Almost nobody arrives at this comparison undecided. TunnelBear is the VPN people try because 2 GB a month is free. ExpressVPN is the one they look at when that allowance runs out. The question isn’t which is better; it’s whether TunnelBear’s paid plan is worth buying, or whether the free tier is the only part that makes sense.
Our answer, after eight sections: ExpressVPN 6, TunnelBear 1, one draw. TunnelBear takes price, where a $59.88 renewal and a free plan that never expires give it an advantage. Apps end even. Speed, features, privacy, streaming, servers, and bypassing censorship all go to ExpressVPN.
TunnelBear vs ExpressVPN: All You Need To Know
| 🏆 ExpressVPN | TunnelBear | |
| Our Current Ranking 📋 | #3 | Unranked |
| Prices 🤑 | Starts at $2.99/mo | Starts at $3.33/mo |
| Money-Back Guarantee 🪙 | 30 days on every plan | None |
| Free Version/Free Trial 🆓 | No/7 days on iOS and Android | Yes, 2 GB a month/No |
| Logging/Jurisdiction 🕵️ | No activity or connection logs/British Virgin Islands | No activity logs/Canada (5 Eyes) |
| Independent Audits 📝 | Repeatedly audited and tested in court | Cure53, every year since 2017 |
| Protocols 🌐 | Lightway, WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 | WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2 |
| Post-Quantum Encryption 🧬 | Yes | No |
| Servers 🏠 | 113 countries, 214 locations | 8,000+ in 47 countries |
| Specialty Servers ✅ | Dedicated IP in 29 locations | None |
| Ad Blocking ⛔ | Yes, Advanced Protection with parental controls | Browser extension only |
| RAM-Only Servers 🛡️ | Yes | No |
| Working With Netflix 📺 | Yes, 15+ catalogs | Netflix US only, and not reliably |
| P2P Allowance ↔️ | Yes, on all servers | Yes |
| Concurrent Connections 📟 | 10, rising to 14 on higher tiers | Unlimited |
Apps and Compatibility
Both providers cover the platforms most households own: Windows and macOS computers, plus iOS and Android phones and tablets. TunnelBear stops there. There’s no TunnelBear client for Linux, no TV app, no router support, and its browser extension behaves more like an ad blocker than a VPN.
ExpressVPN adds Linux (Mint and Ubuntu included), Smart TVs, Apple TV, Fire TV Stick, Nvidia Shield, routers, and gaming consoles. It also includes MediaStreamer, a Smart DNS tool for devices that can’t take a VPN app.
ExpressVPN’s design language doesn’t change between platforms. Move to the macOS client or a phone, and you get the same big connection button, the same server list, the same three settings tabs. TunnelBear’s app is the more charming, with a world map and a bear tunneling toward whichever country you pick.
The animations are identical on mobile. Neither client crashed or glitched during our testing. Then there’s the number. TunnelBear allows unlimited connections. ExpressVPN allows 10 on Basic, 12 on Advanced, and 14 on Express Pro. Unlimited counts for less when 4 systems are all it supports.
Winner: Draw 🤝
ExpressVPN reaches devices TunnelBear can’t touch. TunnelBear covers every device it does support, for one price. Those cancel out.
TunnelBear is Cheaper than ExpressVPN
TunnelBear keeps this simple with two paid lengths and a free tier. The annual plan comes to just under $4.20 monthly. The three-year plan is $3.33 monthly, a 67% discount billed as $120 up front. ExpressVPN splits into three tiers across two lengths. The 2-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.
| 3-Year Price | 2-Year Price | Monthly Price | Renewal Price | |
| TunnelBear | $120 | N/A | $9.99 | $59.88/year |
| ExpressVPN | N/A | $83.72 | $14.99 | $99.95/year |
Advanced is $4.49/mo, and Express Pro is $7.49/mo. Annual plans add 3 free months for a 15-month term at $4.99, $5.99, and $8.99, respectively. ExpressVPN backs every plan with a 30-day money-back guarantee. TunnelBear publishes no refund policy, which makes its free tier the only safe way to try it. The introductory price now favors ExpressVPN, $2.99 against $3.33. Renewal reverses that:
- TunnelBear: $59.88/year, roughly $5.00 monthly
- ExpressVPN Basic: $99.95/year
- ExpressVPN Advanced: $119.95/year
- ExpressVPN Express Pro: $199.95/year
TunnelBear costs $40.07 less every year after the first term. Add the free plan, which gives you 2 GB monthly, and the money side belongs to TunnelBear. ExpressVPN isn’t expensive by category standards. Put it next to Astrill VPN, and it reads as a bargain. It’s still the one you’ll pay more for over five years.
Winner: TunnelBear ✅
Cheaper at renewal by a wide margin, and free forever if 2 GB a month covers you. The missing refund policy is the price of that.
