Surfshark vs Nord?

Anyone in here had both Surfshark & nord? I’m currently on nord & my subscription is about to end. From what i gather Surfshark is pretty much the same company as nord anyways. The deals i found with nord in the past just aren’t there any more. Currently surfshark is just much cheaper & the deals i found for nord just aren’t there anymore. For those who have tried both what have your experience. What i’ve generally liked about nord is the speed. I’ve only been on PIA & nord. PIA (at least years ago i didn’t like) & have been very happy with the speed of nord. One thing i like with surfshark is apparently they have an app for linux rather than command line like nord.

I have had both. I moved from Nord because I got a better price and unlimited devices with Surf

I have had ExpressVPN, NordVPN and SurfShark.

Most of my use is on a Fire Cube and SurfShark is the best performer for me.

FWIW - the countries I connect to are USA, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

I like the surfshark app for mobile, fire TV, and android TV better. But nord is waaaaaay faster on PC. Both have their strengths.

Nord good for streaming and have no issues with almost all apps even ChatGPT and Microsoft CoPilot, but speed slow. Surfshark is cheap and good, but some servers can’t access streaming content especially Amazon Prime. Surfshark can’t work with any AI app. Surfshark speed is definitely fast and even for the Multihop, which you can mix match your entry-exit servers, and the speed is still amazingly fast.

Surfshark> nord. Strictly for unlimited devices. Yes I know it can be unlimited with nord if you setup it up via router but that’s open vpn not nordlynx. I can do the router route using surfshark wireguard

I currently have SS until 8th of Feb. I was with Nord before that for 5 years. Going back to Nord. Never had a problem with Nord. SS is constant problems.

So I decided to try it yesterday. There is so much disagreement that its all i could do. I will give it the 30 day trial. There are some good & bad so far

The good

  1. So far the connection seems stable. Back years ago (probably 5-6 years). PIA was a POS (maybe its better now). I would be without internet on my phone & would have to disconnect/reconnect from the VPN to fix it. That hadn’t been an issue with Nord & hopefully it doesn’t happen with SS.
  2. They a have a GUI app for linux which is both good & bad. The good is they have one & its relatively at feature parity with other non-Linux clients.
  3. Client seems to have the features i need. Auto Connect, DNS blocker for both malware/ads, Kill Switch. The abililty to set wifi connections to safe so it doesn’t auto connect on those

The bad:

  1. I miss the map of where i’m connecting to in the nord app
  2. While the connection client is descent i like nords better
  3. The ability to connect to the fastest server is questionable. I am in Central US & the first time i connected i was in freaking Nigeria. Huh!?!?! That is shady in itself. The second time I was in the UK. Now i seem to frequently connect to San Francisco which is quite far with me. Nord, in general, connected close to me. Servers were 1.5-3.5 hour drive from me. I looked & SS does have servers in those locations but doesn’t seem to connect me to them. I want to trust this functionality.
  4. While they do have a linux GUI app its only available as a .deb file (nord didn’t have a GUI app). I generally use either arch or more commonly fedora. I’m sure its in the AUR (everything seems to be there) but unless you want to bank on some joe out there converting the deb to an rpm & he does it quickly when there is an update then thats not that great. SS should be doing it. Honest nord only had a command line app but the command app was quite good & you could use it with any distro. Maybe they have a console app too. I don’t know i need to search for it.

What I haven’t been able to test is the speeds. I will soon. That I generally don’t use an VPN is for to get around Geo-blocking. I had a vpn for 6 years or more & i have never used that feature. I have generally been able to watch whatever i want to watch. So whether SS Is good for that i don’t know. My primary use is to get around sleezy ISPs & carriers. Could be these VPNs be doing the same thing? Of course but at this point i trust them more than the carriers/ISPs. I’ve had experience with both doing bad things & at this point i haven’t had the same experience with VPNs

How is the included Antivirus with Surfshark?
I have Kaspersy and it is always clashing with my NordVpn. They can’t seem to work together.
So when my Kaspersky and NordVpn are up for renewal I am thinking of just getting Surfshark which has a plan that includes both…

I use a Nord amd SurfShark and I say Nord all day long.

Nord is 100% cash back on Rakuten right now. You’re welcome.

I am using Nord right now but the speeds seem slow for me on speed tests. I am also thinking of switching.

Do not choose SS.

This coming from someone who fled SS with almost a year of subscription left. Now using another VPN, happy customer. Night and day.

Both are bad. But nord is much better than surfshit. SS leaks ipv6 address

Unfortunately i have hit the “missing” feature that i need that will probably lean me towards asking for a refund. The feature exists on the windows/mac client but not on linux. Surfshark calls it “Invisible on LAN”. It looks like like on the linux client it is on and you can’t change it (the toggle is missing on the linux client) which means from the linux client i can’t see anything & nothing can see the linux client which is definitely not what i want.

Can you be more specific? What are the constant problems?

Thanks for your feedback! We have plans to provide our GUI app in different packages for more Linux distros. As for the fastest location option, we’d like to take a look at what the problem might be - it would be great if you could contact us at [email protected] and provide a diagnostics report.

Lastly, we try to provide the best possible design experience and we experiment with it. I can’t definitely promise you’ll see a world map someday for the locations, but anything might be possible :wink:

I would not use their antivirus if you already have a much better one. I heard their antivirus is a reskin of a popular but bad antivirus.

I had a clash with ESET Endpoint on Linux. ESET Warning message “Web access protection access is non-functional” - probably the clash point with Surfshark.

First what VPN did you go to and what made you flee?