TunnelBear review

TunnelBear sells three tiers on its consumer plan. The Free tier gives you 2GB of secure browsing per month, access to all 47 countries on the consumer network, and the same audited apps as the paid tiers, with no credit card required. The Unlimited plan is the consumer flagship at $3.33 per month billed monthly. The Teams tier is built for groups at $5.75 per user per month billed annually.

There is no separate yearly or 2-year tier on the consumer plan. The Unlimited plan bills monthly with no commitment, and renewal pricing does not change. TunnelBear does not push a long-term discount model: the price you see on day one is the price you pay at month 12 and month 24. The 2GB Free tier is too small for sustained streaming but is plenty for occasional browsing, public Wi-Fi protection, and testing the apps before committing.

TunnelBear has been independently audited 8 times since 2016 by Cure53, more annual security audits than almost any consumer VPN on the market. The audits are published in full on the TunnelBear site rather than summarised, which is the standard most consumer VPNs should adopt but rarely do. Cure53 has audited the desktop and mobile apps, the browser extensions, and the server infrastructure across the 8 rounds.

The most recent assessment is from 2024. TunnelBear bills itself as the only consumer VPN in the world to publish regular independent security audits, and the cadence backs the claim. The audit depth is wider than NordVPN (5 audits), ExpressVPN (12 audits across more dimensions), and ProtonVPN (6 audits), though TunnelBear uses a smaller set of firms. For buyers who want a public, recurring security record, TunnelBear is the strongest answer in the consumer market.

GhostBear is TunnelBear's obfuscation feature, designed to wrap the OpenVPN tunnel inside a regular HTTPS envelope so the resulting traffic on the wire looks indistinguishable from ordinary secure web browsing to anyone running deep packet inspection. DPI is what powers most school, workplace, hotel, and state-level network filters; once DPI flags a flow as OpenVPN it can be blocked outright or throttled to unusable levels.

Bypassing DPI is the headline use case. GhostBear opens up TunnelBear on networks where vanilla OpenVPN or WireGuard is blocked, including some institutional networks that explicitly filter VPN traffic. The trade-off is throughput: the obfuscation wrapper adds overhead, so GhostBear connections are typically slower on the same link than WireGuard or un-obfuscated OpenVPN. GhostBear is enabled per-connection in the app settings, so users can keep the faster protocol as the default and switch to GhostBear only when the network demands it.

TunnelBear is headquartered in Toronto, Canada, which is a member of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance (and, by extension, 14-Eyes). The jurisdiction consideration is real, and TunnelBear flags it openly. The mitigation is structural: with the no-logs policy kept under recurring independent audit, there is little account-side data that could be compelled from a Canadian legal request.

TunnelBear has been owned by McAfee since 2018. McAfee acquired TunnelBear to add a consumer VPN product to its broader security suite, which is a corporate consideration for buyers who weigh ownership. The audit cadence and the published reports are stronger than most consumer VPNs regardless of corporate parent, and TunnelBear's engineering team has remained in Toronto through the ownership change.

TunnelBear can unblock Netflix in our latest checks, including US and UK libraries, though coverage is best-effort rather than guaranteed. TunnelBear does not market streaming unblock as a primary feature, so a US exit from a major city works most of the time but may hit captchas or proxy errors more often than a streaming-focused competitor like CyberGhost, NordVPN, or Surfshark.

TunnelBear is not the right pick for buyers whose primary use case is streaming from another region. If streaming is part of why you need a VPN, the consumer-focused competitors on the /netflix guide are the better fit. If streaming is one of several reasons for needing a VPN, and the others (audit cadence, GhostBear obfuscation, the 2GB Free tier) matter more, TunnelBear is a clean answer.

TunnelBear is the right pick for buyers who want the deepest audit cadence on the consumer market and a polished, beginner-friendly app. It fits users who care about GhostBear obfuscation, the 2GB Free tier for occasional browsing, and a Canadian jurisdiction openly flagged. It is also a strong fit for users who prefer simple apps without a feature-stack marketing surface.

Consider alternatives if Canadian jurisdiction is a hard requirement (NordVPN in Panama, ProtonVPN in Switzerland, ExpressVPN in the BVI), if you want unlimited simultaneous devices (Surfshark), if you want the largest server fleet (PIA at 35,000+), or if you want a free tier without a data cap (ProtonVPN Free). For a privacy-first VPN with a flat price and open-source clients, Mullvad is the closer neighbor.

If TunnelBear is close but not quite right, three VPNs cover similar buyer profiles with different trade-offs.

• ProtonVPN - the audited alternative with a free tier. Proton is based in Switzerland (outside 14-Eyes), ships open-source apps, and offers a free plan with no data limits plus a paid tier with Secure Core multi-hop. Stronger audit count (6 vs 8), broader feature set, more visible on consumer comparison lists.
• Windscribe - the free-tier alternative with a configurable ad-blocker. Windscribe ships R.O.B.E.R.T. (configurable DNS-level blocking), unlimited simultaneous devices, and a 10GB Free tier. Canadian jurisdiction (same as TunnelBear), larger country count (69 vs 47), more granular blocker controls.
• NordVPN - the premium alternative. NordVPN caps simultaneous devices at 10, ships Double VPN, Onion Over VPN, Meshnet, and Threat Protection, plus five independent audits and a Panama jurisdiction. Higher headline price, longer-term commitment, broader feature set.