# The comparison map

This documentation compares URnetwork against twenty-one other networks, one
document per product. This page is the overview: every product in those
comparisons, plus URnetwork itself, becomes one dot on a two-axis map,
scored from the same evidence the individual pages cite. The horizontal axis
is a verifiable anonymization index. It asks what the service can see and
how you would know: whether any single party holds both who you are and
what you do, whether "no logs" is verifiable rather than promised, whether
encryption runs through the service or only to it, and whether the key
exchange resists harvest-now-decrypt-later attacks. The vertical axis is a
connection quality index. It asks whether the connection is good enough to
live on: latency, throughput, egress quality, availability, and the ways in.

Each axis is a weighted sum of 0–10 sub-scores assigned against anchors
fixed before any product was scored. The method is on the
[scoring methodology](/docs/comparison-methodology) page and the full anchor
ladders are on the [scores](/docs/comparison-scores) page, so any coordinate
here can be recomputed rather than trusted.

![Two-axis map of 22 networks: verifiable anonymization index against connection quality index, with the axes crossing at the scale center. URnetwork, Obscura, Mullvad and IVPN occupy the top-right quadrant, Obscura on the horizontal line itself; the mainstream VPN pack sits upper-left; Tor and NymVPN are far right at lower quality; the dVPNs and Hola sit lower-left; Apple Private Relay sits at the axes' crossing, within noise of both lines](/docs-assets/quadrant-comparison.svg)

*Positions are URnetwork's weighted scoring of the published evidence behind
these docs, not an independent measurement, plotted on 0–10 indexes whose
axes cross at the fixed scale center (5, 5).*

## The quadrants

The axes cross at (5.00, 5.00), the fixed center of the 0–10 scale, not an
average of the field: a position means the same thing whoever else is on
the chart, and adding or removing products moves nobody. One reading rule:
anything within a quarter point of a line sits on the line, not confidently
on either side of it.

**Verifiable Next Generation**, top right, means clear of the scale center
on both axes: privacy structure that can be checked rather than promised,
with a connection above the midpoint. Four products: URnetwork (7.30, 6.20);
[Obscura](/docs/compare-obscura) (6.60, 5.10), on the quality line itself
rather than clear of it; [Mullvad](/docs/compare-mullvad) (6.00, 6.20); and
[IVPN](/docs/compare-ivpn) (5.70, 5.85). The gap behind the group is real:
the next scores on the verifiable axis are Apple Private Relay's 5.10 on
the line itself and Windscribe's 4.60, clear water rather than rounding.
Mullvad holds the best-verified conduct record in the industry, including
the 2023 Swedish police raid that left with nothing and 0% measured
location mismatch; if external verification is your bar, its page
recommends Mullvad. Obscura's entry hop cannot read traffic for any user on
any platform, with no setting at all; the client is source-available rather
than open source, the backend is unpublished, and it ships no post-quantum
encryption. IVPN is the quadrant's most marginal member, clear of both
lines but nearest to them.

**Trust-Based Current Generation**, top left, is where most of the
commercial VPN industry lands: eleven single-company designs where the
operator terminates the tunnel and could see everything, with connection
quality at or above the midpoint. They all sit left of the vertical line
for the same structural reason: encryption to a company that decrypts
everything, however well run, is not encryption through it. Conduct varies
widely inside it; the per-product pages carry the records:
[Windscribe](/docs/compare-windscribe) (4.60, 6.80) comes closest to the
verifiable line, with open-source apps, a 2025 court dismissal, and a 2026
seizure that found servers running in RAM alone;
[Tailscale](/docs/compare-tailscale) (3.70, 7.25) posts the best quality
score on the map at its own job, a direct mesh between your machines, and
is not an egress-privacy product by default;
[Hotspot Shield](/docs/compare-hotspot-shield) (1.70, 5.50) sits at the far
edge, with the free tier's ad partners named in its own policy.

