by leveraging a tool available on ExpressVPN’s website. We use a similar tactic where we look at the local and Public IPv4 IP addresses to see if there were any WebRTC leaks.

It’s important that we have a thorough understanding of each VPN company’s data-logging practices. We also put a large emphasis on where a company is located because that’s what determines whether it is a member of the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, or 14 Eyes international surveillance alliances, which have the potential to legally force companies to surrender customer data to the federal government.

It’s ideal for a company not to be located in a country impacted by such agreements, but we also prefer they log minimal user account information. Things such as names, email addresses, and payment information are acceptable to log, but we raise a red flag when VPNs log additional data, such as when customers use their VPNs, how long they use them for, how much data they transferred, what servers they used, or what websites they visited.

We also conduct a full analysis of a VPN’s encryption methods and the protocols used to make sure they meet industry standards. We prefer VPNs with AES-256 encryption and WireGuard, which are some of the highest security standards on the market.

How a company handles IP addresses is also important, because it impacts our likelihood of being tracked. It’s best if a company offers dynamic addresses that change each time we log on, making it even harder to track what we’re doing online. A static IP address stays the same every time we connect, which is only acceptable in certain situations, such as if you’re running a server.

Finally, we check that each VPN has a kill switch, which shuts down internet browsers in the unlikely event that a VPN disables. Our activity could become exposed if a kill switch isn’t in place, which kind of defeats the purpose of having one in the first place.

Speed

We typically test VPNs from our Brooklyn office, where we have a private Optimum network. On some occasions, however, we test VPNs when we travel.

Our internet speed without a VPN serves as a control. We know our readers use all sorts of devices, and we want to make sure we have everyone covered. That’s why we test on both Mac and Windows machines.

We use the website SpeedTest.net to test download speed, upload speed, and latency. We first perform tests with the VPN and then without. Download and upload speeds are measured in megabits per second, while latency is measured in milliseconds. Once we take those two measurements, we identify the percentage difference to account for any discrepancies between devices.

Factors such as distance from the server, operating system, and device type all have an impact on speed, but it’s ideal for VPNs to have no more than a 40 percent difference in any of the categories above.