Kape Technologies

On July 20, 2026, Mullvad — the VPN that built its entire brand on being above suspicion — published a blog post about its founder’s private donation to a Swedish political party. And the privacy community lit up. For a company that refuses ads, refuses affiliate marketing, and refuses to ask for your email, even the appearance of a political lean felt like a crack in the porcelain. That single event is a sharp entry point into the comparison nobody on the English web has done: CyberGhost vs Mullvad. Not because they are alike — they are opposite poles. CyberGhost is the streaming machine: 100+ countries, one-click Netflix profiles, $2.19/month countdown pricing, a 45-day refund. Mullvad is the privacy purist: anonymous 16-digit account, flat €5/month forever, no marketing budget at all. We tested both on the same 1 Gbps fiber line, ran the same leak checks, and priced out a three-year hold on each. Here is the data. ...

ExpressVPN’s Lightway protocol hits 850 Mbps on a 1 Gbps line — a 15% speed loss that beats every mainstream competitor in our 2026 benchmarks. And it belongs to Kape Technologies, the company behind Crossrider, whose adware software triggered malware alerts on over 25 million machines before the pivot into VPN ownership. So that tension — engineering excellence versus controversial corporate ownership — is the real story here. But most VPN review sites won’t touch it. ...

Look, Private Internet Access forces you to hold two conflicting facts at once. Its no-log policy has been proven in US federal court — not once, but across three separate cases between 2018 and 2022. Yet it’s owned by Kape Technologies, a publicly traded company whose past life as Crossrider (an adware distributor) makes many privacy advocates uneasy. (Same parent company behind ExpressVPN and CyberGhost, by the way.) So which side carries more weight? ...

CyberGhost VPN offers 11,000+ servers across 100+ countries and a 45-day money-back guarantee for roughly $2.19/month on the two-year plan. That’s more servers than ExpressVPN and NordVPN combined, at a fraction of the price. But it also operates under Kape Technologies — the same parent company whose predecessor (Crossrider) built a business on adware distribution. So this CyberGhost VPN 2026 review puts those 11K servers through a speed test, streaming check, and privacy audit. ...

ExpressVPN still unblocks Netflix US on the first try. It still runs on RAM-only servers confirmed by annual PwC audits. And it still belongs to Kape Technologies — the company whose predecessor built adware that landed on millions of machines. Yet all three statements are true at the same time. And that tension is what makes an ExpressVPN review in 2026 different from a ProtonVPN review or a Mullvad review. ...