Do you actually need a VPN in Costa Rica?
For access, no: the sites and apps travellers rely on are generally available, and there is no law against using a VPN. For protection, it is one of the most useful places to run one. Much of daily life for a visitor happens on shared networks: the cafe you work from, the coworking space, the guesthouse where one router serves every room. A VPN encrypts what you do on all of them, and it helps keep banking, email and other cautious services treating you as if you never left home.
Things also break at inconvenient hours when you are abroad. Both of our picks run 24/7 support over live chat and email, so there is help at 2am: NordVPN and Surfshark both answer around the clock.
What a VPN does and does not do in Costa Rica
It does three things well. It encrypts your traffic, which is the whole point on open Wi-Fi. It lets you appear to be connecting from home, which helps home services behave as if you were still there. And it puts the devices you carry under one subscription, ten of them on NordVPN and unlimited on Surfshark.
It does not speed anything up. Encryption adds a small overhead, so on a slow beach-town connection a VPN makes things slightly slower, not faster. And it is not needed to reach the everyday internet here: Costa Rica does not run nationwide blocking of major platforms, so anyone selling a VPN as the way to open the Costa Rican internet is solving a problem you are unlikely to have.
Recommended VPNs for travel
NordVPN, best for short trips and month-by-month plans
It is the one for you if you are covering yourself, or you and a partner, and want something simple to run and easy to forget about. One plan covers 10 devices, and the apps are quick to install and easy to switch off and on as you need. Plans run by the month, the year or over two years, all with a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Surfshark, best for long stays and unlimited devices
It is the one for you if one subscription needs to cover everyone. Connections are unlimited, so every phone, laptop and tablet you travel with, and anyone you share a household with, runs on the same plan at once. The same plan lengths and the same 30-day money-back guarantee apply.
Server networks and speeds
Speed for a traveller mostly comes down to distance: the closer the server, the shorter the detour your traffic takes, and the less speed you give up. In Costa Rica the right default is a nearby server, and the exception is when you specifically need to appear at home, for your bank or your email, in which case you accept the longer detour for that session.
Connection quality varies widely between the capital and the coast, so we do not publish speed numbers; they would tell you more about the cafe you sat in than about the VPN. The 30-day money-back guarantees on NordVPN and Surfshark are the honest way to test both on the connections you will actually use, in the places you will actually stay.
How to choose between them
The differences that matter fit in one table, and the last row is the promise you should not believe anywhere.
| Feature | NordVPN | Surfshark |
|---|
| 1 month | $14.99 | $16.45 |
| 12 months, total upfront | $65.88 | $50.85 |
| 24 months, total upfront | $94.23 | $67.23 |
| Devices per plan | 10 | Unlimited |
| Kill switch and auto-connect | Yes | Yes |
| Audited no-log policy | Yes (2025) | Yes (2025) |
| Money-back guarantee | 30 days | 30 days |
| Speeds up slow beach-town Wi-Fi | No | No |
Priced per month, NordVPN wins only on the one-month plan. Commit for a year or two and Surfshark is the cheaper subscription, and the unlimited device allowance is the deciding factor for anyone travelling with a bag full of electronics.
Setting up before you travel
Do the setup at home, on Wi-Fi you trust, before the airport. Install NordVPN or Surfshark on each device, sign in, and connect once to confirm everything works. Then turn on two settings both apps include: the kill switch, which stops your traffic travelling unprotected if the VPN drops, and auto-connect, which brings the VPN back up when your connection returns. In a country where rainy-season downpours and power interruptions are part of life, those two toggles do the remembering for you.
One more pre-flight note: mobile data is often the fallback outside the bigger towns, and both apps work on mobile data as well as Wi-Fi. If you are picking up a local SIM or an eSIM for the trip, the VPN sits on top of it.
Final recommendation
For a trip measured in weeks, NordVPN is the pick: 10 devices covered, quick to run, and a 30-day guarantee that outlasts most holidays. For a nomad stay, a household, or anyone committing to a year or more, Surfshark covers unlimited devices on one subscription.
Buy either one for what it actually does in Costa Rica: an encrypted connection on the shared Wi-Fi you will use every day, and a home-country connection for the services that dislike foreign logins. Neither is a key to anything here, because the everyday internet is generally open, and neither will make slow Wi-Fi fast. This page will not pretend otherwise.
