Price and device count are usually the first two questions anyone asks about a VPN, and IPVanish answers both better than ExpressVPN does. It costs less than half as much and protects an unlimited number of devices compared to ExpressVPN’s cap of ten. For a lot of readers, that settles it before the comparison starts.
The other six tests go the other way. ExpressVPN wins this 6 to 2, taking features, privacy, speed, streaming and torrenting, server coverage, and censorship bypass, while IPVanish holds apps and price. Every verdict below explains itself, so you can stop reading at whichever round decides it for you.
IPVanish vs ExpressVPN: All You Need To Know
The headline differences before we get into the details.
| 🏆 ExpressVPN | IPVanish | |
| Our Current Ranking 📋 | #3 | #8 |
| Prices 🤑 | Starts at $2.99/mo | Starts at $2.19/mo |
| Money-Back Guarantee 🪙 | 30 days on every plan | 30 days, 1-year, and 2-year only |
| Free Version/Free Trial 🆓 | No/7 days on iOS and Android | No/7 days on iOS and Android |
| Logging/Jurisdiction 🕵️ | No activity or connection logs/British Virgin Islands | No activity logs/USA (5 Eyes) |
| Independent Audits 📝 | Repeatedly audited and tested in court | Leviathan Security, plus transparency reports |
| Protocols 🌐 | Lightway, WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 | WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 |
| Post-Quantum Encryption 🧬 | Yes | No |
| Servers 🏠 | 113 countries, 214 locations | 2,400+ in 100+ countries, 135+ locations |
| Specialty Servers ✅ | Dedicated IP in 29 locations | None, though SOCKS5 proxy is included |
| Ad Blocking ⛔ | Yes, Advanced Protection with parental controls | Yes, Threat Protection |
| RAM-Only Servers 🛡️ | Yes | Yes |
| Working With Netflix 📺 | Yes, 15+ catalogs | Yes, around 10 catalogs |
| P2P Allowance ↔️ | Yes, on all servers | Yes, on all servers |
| Concurrent Connections 📟 | 10, rising to 14 on higher tiers | Unlimited |
Apps and Compatibility
Device coverage is the one thing these two share completely. Both install on:
- Windows, macOS, and Linux computers
- Android, including Android Smart TVs and iOS phones and tablets
- tvOS for Apple TV
- Fire OS for Amazon Fire TV
- Routers
ExpressVPN’s client is the same on every platform, which sounds like a small thing until you switch between a laptop and a phone. Connecting takes about three seconds, and the settings menu doesn’t hide anything.
IPVanish packs more onto the screen and shows its age doing it. The dark theme is easy on the eyes over a long session, though the Windows client can feel sluggish and takes noticeably longer to establish a connection.
Its mobile apps are the better half, and the Android version behaved well throughout testing on a Samsung flagship. Then there’s the number that decides this. IPVanish allows unlimited simultaneous connections. ExpressVPN allows 10 on its Basic tier, rising to 12 and 14 further up the range. Ten covers most households. It doesn’t cover a household plus a router plus relatives.
Winner: IPVanish ✅
ExpressVPN has the better software. IPVanish protects every device you own on one subscription, and that’s worth more to more people.
ExpressVPN vs IPVanish Price Comparison
Two different philosophies here, and IPVanish’s is the friendlier one. IPVanish splits into two tiers across two lengths. Essential opens at $2.19/mo on the two-year term, with unlimited devices, Threat Protection, and round-the-clock support. Advanced costs $3.29/mo and adds cloud backup, a secure browser, and phone support. One-year plans exist and cost more per month. ExpressVPN offers three tiers of its own.
Its two-year term includes 4 bonus months, so you pay for 28. Basic comes to $2.99/mo, billed $83.72 up front, an 80% discount. Advanced is $4.49/mo, and Express Pro is $7.49/mo. Annual plans add 3 bonus months for a 15-month term: Basic at $4.99/mo, Advanced at $5.99, Express Pro at $8.99. Device allowances climb with the tier, from 10 on Basic to 12 on Advanced and 14 on Express Pro.
Both providers back their plans with 30 days of money-back guarantee, though IPVanish excludes its monthly plan from that.
Which VPN Is Cheaper?
On the introductory price, IPVanish wins by a wide margin. On renewal, the picture gets worse for both. ExpressVPN renews at:
- $99.95/year on Basic
- $119.95/year on Advanced
- $199.95/year on Express Pro
Per our full IPVanish review, its renewals are:
- $89.99/year for 1-year Essential
- $179.98 every two years for 2-year Essential
- $109.99/year for 1-year Advanced
- $219.98 every two years for 2-year Advanced
IPVanish holds the advantage at both points, though the margin narrows once the introductory rates expire. Its entry price of $2.19/mo undercuts ExpressVPN’s $2.99 by a quarter, and its $89.99 renewal comes in just $9.96 a year below ExpressVPN’s $99.95. Anyone comparing Advanced tiers gets a wider difference: $109.99 vs $119.95.
