Surfshark

Completely legal — like every consumer VPN in Australia — and it's our value pick for Australians. Surfshark runs local servers in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide, with pricing from US$1.99/mo on the 2-year plan. Anything unlawful without a VPN stays unlawful through one.

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Yes — Surfshark supports OpenVPN over both UDP and TCP, alongside its default WireGuard and IKEv2 protocols. You can switch protocol in the app or download manual OpenVPN configuration files for routers and third-party clients. In practice, WireGuard is faster and more battery-friendly for everyday use, so most people leave it on; OpenVPN stays the compatibility workhorse for older devices, restrictive networks or hardware that doesn't speak WireGuard.

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Usually not — Surfshark handles Netflix and the other major platforms reliably, and its unlimited simultaneous connections make it popular for streaming on every screen in the house at once. As with any VPN, platforms occasionally flag an individual server; switching to another one, or asking 24/7 support for a working server, fixes it in moments. It won't guarantee a specific foreign catalogue forever, but for the price it's one of the more dependable streamers here — and cheaper than the streaming specialist, ExpressVPN.

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Yes — for the money, nothing in our line-up beats it. Surfshark's no-logs policy has been independently audited by Deloitte, it runs RAM-only servers (data can't persist through a reboot) and uses WireGuard for fast connections. Its standout feature is unlimited simultaneous devices — you can protect the whole household on one subscription, where most rivals cap you at five or ten. It's based in the Netherlands, and the entry price (US$1.99/mo on the 2-year plan) is the lowest of our leaders. It's the obvious pick when value and device count matter most.

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The honest trade-offs: the introductory rate (US$1.99/mo) rises substantially once the promo term ends, so budget for the renewal; the apps upsell optional extras at checkout; and the server network is younger and a little smaller than NordVPN's. There's also no free tier, only the 30-day money-back guarantee for testing. None of it dents the core deal, though — audited no-logs privacy plus genuinely unlimited devices at the lowest price of any provider here, which is exactly why it's our value pick.

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Surfshark handles IPv6 by blocking it on most platforms to prevent leaks: your traffic runs over IPv4 inside the encrypted tunnel, so an IPv6 connection on your network can't leak your real address around it. Full dual-stack IPv6 routing inside the tunnel isn't offered — but for leak-safety, blocking is the correct default, and it means you don't have to configure anything yourself.

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Yes — every Surfshark server runs the company's own private DNS, resolved inside the encrypted tunnel, so your ISP can't see the sites you look up. It also includes leak protection to stop DNS requests escaping outside the tunnel, and you can confirm it's working with the built-in DNS leak test in the app. That keeps your browsing away from Australia's two-year ISP metadata logs.

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