**Academic / Research**, bottom right, holds the strongest anonymization at
real cost to daily use. [Tor](/docs/compare-tor) (9.40, 3.30) is the
reference standard and the top score on the anonymization axis by a wide
margin; its cost is documented by its own community: relay-chain latency
and publicly listed exits that much of the web blocks or challenges. For
adversaries up to a state, its page and the experts agree: use Tor.
[NymVPN](/docs/compare-nymvpn) (7.50, 4.00) ships the strongest anonymity
design in commercial VPN, a live 5-hop mixnet with cover traffic, payment
unlinkability, and a published independent audit of the protocol itself,
which URnetwork does not have. The default Fast mode is a two-hop tunnel
without cover traffic; Nym's own docs state the mixnet's latency price.

**Legacy**, bottom left, means below the scale center on both axes. The
label describes position, not age: [Orchid](/docs/compare-orchid)
(3.40, 3.90), [Mysterium](/docs/compare-mysterium) (2.70, 4.90) and
[Sentinel](/docs/compare-sentinel) (2.40, 4.80) are young projects that
land here on thin verification, the latter two within noise of the quality
line. Only for [Hola](/docs/compare-hola) (0.25, 4.85) does the name carry
its full weight: the floor of the anonymization axis, with its own privacy
policy stating collection of browsing history with retention up to 12
months, and free users' devices enrolled as capacity for a commercial
proxy business.

One product belongs to no quadrant.
[Apple Private Relay](/docs/compare-apple-private-relay) (5.10, 4.95) sits
at the axes' crossing, inside noise of both lines. Its two-hop split is
enforced by encryption, per Apple's own architecture overview; it is held
at the middle of the verifiable axis by its closed implementation, by
non-collusion that is a corporate arrangement rather than mathematics, and
by the narrowest scope on the map: Safari and DNS on Apple hardware, no
location choice. An earlier version of this page placed it in Legacy on a
misdescription of its architecture; the disclosed rescore is on the
[score derivations](/docs/comparison-scores) page.

## Where URnetwork sits

URnetwork's dot is at (7.30, 6.20), in the top-right quadrant. No single
party holds both who you are and what you do: the provider never learns who
you are, and the operator relays bytes it cannot read, both by default at
launch. The entire stack is open source, including the operator's server
code. Egress is residential and city-targetable, with locations derived
from the connection the network observes.

Two caveats frame the whole map. These positions are URnetwork's own
scoring of published evidence, not an independent measurement. And nobody
has measured URnetwork from outside: IPinfo measured roughly 150,000 exit
IPs across 20 commercial providers and found only Mullvad, IVPN and
Windscribe with zero location mismatch, while URnetwork's residential,
presence-derived locations are a mechanism you can check in code, not a
third-party result.

URnetwork was scored on the same rubric as everyone else, and its costs are
printed here rather than footnoted:

- **No independent audit covers the protocol, the connect engine, or the
  operator's server code.** That holds its verifiability part at 6, below
  Mullvad's 9 and PIA's 8. Two 2025 third-party assessments cover other
  surfaces, a web-application and API penetration test and a passed
  Leviathan MASA AL2 assessment of the Android app that Leviathan itself
  scopes as not a holistic security evaluation; neither examined logging,
  retention, or the data path, and neither moved a score.
- **Two integrity fixes for the sealed session are still landing before
  launch.** Today a failed handshake leaves traffic flowing unsealed with
  no visible signal, and the key cross-check that would catch an operator
  substituting a provider key logs rather than refuses; the threat model
  documents both. The browser extension has no sealed session at all.
- **The latency and speed parts are structural judgments, both scored 5.**
  No outside measurement of URnetwork's latency or throughput exists in
  either direction; the one number in the corpus is URnetwork's own
  attributed 40 Mbps+ average streaming speed, which moves with the members
  carrying you.
- **It is not a torrenting product.** The engine drops BitTorrent-class
  traffic at the provider's edge, by design.

