Whether you want to enjoy a little more privacy while browsing online, watch movies and series on a streaming service or access content restricted to people geo-located in a particular country, a VPN can be the answer to your problems. But it must be powerful enough to be used in your country. Today, we look at the best free VPNs for France.
Why use a VPN for France?
No matter what country you are in, using a VPN can have many advantages. The first thing that often comes to mind is bypassing geographical restrictions, especially on streaming platforms like Netflix. And indeed, a VPN is a good solution to get around this type of problem. You can use it to access foreign catalogues of streaming services while being in France, but also to be able to watch the French version when you are abroad and thus not interrupt the viewing of your new favourite series. You will also be able to use your VPN to find cheaper airline tickets by changing your location, especially if you want to take tickets to border countries.
But you don't have to connect to a server domiciled abroad for a VPN to be useful. By choosing a VPN with servers in France, you combine privacy, with a new IP address that will make you harder to track, and performance as your data doesn't need to be sent to another country or continent before being transmitted to the websites you visit.
1. CyberGhost VPN
Infrastructure and functionality
Voted to the top of the palmares of the best VPNs, CyberGhost is probably one of the most sensible choices for France. Its colossal offer of servers (more than 9,200 servers in 91 countries, including 891 in France) ensures good VPN performance for all uses. If you want to combine security and performance, youll have plenty of choice, with three cities covered by CyberGhost in France: Marseille, Paris and Strasbourg. This means you can be sure of the best possible speed throughout France by choosing the server that is closest to you geographically. Europe is also very well covered by the service if you prefer to be located abroad.
If it's bypassing geographical restrictions that you're interested in, CyberGhost is present just about everywhere in the world and on every continent. This means that almost no content will be out of your reach. CyberGhost offers optimized servers for Netflix France, perfect for continuing to watch your series from a foreign country or without having to disconnect from the VPN.
CyberGhost not only helps you locate yourself elsewhere, but also has essential features to protect your browsing, such as AES 256 encryption, protection against DNS and IP leaks and a kill switch that disconnects you from the internet if you disconnect from the VPN. The company assures that it applies a no log policy and does not store your browsing data.
Get CyberGhost for free
CyberGhost puts no limits on traffic and bandwidth and allows you to use protection on up to 7 devices at once. Unfortunately, such features mean that CyberGhost is not a free VPN. However, you can still try it out for 45 days with a "money back" guarantee.
2. NordVPN
Infrastructure and functionality
NordVPN has a good presence in France: over 230 servers, with two locations available, one in Paris and one in Marseille. Enough to make it easy to find a server that meets your speed needs, even during peak hours. If you prefer to be located in a foreign country, you can choose from over 5,500 servers in 59 countries. Like most of its competitors, NordVPN focuses on Europe and North America, but still has several servers in South America, Asia-Pacific and Africa and the Middle East.
NordVPN does not offer specialised streaming servers, but the service still performs well for this purpose. On the other hand, all the other specialised servers offered by NordVPN are available in France (P2P servers, obfuscated, dual VPN, dedicated IP), as well as all the protocols including NordLynx, the company's creation.
On the rest of the security features, we stick with the classic. The kill switch answers the call, as well as split tunneling and protection against malicious websites. NordVPN is a no log VPN, which was verified in 2018 and 2020 by audits from PricewaterhouseCoopers AG. By subscribing to one of the most expensive offers, we additionally get two other software products from the company: NordPass, a password manager and NordLocker, encrypted cloud storage.
Get NordVPN for free
NordVPN is a premium VPN, which has several advantages. For example, you will be able to connect to the VPN on up to 6 devices at a time and the bandwidth and speed is unlimited. However, its free of charge will be limited to the 30-day "money back guarantee" offered with every new subscription to the service.
3. ExpressVPN
Infrastructure and functionality
ExpressVPN has fewer servers than its competitors, 3,000, but covers more countries, with 94 countries. In France, the service offers 5 server locations: Alsace, Marseille, Paris - 1, Paris - 2 and Strasbourg. A significant advantage that allows ExpressVPN to be one of the most recommended VPNs for France.