Winner: IPVanish ✅
Cheaper going in and cheaper staying. Neither provider is a bargain at renewal, and IPVanish is the less painful of the two if that matters to you.
ExpressVPN vs IPVanish Security Comparison
IPVanish has taken the first two rounds. This is where that stops.
Shared Features: Just a Few Basics
Both providers cover the fundamentals properly:
- Automatic kill switch. Both reacted promptly every time we dropped a connection deliberately.
- Split tunneling. Route chosen apps through the tunnel or exclude them, whichever suits. Our guide explains the difference.
- 256-bit AES encryption, with IPv6 and DNS leak protection alongside it.
Unique Features: Here’s Where ExpressVPN Takes It
Neither matches NordVPN or PIA for depth. What each has is worth knowing.
Protocols and Multi-Hop
Both now offer WireGuard, which closes an old difference between them. ExpressVPN adds Lightway, its own protocol built on wolfSSL, open source, independently audited, and quicker in practice than WireGuard on the same connection. It offers post-quantum encryption, which IPVanish has no equivalent for. That protects against traffic captured today being decrypted years from now by hardware that doesn’t exist yet.
IPVanish answers with Double Hop, routing your traffic through two servers so neither one holds both ends of the connection. ExpressVPN still doesn’t offer multi-hop, and we’ve said so on every ExpressVPN page we’ve written.
Threat Protection Features
IPVanish’s Threat Protection blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains. ExpressVPN’s Advanced Protection does the same and adds a parental control layer. That layer blocks adult content across every desktop and mobile device on the account with a single toggle. Plenty of readers arrive here wanting the opposite, to reach blocked sites in Florida and elsewhere, and the same control serves whichever direction you need.
Browser Extensions
IPVanish’s extension behaves like a browser inside your browser, screening downloads for malware and spyware. ExpressVPN does something different and, for this comparison, more useful.
It spoofs your location independently of the tunnel, which opens streaming platforms that check for mismatches, and it includes WebRTC leak protection. That’s a large part of why it’s the stronger option on Chrome.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Lightway, post-quantum encryption, and an extension that does real work. Double Hop is the one thing IPVanish has that ExpressVPN should copy.
Do IPVanish and ExpressVPN Store Logs?
Neither records what you do online. ExpressVPN’s policy rules out two categories. No activity logs, meaning no browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. And no connection logs either, which it spells out: no IP address, no outgoing VPN IP address, no connection timestamp, no session duration.
It can’t disclose data it doesn’t hold, even under compulsion. That position has been audited repeatedly and tested once in a Turkish court case, where investigators seized a server and recovered nothing. The company operates from the British Virgin Islands, which imposes no retention duty. IPVanish is a no-logs provider too, and its policy is refreshingly specific about what it does collect.
Aggregated, anonymous performance data for diagnostics, explicitly excluding IP addresses, connection timestamps, and DNS queries. Your email address and billing details are kept because the account needs them. Nothing is sold or rented. Leviathan Security has audited it, and it publishes transparency reports, a practice we’ve also seen from CyberGhost. Two things count against it.
It’s a US company, which places it inside 5 Eyes. And in 2016, under previous ownership, IPVanish supplied investigators with connection times and dates, a source IP address, and an email address while advertising a no-logs policy. That was a decade ago, and a different company owns it now. The audit and the transparency reports are the response to it. It’s still the reason this round has a winner.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
A stricter policy, a jurisdiction outside every intelligence-sharing arrangement, and a record with nothing in it. IPVanish today looks solid; its history doesn’t.
ExpressVPN is Faster Than IPVanish: Speed Tests
We tested from Serbia, 3 times a day across 3 consecutive days, on the UK, US, and Japanese servers. Both VPNs were set to their fastest available protocol, Lightway for ExpressVPN and WireGuard for IPVanish. Our native speeds are:
- DL Speed, No VPN: 342.59 Mbps
- UL Speed, No VPN: 19.65 Mbps
- Latency, No VPN: 10 ms
Here are the results:
| Download Speed Loss | Upload Speed Loss | |
| ExpressVPN | 24% | 9% |
| IPVanish | 28% | 10% |
Four points apart on download, one on upload. Both figures are good, and as our ExpressVPN review notes, NordVPN was quicker than either. The per-location results show where the difference comes from.
| UK (Download/Upload) | US (Download/Upload) | Japan (Download/Upload) | |
| ExpressVPN | 298.82/18.50 Mbps | 274.61/18.35 Mbps | 206.33/16.73 Mbps |
| IPVanish | 257.13/19.31 Mbps | 250.64/15.99 Mbps | 179.31/11.98 Mbps |
IPVanish took the UK upload test, 19.31 Mbps against 18.50, its only win of the six. ExpressVPN led everywhere else, and the margin grew with distance: 16% ahead on download to London, 10% to the US, and 15% to Tokyo. Upload to Japan is the widest, 16.73 Mbps against 11.98.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Faster on five of six measurements, with Lightway doing most of the work.
