I went looking for a VPN recommendation and found two sites with almost the same name, near identical layouts, and different lists. One reads like a community wiki and the other reads like a review site. I do not know which one to weight, and picking wrong means I buy a two year subscription on bad advice. What is the actual relationship between them and which should I be reading in 2026?
Softly against the whole framing: do not outsource this to either site. Write down what you are actually defending against, then evaluate against that. A VPN chosen because it topped a list is worthless if your threat is your employer's device management, and overkill if your threat is a coffee shop network. The lists are useful for excluding obvious rubbish and useless for choosing between two decent options.
I bought a three year plan from the top recommendation on a site that turned out to be entirely affiliate driven. The provider was fine for about eight months and then got quietly acquired, and the ownership change never showed up on the site that recommended it because nothing there was ever revisited. That is the real cost of a stale list: not that it was wrong on the day, but that nobody updates it when the facts move.
Regardless of these two specifically, here is the test I apply to any recommendation site before I read a word of it. Do outbound links carry affiliate or referral parameters, is there a funding page that says plainly where money comes from, and can I see the edit history for a recommendation changing. If all three are yes you can read it critically. If the first is yes and the other two are no, you are reading advertising with citations.
The edit history one is underrated. A list that has never removed anything is not a list, it is a directory of people who paid.
Read privacyguides.org, read the criteria page before the recommendations, and treat anything on the old domain as marketing. Then pay monthly for the first quarter regardless of who you pick.
@coldstorage_cy · 3w ago · 3 replies
There is a specific history here and it explains everything you are seeing. The people writing privacytools.io lost contact with the founder, who had been largely absent since 2019, and got worried about the domain lapsing, so in September 2021 the active contributors voted to move the project to privacyguides.org and announced the migration mid month. The founder reappeared about a week later, the redirect was removed at his request, and the old domain was subsequently turned into a heavily search optimised site recommending VPNs on commercial terms, which is precisely the thing the original project existed to warn people about. So: privacyguides.org is the continuation of the community project, and the old domain is now a different thing wearing the old name.
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@airgap_amir · 4w ago
That explains the tone difference completely. One of them reads like people arguing about criteria and the other reads like it wants me to click a button.
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@cors_error_cleo · 4w ago
Worth adding that Privacy Guides publishes its criteria and its changes in the open, so you can go and read why something got added or dropped rather than trusting the list.
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