Like NordVPN, ExpressVPN has chosen not to offer specialised servers for streaming or gaming. This means you can use the entire service for any purpose. On the French servers, the Lightway protocol is fully supported. This protocol was created by ExpressVPN and is supposed to be particularly suitable for mobile use thanks to its lightness, which makes it less demanding on the battery of smartphones.
As for security features, ExpressVPN offers the same protections as its competitors. Network Lock is a kill switch that protects you if you disconnect from the VPN, split tunneling allows you to use both the VPN protection and your regular connection and finally Threat Manager prevents certain sites from tracking you. ExpressVPN is also no log and uses RAM-based servers that don't log data.
Get ExpressVPN for free
If you're interested in ExpressVPN, you can try it for 30 days with the "money back guarantee". For Android and iOS smartphone users, a free 7-day trial is included with the first download of the app.
4. Hide.me VPN
Infrastructure and functionality
Hide.me is a freemium VPN. This model allows it to offer a generous and quality free version, funded by other users' subscriptions, but with some limitations. Data usage is limited to 10GB per month and you can only be connected to one device at a time.
The choice of servers is smaller, with 8 locations available to users of the free version. But, good news, France is among the choices, so French users will be able to get the best possible speed while being protected. In addition to France, you will be able to locate in Germany, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain and the UK for free. Be careful though, don't think you can use the free version of Hide.me for streaming, it will be impossible.
Hide.me does not limit the speed in its free offer and has not implemented any ads or log saving. In the options we find split tunneling, kill switch as well as all the popular VPN protocols.
Get Hide.me for free
You can download Hide.me in its free version on all platforms, computers, smartphones, browsers. You can test the subscriptions by taking advantage of the "satisfied or reimbursed" guarantee during 30 days.
5. TunnelBear VPN
Infrastructure and functionality
Like Hide.me, TunnelBear offers a free version in addition to its paid offer. Unfortunately, the limitations are much greater: only 500 MB of transfer per month. In return, you have access to almost all the servers offered by the VPN, with the exception of certain cities in the United States and Canada, which allows you to locate yourself in France in particular.
You'll also have access to all of TunnelBear's features, such as VigilantBear, a kill switch and GhostBear, an obfuscation feature to hide VPN usage and bypass blocks.
But as you will have understood, with such a limitation on transfer, it is impossible to use TunnelBear for anything other than very occasional use and you might as well forget about streaming directly. This free version is only offered as a trial of the service.
Get TunnelBear for free
To use TunnelBear for free, simply download the application for the medium of your choice. Unlike its competitors, TunnelBear does not guarantee a refund of your subscription if you are not satisfied.
FAQ
Which VPN has the most servers in France?
With 891 servers in France covering 3 cities (Marseille, Paris, Strasbourg), CyberGhost has an impressive number of servers in the country. Although its capacity may seem less than CyberGhost's abundance of servers, NordVPN also fares well, with over 230 servers located in France. While the number of servers in a country is important to ensure that there are no slowdowns at peak times with too many users on the same server, it is the quality of these servers that is most important. A hundred slow servers will prove useless in use, a problem that can be encountered with free VPNs.
How to get a free French IP address?
To have a French IP address, which is not your home address if you already live in France, you will need to use a VPN. However, the majority of free VPNs do not offer servers in the country, preferring to put forward American servers, more lucrative. To obtain this IP address for free, you should rather use the refund offers of premium VPNs. The most serious of them allow you to try them out for 30 or 45 days and request a refund from their customer service during this period if you don't want to subscribe to the service after all.
Is it legal to use a VPN in France?
Using a VPN in France is completely legal. The practice is even legal throughout the European Union, where everyone has the right to privacy on the internet. However, you obviously don't have the right to hide your identity in order to behave in a way that is contrary to French law, such as downloading movies/series/games illegally, harassing other internet users...