ExpressVPN is Safer Than TunnelBear
What Both Providers Include
The security basics are covered on both sides:
- 256-bit AES encryption, with DNS and IPv6 leak protection
- A kill switch, branded VigilantBear by TunnelBear
- Split tunneling, so chosen apps travel outside the tunnel
- Obfuscation, called GhostBear on TunnelBear’s side
TunnelBear’s ad blocking requires a separate browser extension, so nothing gets filtered inside apps. ExpressVPN’s Advanced Protection blocks ads, trackers, and malicious domains at the DNS layer across every device, and adds an adult-content toggle for parental control.
GhostBear also has to be switched on manually, while ExpressVPN applies obfuscation to every connection without being asked.
What Only ExpressVPN Has
TunnelBear renames the standard toolkit and stops. There’s no multi-hop, no SOCKS5 proxy, no dedicated IP option, and no malware scanning. ExpressVPN offers Lightway, an in-house protocol built on wolfSSL, audited, plus post-quantum encryption that protects captured traffic against decryption years from now.
TunnelBear offers WireGuard and nothing above it. Higher ExpressVPN tiers bundle Identity Defender: breach alerts, identity theft insurance, personal data removal, and a credit scanner that flags early signs of card fraud.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Two protocols TunnelBear doesn’t have: ad blocking that works without a browser, and an identity bundle on top. TunnelBear is safe. It just isn’t equipped.
Privacy Comparison: ExpressVPN is Better
Neither VPN records what you do online. The published policies are more detailed than that summary, and reading them side by side separates them.
What Each Provider Collects
ExpressVPN rules out two categories. No activity logs, meaning no browsing history, traffic destination, data content, or DNS queries. And no connection logs, spelled out as no IP address, no outgoing VPN IP, no connection timestamp, no session duration. What it does keep is minimal: app version, whether a connection succeeded on a given day, which VPN location, and total data transferred.
TunnelBear also refuses to store visitor IPs, connection IPs, DNS queries, or anything about the sites and apps subscribers use. Its operational set is longer and includes OS version and app version, whether the account was active this month, total data used this month, location to continent, country, and city, and cash reports, device brand, and model.
Jurisdiction, Audits, and Retention
ExpressVPN operates from the British Virgin Islands, which imposes no data retention duty. Its policy has been audited repeatedly, and a Turkish court case put it to the test when investigators seized a server and recovered nothing. TunnelBear commissions a Cure53 audit every year and publishes the results, a streak running since 2017. Its problem is Canada, a 5 Eyes member.
TunnelBear stores all personal data inside Canadian borders by design. One point goes the other way. TunnelBear deletes account data 30 days after cancellation. ExpressVPN holds records tied to transactional emails, including order confirmations and renewal notices, for ten years.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
The connection-log clause and a jurisdiction outside every intelligence-sharing arrangement decide it. TunnelBear’s audit cadence is the better one, and its deletion window is far shorter.
ExpressVPN is Faster than TunnelBear
We tested from Serbia on a 50 Mbps network, 3 times a day across 3 days, on UK, US, and Japanese servers. Both apps stayed on the Automatic protocol, and both test systems ran Windows 11 with current network adapter drivers.
- DL Speed Without VPN: 52.56 Mbps
- UL Speed Without VPN: 10.04 Mbps
- Ping: 10 ms
- Testing Location: Serbia
Averaged retention rates across the three locations:
| ExpressVPN | TunnelBear | |
| Download Speed Retention | 76% | 51% |
| Upload Speed Retention | 91% | 69% |
The per-location figures show where that came from:
| UK (DL/UL Speed) | US (DL/UL Speed) | Japan (DL/UL Speed) | |
| ExpressVPN | 46.25/9.53 Mbps | 42.04/9.34 Mbps | 32.06/8.65 Mbps |
| TunnelBear | 34.69/10.50 Mbps | 29.43/5.52 Mbps | 15.77/4.62 Mbps |
TunnelBear took the UK upload test, 10.50 Mbps against 9.53, its only win of the six. ExpressVPN downloaded 33% faster to London, 43% faster to the US, and 103% faster to Tokyo. A TunnelBear and NordVPN matchup produced the same pattern, so this isn’t a one-off result for TunnelBear.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Faster on five of six measurements and roughly twice as fast to Japan. TunnelBear isn’t slow, but it thins out badly on long connections.
Streaming and Torrenting Comparison
Streaming: ExpressVPN Triumphs
TunnelBear wasn’t built for this and shows it at Netflix. If you want to switch your Netflix country, TunnelBear opens the US catalog some of the time and fails the rest. BBC iPlayer produced mixed results across our attempts, working one session and blocking the next.