## What would change this picture

Every ordering claim here sits on two stability tests, a design
adopted from independent peer review: sampling the axis weights uniformly
with sub-scores frozen, and perturbing every sub-score by ±1 point at the
published weights. Design, seeds, exact fractions and a reproduction script
are on the [sensitivity analysis](/docs/comparison-sensitivity) page. The
main results:

1. **The lead over Mullvad is a weighting judgment, not a settled fact.**
URnetwork leads Mullvad on the verifiable axis in about 74% of sampled
weightings (exactly 71/96 of the weight space). A reader who weighs audits and
court evidence at about half the axis gets Mullvad first, a reasonable reading
rather than a mistake. Under ±1 score noise at the published weights,
URnetwork leads in 99.9% of draws. Before the disclosed rescore that recorded
URnetwork's sealed session as on by default, the same test read 55.55%, a coin
flip.

2. **The Obscura gap is one part wide.** URnetwork and Obscura tie 16–16
on the two structure parts and tie at 6 on verifiability; URnetwork's entire
0.70 lead is the post-quantum part, scored 7 against Obscura's 0. The
structure tie is earned differently: Obscura's entry-hop blindness is by
construction, URnetwork's seal is a shipped default with its integrity fixes
still landing. Every weighting that gives post-quantum any weight preserves
the order, a statement about the difference's shape rather than its
robustness; the informative test is score noise, where URnetwork keeps the
lead in 93.9% of draws. What would genuinely close the pair is Obscura
shipping post-quantum.

3. **NymVPN sits 0.20 ahead on the verifiable axis, and
the pair is unsettled.** URnetwork passes it in 67% of sampled weightings (the
order turns entirely on whether the post-quantum weight exceeds an eighth),
and under score noise NymVPN keeps its lead in about 69% of draws.

4. **The
quality axis is the loose one.** URnetwork's quality rank runs 1st to 15th of
22 across sampled weightings, and 4th to 11th under score noise, against the
tied-5th its point score suggests; its verifiable-axis rank stays within 1–4
across the same weight space. An earlier claim that no re-weighting could take
URnetwork's quality score below the center was withdrawn as circular (every
quality sub-score was assigned at least 5, so the bound followed from the
inputs); the withdrawal is recorded on the sensitivity page.

5. **The two
lines carry different confidence.** Only Apple Private Relay sits within noise
of the vertical line; no other product comes closer than 0.40, so no
defensible single-point re-score moves anyone else across it. The horizontal
line is the noisy one: Obscura sits a tenth above it, Apple, Mysterium, Hola
and Sentinel within a quarter point below, and TunnelBear, IPVanish and
Hotspot Shield within half a point above. Read all of those loosely; the
corner residents, Tor, NymVPN, URnetwork and Mullvad, do not move.

## The scores

The map's dots, one line per product, each linked to its head-to-head page.
The rank columns are intervals rather than points, on purpose: the 5th–95th
percentile of each product's rank (1 = highest) under the ±1 score-noise
test. Ranges under re-weighting are wider still; both sets are on the
[sensitivity analysis](/docs/comparison-sensitivity) page, and the complete
sub-score matrix is on the [score derivations](/docs/comparison-scores)
page.