Streaming and P2P: ExpressVPN is Better Overall
Streaming
IPVanish has improved here. Netflix US, Canada, and the UK opened without issue, along with Hulu, Max, and ABC, and it handled CBS from the UK plus a range of sports channels. Netflix Japan gave it trouble, as did Sky Sports and ESPN+, which are the two that separate a good streaming VPN from a very good one.
ExpressVPN opened 15+ Netflix catalogs and both of those. Its browser extension is the reason: spoofing location separately from the tunnel defeats the cross-checks that stop IPVanish. That’s what makes free Super Bowl streams and F1 races reachable when you use it, so it’s a clear winner here.
Torrenting
This half is even. P2P works on every server on both networks, which isn’t universal in this category, and neither provider caps bandwidth.
IPVanish includes a SOCKS5 proxy, useful for routing a torrent client outside the tunnel when you want throughput more than encryption.
ExpressVPN held its transfer rates across European, US, Australian, and Canadian servers, with download times varying by a minute at most.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Torrenting is a draw. Streaming decides it, based on catalog count and the two platforms IPVanish can’t reach. Overall, ExpressVPN is undoubtedly better.
ExpressVPN Offers More Servers and Locations
| ExpressVPN | IPVanish | |
| Countries | 113 | 100+ |
| Locations | 214 | 135+ |
| 10 Gbps servers | Yes | Yes |
| RAM servers | Yes | Yes |
Country counts are close. Location counts aren’t. ExpressVPN’s 214 locations against 135+ means more city-level choice inside the same countries, which shortens the hop and spreads the load at peak hours. It expanded that network in July 2026, and the difference widened. Both use a mix of physical and virtual servers, which is how any VPN reaches places where hosting hardware isn’t practical.
Dedicated IPs are the other difference. ExpressVPN sells them in 29 locations from $2.49/mo, giving you an address nobody else uses, which helps with banking and services that flag shared VPN addresses. IPVanish offers none. Neither VPN maintains specialty server categories, and neither needs to. Streaming, gaming, torrenting, and dark web access all work on the standard fleet.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Nearly 80 more locations and a dedicated IP option make ExpressVPN an easy winner. The country counts are close enough to call even.
Bypassing Censorship: Which VPN Is More Efficient?
IPVanish handles restricted school and workplace networks. China is where it stops working, and no combination of settings changed that for us. Both providers offer obfuscation, and the implementations differ significantly. IPVanish asks you to enable it. ExpressVPN’s works automatically, detecting a restricted network and disguising the connection without being told.
This matters when you’re troubleshooting from the country where the VPN site is blocked. Our contacts in mainland China connected through ExpressVPN with few complaints, and switching servers resolved the occasional failure. It’s also a dependable option in the UAE, where it restores WhatsApp calls and other VoIP apps.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
IPVanish works across a long list of filtered countries. However, it doesn’t work in China, while ExpressVPN does, which is why it wins this round.
Conclusion: ExpressVPN Is Better Than IPVanish
Two questions decide this, and they pull against each other. How much are you willing to spend, and how many devices need covering? Answer those, and IPVanish is your VPN. $2.19/mo with unlimited connections, renewing at $89.99, while ExpressVPN renews at $99.95, backed by an independent audit and quarterly transparency reports. Nothing about it is a compromise on the fundamentals.
What do you need the VPN to actually do? Answer that, and it’s ExpressVPN. Quicker on five of six speed tests, 15+ Netflix catalogs against roughly 10, 214 locations against 135, dedicated IPs available, a diskless network, and obfuscation that gets through the Great Firewall without being switched on.
Six rounds to two, and the two IPVanish took are worth more to some households than the six it lost. Most readers should take ExpressVPN anyway.
IPVanish vs ExpressVPN: FAQ
⚖️ Is ExpressVPN better than IPVanish?
Yes, taking six of the eight rounds. The deciding factors are measured speed, streaming reach, jurisdiction, and location coverage. IPVanish wins on price and device allowance, which is enough to recommend it for large households on a budget.
📝 Does IPVanish keep logs?
No browsing logs. The privacy policy states that no record is made of sites or apps used while connected, and the diagnostic data it does gather excludes IP, connection timestamps, and DNS queries. Email and billing details are retained to operate the account. Leviathan Security has verified the policy independently.
📱 How many devices can be connected at once?
IPVanish allows an unlimited number. ExpressVPN allows 10 on its Basic tier, 12 on Advanced, and 14 on Express Pro.
🏮 Does IPVanish work in China?
No. Its obfuscation handles school and office networks well enough, but the Great Firewall defeated it in every attempt during testing. ExpressVPN connects there consistently, with automatic obfuscation that activates on restricted networks without being switched on manually.
🔴 Which VPN is better for streaming?
ExpressVPN, on two counts. It reaches more than 15 Netflix regions against roughly 10, and its browser extension spoofs location separately from the tunnel, which opens Sky Sports and ESPN+ where IPVanish gets blocked.