VPN software lets you manually select a secure server in a location of your choice. Tor is cheap, but it puts you at risk of exposing your true IP address or being identified as suspicious if you don’t know what you’re doing. The Tor network is only designed to handle traffic using TCP protocol too, which means voice and video traffic using UDP has to travel outside the encrypted connection. However, the trade-off for this large network is an unreliable connection and extremely slow speeds. onion domain name - part of the so-called ‘Dark Web’. Tor also lets you access a number of unlisted websites with the. When you use a VPN, you need to trust the VPN service provider.īecause each Tor node only knows the identity of the server before it, it is impossible for anyone to reverse engineer your connection’s route through the Onion network. You don’t need to place your trust in anyone when you use Tor. The table below compares the main differences between the Tor browser and VPN software: CriteriaĪ VPN routes your connection through a single, privately-owned VPN server, whereas Tor bounces your connection through a number of volunteer-run, randomly-assigned servers.

However, they don’t offer the same level of anonymity as Tor. On the other hand, VPNs are faster, more widely-compatible, and better for location spoofing, unblocking, and P2P file-sharing. Tor is designed to achieve complete anonymity at the cost of speed, compatibility, and convenience.

Tor vs vpn vs proxy