| Product | X | Y | X rank | Y rank | Quadrant |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| [Tor](/docs/compare-tor) | 9.40 | 3.30 | 1 | 21–22 | Academic / Research |
| [NymVPN](/docs/compare-nymvpn) | 7.50 | 4.00 | 2–3 | 20–21 | Academic / Research |
| URnetwork | 7.30 | 6.20 | 2–4 | 4–11 | Verifiable Next Generation |
| [Obscura](/docs/compare-obscura) † | 6.60 | 5.10 | 3–5 | 12–19 | Verifiable Next Generation |
| [Mullvad](/docs/compare-mullvad) | 6.00 | 6.20 | 4–6 | 4–11 | Verifiable Next Generation |
| [IVPN](/docs/compare-ivpn) | 5.70 | 5.85 | 5–7 | 6–13 | Verifiable Next Generation |
| [Apple Private Relay](/docs/compare-apple-private-relay) ‡ | 5.10 | 4.95 | 6–8 | 13–19 | On both lines |
| [Windscribe](/docs/compare-windscribe) | 4.60 | 6.80 | 7–10 | 1–5 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [PIA](/docs/compare-pia) | 4.20 | 5.75 | 8–13 | 7–14 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [ExpressVPN](/docs/compare-expressvpn) | 4.20 | 6.10 | 8–13 | 4–11 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Proton VPN](/docs/compare-proton-vpn) | 3.90 | 6.70 | 9–15 | 1–6 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [NordVPN](/docs/compare-nordvpn) | 3.90 | 6.10 | 9–15 | 4–11 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Tailscale](/docs/compare-tailscale) | 3.70 | 7.25 | 10–16 | 1–3 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Cloudflare WARP](/docs/compare-cloudflare-warp) | 3.55 | 6.70 | 11–16 | 1–6 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Surfshark](/docs/compare-surfshark) | 3.50 | 6.00 | 11–17 | 5–12 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Orchid](/docs/compare-orchid) | 3.40 | 3.90 | 12–17 | 20–22 | Legacy |
| [Mysterium](/docs/compare-mysterium) † | 2.70 | 4.90 | 16–20 | 14–19 | Legacy |
| [TunnelBear](/docs/compare-tunnelbear) | 2.65 | 5.45 | 16–20 | 9–16 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Sentinel](/docs/compare-sentinel) † | 2.40 | 4.80 | 17–20 | 15–19 | Legacy |
| [IPVanish](/docs/compare-ipvanish) | 2.35 | 5.45 | 17–21 | 9–16 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Hotspot Shield](/docs/compare-hotspot-shield) | 1.70 | 5.50 | 20–21 | 9–16 | Trust-Based Current Generation |
| [Hola](/docs/compare-hola) † | 0.25 | 4.85 | 22 | 14–19 | Legacy |

*† Within a quarter point of the horizontal line: read Mysterium, Sentinel
and Hola as on it from below, Obscura from above.*

*‡ Within noise of both lines at once: read Apple Private Relay as sitting
at the axes' crossing, in no quadrant.*

## Limits

Two axes cannot hold everything. Price, device limits, torrenting policy,
port forwarding, jurisdiction, and ownership are all real reasons to choose
a product, and none of them is on this chart. The per-product pages carry
them.

No weight or axis was adjusted after scoring began, and no score was chosen to
produce a placement. Three changes since scoring are disclosed with full
re-derivations on the pages below: Apple Private Relay was rescored after peer
review showed the evidence base had misdescribed its architecture — an error
that had run in URnetwork's favour, so correcting it cut against us; URnetwork
was rescored when its sealed session was ruled on by default at launch, which
did move its dot in URnetwork's favour and is flagged as such; and Obscura,
the closest architectural competitor, was added on 2026-08-07 with every rank
interval recomputed. The standing rule applies to URnetwork itself: if new
evidence lands, an independent audit, an outside measurement, a competitor
shipping verifiable structural separation, the move is to rescore and
republish, in that order.

The depth this page defers lives in three places:

- The [scoring methodology](/docs/comparison-methodology): the axis
  weights, the comparator-selection rule, the change ledger, and how the
  map is built.
- The [score derivations](/docs/comparison-scores): every product's
  sub-scores, the anchor ladders they were assigned against, the evidence
  and reasoning behind each number, and the disclosed rescores.
- The [sensitivity analysis](/docs/comparison-sensitivity): the Monte Carlo
  design and seeds, the rank intervals under both tests, the withdrawn
  claim, and the reproduction script.

Every individual comparison linked above states where the other product
wins, because all of them win somewhere. More questions are answered in the
[FAQ](/docs/faq).