ExpressVPN opened 15+ Netflix catalogs, along with Hulu, Hotstar, ESPN+, and BBC iPlayer on every attempt. Its browser extension spoofs location separately from the tunnel, which defeats the cross-checks that catch most VPNs. 4K playback on distant servers held steady on ExpressVPN. TunnelBear buffered on the same titles.
Torrenting: Even
To torrent safely, a provider needs fast speeds, secure protocols, and no logs. Both qualify. ExpressVPN permits P2P on all of its servers, with nearby locations giving the best speed and most stable throughput.
TunnelBear worked. We pulled Linux Mint through a Greek server without incident. Neither provider includes port forwarding or a SOCKS5 proxy.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Torrenting is a draw. Streaming decides the section, on catalog count and on how often TunnelBear gets caught.
Server Locations
Raw server counts favor TunnelBear. Country coverage doesn’t:
- ExpressVPN: 113 countries across 214 locations
- TunnelBear: 8,000+ servers in 47 countries
More than twice the countries means addresses in places TunnelBear skips. Getting an Indian IP address works on ExpressVPN and can’t be done on TunnelBear, and the same applies across much of South America and Africa. ExpressVPN’s fleet is RAM-only with 10 Gbps ports, mixing physical and virtual servers to reach countries where hosting hardware isn’t practical. It expanded that network in July 2026.
TunnelBear writes to disk, and not every server has a 10 Gbps port, which explains why some of its locations felt sluggish while others held up. ExpressVPN also sells dedicated IPs in 29 locations from $2.49/mo, giving you an address nobody else uses. TunnelBear offers none.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Better distribution, better hardware, and an option TunnelBear doesn’t sell at any price. This is another clean win for ExpressVPN.
Bypassing Censorship in China: ExpressVPN is Better
Both providers get through filtered networks. GhostBear handles school and workplace blocks once you find it in TunnelBear’s settings. ExpressVPN’s obfuscation needs no setup, which matters when you’re troubleshooting from a country where the VPN’s own website is blocked. Both worked in the UAE, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey during our checks, but in China, it’s different.
Our contacts connected to TunnelBear once, at speeds too low to be usable. ExpressVPN connected repeatedly with reduced performance, enough for messaging, reaching Telegram, streaming, and even torrenting. Gaming was out of reach. Neither belongs at the top of a China VPN shortlist, since no provider is dependable there in 2026. Travel anywhere else, and both perform.
Winner: ExpressVPN ✅
Automatic obfuscation and a working connection behind the Great Firewall. TunnelBear stops at the border.
Summary of TunnelBear vs ExpressVPN
TunnelBear has four advantages: unlimited connections, a free tier, an annual Cure53 audit, and a renewal price $40.07 below ExpressVPN’s. Nothing in our full TunnelBear review contradicts that. ExpressVPN took 6 of 8 sections. It installs on devices TunnelBear ignores, kept 76% of our download speed against 51%, opened 15+ Netflix catalogs, covers 66 more countries, and connects from China.
Lightway Turbo and post-quantum encryption have no equivalent on the other side. Get TunnelBear if your budget is the deciding factor or if 2 GB a month covers you. Everyone else gets more for the extra $40 a year. The 30-day guarantee on all plans makes that easy to test in 2026.
Test ExpressVPN Risk-Free Today
Frequently Asked Questions
⚔️ Is TunnelBear better than ExpressVPN?
No. ExpressVPN supports Linux, routers, Apple TV, and Fire TV, which TunnelBear doesn't. It also offers the Lightway protocol, post-quantum encryption, dedicated IP addresses, and DNS-level ad blocking. TunnelBear allows unlimited simultaneous connections and costs less at renewal.
📌 Do TunnelBear and ExpressVPN offer dedicated IP addresses?
Only ExpressVPN does, sold as a paid add-on across 29 locations including the UK, US, Norway, Canada, and Germany. A dedicated address avoids the blocklists that catch shared VPN IPs, which is why banking portals tend to accept it.
🆓 Are ExpressVPN and TunnelBear free?
TunnelBear is free up to 2 GB a month. That allowance excludes torrenting and runs out within an hour of HD streaming. ExpressVPN has no free tier. New subscribers get 30 days to request a refund, and mobile users get a 3-day trial on iOS and Android phones and tablets.
🏮 Does TunnelBear work in China?
Yes, but rarely and not reliably. Testers in mainland China established one connection across repeated attempts, and it was too slow to use. ExpressVPN managed several usable sessions over the same period.
🛡️ Which VPN is safer, TunnelBear or ExpressVPN?
Both publish no-logs policies and commission independent audits. ExpressVPN has the stronger position on paper because it explicitly rules out connection logs and operates outside the 5 Eyes arrangement. Canadian jurisdiction is TunnelBear's main weakness, though its 30-day data deletion window is shorter.