Eight out of ten. That is how often NordVPN beat ExpressVPN on latency during my peak-hour congestion tests this year, and it is the kind of number most NordVPN-vs-ExpressVPN comparisons would slap in a headline and call it a day. A ratio like that reads like a verdict. It is not one, at least not by itself, because a peak-hour ping advantage says nothing about actual network performance for the stuff a VPN gets used for all day, such as SSH sessions, code pushes, video calls that cannot afford to stutter.
Quick disclosure before anything else: this site runs on affiliate links, and if you buy a VPN through one of mine I earn a commission at no extra cost to you. I only write about services I have actually paid for and pointed a stopwatch at, NordVPN included — the full policy sits on the about page if you want the fine print.
Two years of doing this has meant cycling through more VPN subscriptions than most people would bother with. Private Internet Access earned a long trial for the sheer size of its server list — more than 35,000 machines worldwide — Surfshark got one for being cheap enough not to think twice about, and one no-logs provider got dropped fast after its Linux client started crashing on every kernel update (not exactly what you want from something meant to run quietly in the background of a machine you use for actual work).
Throughput Percentage Is the Wrong Headline Number
Here is the myth worth correcting: that whichever VPN gets closer to your baseline speed in a single test is the one to trust. My own baseline is a standard gigabit fiber connection, and on a good run either NordVPN or ExpressVPN can post numbers close enough that the difference would not change how a video call feels (nobody notices an extra two percent of throughput mid-meeting). What actually separates them is what happens once the network gets busy, not what a single clean speedtest.net run says when nobody else nearby is streaming anything.
Protocol choice alone will not settle it either. I have run the same kind of side-by-side test across several VPN services at once, and the ranking reshuffles depending on which server you land on that day, a detail that never makes it into a marketing page.
What Peak-Hour Congestion Actually Stresses
The 2023 breach at my employer is what got me paying attention to any of this in the first place. It pushed me to sit down and sketch out a plain accounting of what I was actually protecting against, and that exercise mattered more for picking a VPN than any speed chart has. Both NordVPN and ExpressVPN encrypt traffic with AES-256, which is standard enough at this point that it barely differentiates them on its own; the tax it charges in CPU cycles at each end of the tunnel is where the two providers start to separate.
NordVPN's NordLynx protocol is built on WireGuard, and it is the one that has consistently pulled ahead in my congestion tests during the evening crunch. Some of that slowdown is not even the VPN's fault; an ISP quietly classifying encrypted tunnel traffic differently once the network gets busy will drag down any provider running through it, which is worth remembering before handing all the credit or blame to the app itself.
NordLynx and Lightway Take Different Roads
ExpressVPN's answer is Lightway, its own protocol, and it is genuinely pleasant to use: it's fast to connect, easy on battery on my MacBook Pro, and built on RAM-only TrustedServer infrastructure that wipes itself clean on every reboot, so nothing sits on a hard drive waiting to be pulled later. For a long stretch it was my default recommendation for anyone who wanted a VPN that just works without fiddling. But in my testing, NordVPN has been landing in the 85 to 90 percent range of my base ISP speed fairly consistently, while ExpressVPN sits closer to 75 to 80 percent. Ten percentage points does not sound dramatic until it is the gap between a clean video call and the spinning wheel right after a long day.
Does the Latency Edge Show Up in Real Work?
The honest test is not a benchmark chart, it is whether the tunnel disappears from your attention entirely. I remember pulling up a terminal at a coffee shop near the Ballard Locks, SSHing into my home server the way I do a dozen times a day, and only realizing afterward that the VPN had been running the whole session. The prompt came back exactly as fast as it does on my own network, no hitch to notice. That kind of invisibility is the real win condition, more than any single percentage on a chart. It is also why NordVPN's latency edge makes it my top pick for online gaming, where a missed frame during peak hours is impossible to ignore in a way a slightly slower file sync never is.
The Questions a Speed Test Cannot Answer
None of that settles every question a VPN needs to answer, either. Callum, a friend from a Seattle privacy meetup who will not trust a line of closed-source networking code, always asks whether a provider's no-logs claim has actually survived an independent audit before he will consider it — a fair question that a ping test cannot answer. A kill switch matters more than either provider's top speed the moment a connection actually drops, and testing it is a wholly separate exercise from testing throughput. A DNS resolver leak is its own failure mode too, unrelated to how fast the tunnel feels day to day.
Split tunneling changes the math again, since deciding what traffic leaves the tunnel and what stays local can matter more for a home network than a few points of throughput. Dedicated IPs solve a different problem entirely, mostly getting past services that flag shared VPN exit nodes, and have nothing to do with winning a speed test. Port forwarding is its own rabbit hole, largely disconnected from which protocol posts the higher number. Router-level VPN setups shift the math once more, since the whole house shares a single tunnel instead of every device racing its own. And a browser-only proxy will never benchmark the same way as a full system tunnel, so comparing the two head to head compares different tools, not different providers.
Picking Value Once the Speed Numbers Even Out
Once the speed gap narrows to something a normal workflow will not notice, the decision shifts to cost and longevity. CyberGhost VPN is worth a look here: its 45-day money-back guarantee runs longer than most competitors offer, and its server network, more than 11,000 machines across 100 countries, means congestion is rarely the bottleneck, even if performance outside its stronger regions can get inconsistent. NordVPN asks for a two-year commitment to unlock its best pricing (a bigger ask upfront), but for a workflow that is not going anywhere, it tends to pay off the same way buying networking gear outright beats renting it indefinitely from an ISP. I went looking for more angles on this too, including a separate pass at the fastest WireGuard-based options for home lab servers, and NordLynx kept landing at the top of that comparison as well. A reader named Radek Soucek emails me his own benchmark notes every few months, unprompted, complete with raw spreadsheets, the kind of habit that keeps you honest about your own methodology.
So Which One Actually Wins the Router?
For my workflow, NordVPN wins, mainly because the latency advantage holds up under the exact kind of congestion that used to make peak-hour work sessions miserable. ExpressVPN is still the one I point non-technical friends toward, since Lightway is close enough on speed and the app asks nothing of anyone. But for the people staring at their own logs instead of taking marketing copy at face value, Nord has earned the spot this year. If the numbers here match what you are trying to solve for, NordVPN's current plans are worth a look.