A Boring Dystopia

1. nothing free will ever be best, because you are the product

2. best heavily depends on usecase, and not all usecases are covered by the "best choices"

for piracy, you need vpns that dont keep logs, and allow port fowarding(a feature not all vpns support)

for privacy from governments, especially western ones, people want vpns hosted in countries outside of the five/nine/fourteen eyes alliance

for example, a common VPN choice that covers both usecases is Proton VPN, as i believe its swiss hosted, does not keep logs and has a form of port fowarding. someone using a vpn for privacy might not care about the use for piracy or vice versa, so they may spend time looking for vpns that give more value for their usecase.

https://www.privacyguides.org/en/vpn/

Privacy guides are a great resource for finding services.

Edit: I use Mullvad myself, and some services Proton has

Mullvad is an amazing choice.

I've already read like 10 of these before, so I'm kind of confident saying that most people would recommend Mullvad as the best and most secure/private, and some of them would also add ProtonVPN. I'm using Proton here and there, no issues, would recommend.

Proton. They're a great company, and offer more services than just a VPN.

They're also the only for profit (at the time) company I've ever seen say, "Hey, our cost of running the services has dropped, so we're lowering our prices."

One cool feature they offer is their secure core servers. Basically, your traffic bounces to a server in a neutral country (Switzerland for instance), then back to a US server so it looks like your traffic is from the US on the website's end. This does noticeably increase latency, though (~200ms for me)

I used to be on mullvad, but proton makes more sense to me because I've got my email, email aliases, cloud storage, and VPN in one bundle, it's cheaper that way

Mullvad, Nord and Proton are good.

PIA used to be good but they got bought out by a sketchy company.