How we review

Our method, its boundaries, and the things we are not in a position to tell you. Last updated 24 September 2026.

What kind of assessment this is

This site publishes explanatory guides, not laboratory reviews. The distinction matters, so here it is in full.

A laboratory review measures a product: it runs a controlled sample set against the software on a standardised bench, records detection and false-positive rates, and publishes the methodology so others can challenge it. That work is expensive and specialised. We do not do it, and no one should treat anything on this site as though we did.

An explanatory guide describes how a category works, what a product claims to do, how those claims can be checked, and what the buyer should look for. That is what we publish.

The five steps behind each article

1. Read the vendor’s own documentation — product pages, support articles, terms of sale, privacy policy. This establishes what is being claimed and sold.
2. Establish the mechanism independently. How does the technology work, according to sources with no commercial interest in the product? Platform documentation, standards bodies, academic and agency publications.
3. Check the claims against primary sources. A test result is only usable if we can name the laboratory, the round and the date. Anything we cannot locate is not reported.
4. Identify what the reader already has. Much of what a suite sells is already present in a current operating system. An honest guide has to say so.
5. Write down the limits. Every article states what we could not verify.

What we could not verify in our current article

Stated plainly, because a guide that only lists its strengths is a sales page:

• We have not independently tested the detection performance of any product named on this site. Our article points to AV-TEST, AV-Comparatives and SE Labs for that, and readers should consult their reports directly.
• We do not reproduce prices, plan names or device limits, because we cannot guarantee they will still be correct when you read the page.
• We have not audited any vendor’s VPN logging policy. Claims about what a VPN provider does or does not retain are the provider’s claims, not findings of ours.
• We have not tested customer support response times.

Why there are no scores on this site

A score implies measurement. Presenting an unmeasured opinion as “8.7 out of 10” borrows the authority of a laboratory without doing its work, and on a page that earns commission it also flatters the product that pays. We would rather write the sentence than assign the number.

Conflicts of interest

We earn affiliate commission on purchases made through links on this site. That is disclosed at the top of every page, beside every commercial button and in the advertising disclosure. No vendor has editorial input. See the editorial policy for the full position.