Which feature is your favorite? Is there a particular feature you’d like to understand more thoroughly?
Alternatively, are there any aspects you’d like to enhance or upgrade if given the opportunity? Share your thoughts in the comments.
I can start first. For me, Threat Protection takes the top spot, imho having a single app covering all aspects of internet security is not just convenient but downright fantastic. Yes, yes, like all of you, sometimes I’ve run into issues while having it on, but again, having VPN and Threat Protection combo is a huge plus. If it were in my power, I would enhance Threat Protection by incorporating an allowlist for specific websites.
Will be waiting for your constructive feedback and suggestions, so I could forward it for Nord’s product team consideration.
Meshnet - can’t imagine a use case for me. I usually transfer files through cloud (Google disk) or telegram (for smaller ones).
Dark Web Monitor - good thing in theory, but usually I don’t care about my login/passwords on most of the websites. Stole or sell them, I don’t care.
I tend to use hard ones and change them manually from time to time on the mandatory sites, like banks or socials. Multi-factor authentication is the way to go. Also, I hope we can go passwordless everywhere sometimes soon.
Threat Protection - haven’t been using any anti-virus software for like 5 years or more. If you’re an experienced user, you know where not to click or what not to download. Also, nowadays security on most platforms is good enough for most users.
For me, I would trade all these features and even wouldn’t mind increased price for a better VPN. Maybe
new protocols, more locations, speed and trusted servers.
Many countries tend to block information or even parts of internet nowadays, and I believe people should have the ability to pass the restrictions of freedom.
For example, Nord works fine in countries where I don’t need it, but immediately stopped working in Russia when needed.
Since Apple introduced direct VPN support in tvOS, I would like to see a tvOS version for AppleTV.
I use Flashrouter with NordVPN on it but it is not reliable and I lose a LOT of throughput.
If Nord wants to keep me as a customer when my initial subscription plan ends they need to:
Allow port forwarding when connected to p2p servers. It is really false advertising to say ‘Nord is great for p2p’ without this feature.
Make it easy for users to get WireGuard credentials so we can connect to Nord servers with routers directly and/or use the default WireGuard client instead of Nord’s software.
I do not care about Meshnet, Dark Web Monitor or Threat Protection. I tried all these features and they are all much worse than competitor’s products. Specifically, Chrome’s remote desktop >> Meshnet and Adguard >> the other two.
So I don’t want more features. I want it to be easy to use the core service (a fast and reliable VPN) to its full potential!
My favorite feature is NORDvpns performance in China. Oh wait. There isn’t any performance but according to your advertising it works great in China. According to your tech support form emails I need tweak this and that but it never worked. On iPhone or pc.
I dont need any of the additional features. I dont care for them.
All I want is the core VPN to be fast and reliable, split tunneling working as intended, and killswitch. Why can those be perfected before adding unnecessary “feature”?
Great insights, thank you for writing it all down. I agree with you that for advanced users who have more information and interest in cybersecurity, some features may seem unattractive or redundant. But at the same time, I think that there is a really large number of people (let’s look at breached services news and numbers) who are beginners at this.
Regarding Russia… I don’t think it’s worth having high expectations for VPN performance in that country, especially considering their ever-changing attitude toward VPN service users.
Can you share what was much worse? Maybe the community will have some advice on what you can try to get more out of these features.
Regarding your 1 and 2 described points. I may be misremembering this, but Nord’s position on port forwarding is that they will not implement it for security reasons. Their rationale is that the more ports are open, the more chances bad actors have to penetrate.
WireGuard credentials - if I’m not mixing the info, I saw they mentioned in their soc. media that they are working on it, so maybe someday we will hear more about it. To bring clarity about WireGuard, I suggest you try asking their team directly on soc. media or via live chat. If you get an answer, please share it with us.
Simply stated, the ad blocking by Nord’s Threat Protection is not as eligant as Adguard. Adguard fills in the empty space where the ad used to be much more cleanly. And their software is much lighter weight and never crashes, in contrast to Nord.
Meshnet requires me to run Nord’s application all the time on all my computers, and I find it resource heavy and buggy in that it crashes or freezes regularly. In contrast, I already have Chrome on all my computers and remote desktop works great.
Port forwarding. Maybe it is less secure, but I want the option to use it if I choose.
WireGuard credentials. There are already instructions out there (on this subreddit actually!) for extracting WireGuard credentials with Linux or MacOS. I have done this using the Linux method and the credentials work just fine on Windows with the default WireGuard app. So Nord does not need to do anything, just make it easier to get the credentials and officially support it!