AdGuard VPN Review 2026: The Open-Source TrustTunnel Gamble Pays Off
AdGuard VPN hides your traffic inside ordinary HTTPS — and in January 2026 it open-sourced the protocol that does it. Strong idea, fair pricing, one missing audit. Full review.
Table of contents
AdGuard VPN comes from AdGuard Software Ltd — the Cyprus-based company that has been building one of the best-known ad blockers since 2009. The VPN is a separate product with its own apps and its own subscription, and in 2026 it has one genuinely distinctive claim: in January it open-sourced its custom protocol as TrustTunnel, a promise the company had been making for years and finally kept.
Here's what you get, what it costs, and where the honest gaps are.
The protocol is the story
Most VPNs run WireGuard or OpenVPN. Both are excellent — and both are easy for a network operator to fingerprint and block with deep packet inspection, which is why they often fail on restrictive networks. (Our WireGuard vs OpenVPN vs IKEv2 comparison covers the trade-offs.)
AdGuard went a different way: its protocol disguises VPN traffic as ordinary HTTPS, encrypting it with TLS over HTTP/2 and HTTP/3. To the network in the middle, it looks like regular web browsing. That makes it materially harder to detect, throttle or block — useful on hostile hotel Wi-Fi, corporate networks, and in countries that actively hunt VPN traffic.
For years the obvious objection was "proprietary protocol, trust us." That objection expired on 22 January 2026, when AdGuard published the full specification, a reference implementation and cross-platform clients under the permissive Apache 2.0 license, under the name TrustTunnel. The company says it wants the protocol to become a vendor-neutral project usable by any VPN stack, not an AdGuard-only technology. Encryption is AES-256.
Network, apps and limits
- 70+ server locations across 50+ countries, with ping shown per location so you can pick sensibly.
- 10 simultaneous devices on any paid plan.
- Apps for Windows, Mac, Android, iOS and Linux, browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, Edge and Opera, plus Android TV and Apple TV apps and router support; consoles and Chromecast are covered via DNS-level setup.
- Exclusions — AdGuard's take on split tunneling — lets you run the VPN in one of two modes: everywhere except listed sites/apps, or only on listed sites/apps. It's one of the cleaner implementations of the idea. (When split tunneling actually helps →)
- A kill switch is included, and paid plans bundle AdGuard DNS Personal for network-level ad and tracker filtering — a sensible pairing given who makes it.
The network is the visible trade-off: 70+ locations is a fraction of what ExpressVPN or NordVPN operate. Coverage of major regions is fine, but if you need a specific small market, check the location list before paying.
Pricing
| Plan | Per month | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $11.99 | no money-back guarantee |
| 1 year | $3.99 ($47.88 billed) | 30-day money-back guarantee |
| 2 years | $2.99 | 30-day money-back guarantee |
Two things worth knowing. First, the 30-day refund applies only to yearly and longer plans bought from the official site — the monthly plan is excluded, which is unusual and worth noticing before you test with a monthly subscription. Second, the AdGuard ad blocker is not included; it's a separate license, and the bundle discounts AdGuard runs on its own site change frequently.
The free tier
The free plan gives you 3 GB of traffic per month, 2 devices, and a reduced set of locations — no card required. That's not enough to live on, but it's enough to genuinely test the protocol on the networks you care about, which is exactly what a free VPN tier should be for. (Most free VPNs fail our sniff test entirely — here's how to tell the safe ones from the harvesters.)
Privacy: good policy, still no audit
AdGuard VPN's policy states it doesn't log your activity or connections, and the company's long track record in the ad-blocking world gives it more reputational skin in the game than a typical no-name VPN. The jurisdiction is Cyprus — EU privacy law applies.
But the claim remains unaudited. AdGuard has said publicly that it postponed an independent audit to prioritize open-sourcing the protocol first, and that auditing is next. Open-sourcing TrustTunnel is real transparency and shouldn't be discounted — but a protocol audit and a no-logs audit are different things, and as of mid-2026 competitors like NordVPN, ExpressVPN and hide.me have repeatedly passed independent no-logs audits while AdGuard has not yet had one. (Why audits matter and what they actually prove →)
Who it's for — and the honest caveats
AdGuard VPN makes the most sense if you want traffic that doesn't look like a VPN — for restrictive networks, travel to censorship-heavy countries, or ISPs that throttle VPN connections — and you like the idea of an ad-blocking company's DNS filtering built into the same subscription. The 2-year price of $2.99/month is competitive for what's included.
The trade-offs, stated plainly: no independent no-logs audit yet, a smaller server network than the big providers, and no refund on the monthly plan. If audited privacy is your first requirement, an audited provider is still the safer pick until AdGuard follows through on its stated auditing plans.
Bottom line
- TrustTunnel protocol, now fully open-source — VPN traffic that passes as ordinary HTTPS, verifiable by anyone.
- 70+ locations, 10 devices, Exclusions split tunneling, kill switch, AdGuard DNS included, apps on effectively everything.
- $2.99/month on the 2-year plan with a 30-day refund; a real 3 GB/month free tier to test with.
- Weighed against: no independent audit yet and a mid-sized network.
A technically interesting, honestly priced VPN from a company with a real reputation to protect — one audit away from an unreserved recommendation.
This review reflects publicly available information at the time of writing and is not a paid placement. Features, pricing, and policies change — confirm current details on the provider's official site.
