SSTP VPN: Which Services Offer It and How to Connect Beyond Windows

The three services that lead the ranking

Trust.Zone lets you try it for three days without leaving a card number. CactusVPN has no free trial but a 30-day refund window. Across the list the cheapest paid plan sits at €0.71 a month, the median around €2.49, and 9 of 22 providers offer some kind of free plan.

Why SSTP scores nothing for bypass

The ranking weights censorship bypass at 40% of the page score, and SSTP itself earns none of it. The protocol carries PPP frames inside a TLS session running over TCP 443, which is enough to pass a firewall that only opens HTTPS out: the typical hotel, office or campus setup. It fails behind authenticated web proxies. What it cannot survive is DPI: the client opens every session with a fixed HTTP request (SSTP_DUPLEX_POST), documented in Microsoft's own specification, and that fingerprint exposes the SSTP connection to the censor's DPI despite the HTTPS port. That is why Trust.Zone leads: its points come from a stealth mode, VLESS Reality and Shadowsocks sitting next to SSTP. Only 7 of the 22 providers publish any obfuscation; 7 score zero on bypass entirely.

Connecting a Mac, iPhone, Android or Linux box

Among desktop and phone operating systems, only Windows ships an SSTP client (since Vista SP1); macOS, iOS, Android and Linux do not. On those platforms the choice is narrow but real:

On Android, Open SSTP Client was written for VPN Azure and SoftEther servers and accepts PAP and MS-CHAPv2 logins; if your provider demands EAP, it will not work there. The provider's kill switch lives inside its own app and does nothing for a connection dialed through the Windows built-in client, so a dropped tunnel on hotel Wi-Fi leaks traffic.

Where WireGuard and OpenVPN beat it

SSTP runs over TCP only, so on a lossy mobile or long-distance link the tunnelled TCP and the outer TCP retransmit each other's losses and throughput collapses. The Windows implementation is closed source, and authentication is per user only, with MS-CHAPv2 or EAP, no machine-level check. Microsoft itself is retiring SSTP from Azure VPN Gateway: no new gateways can enable it after 31 August 2026, existing connections stop on 31 March 2027 (see Microsoft's notice on SSTP retirement in Azure VPN Gateway), capped at 128 concurrent sessions until then. Among these 22 providers, OpenVPN is available at 20 of them and WireGuard at only 7; if you need OpenVPN on TCP 443, the OpenVPN ranking lets you compare providers directly.

Free SSTP and what it costs in privacy

VPN Gate, the volunteer relay network run by the University of Tsukuba, hands out SSTP with the username and password both set to "vpn"; hostnames end in opengw.net. It keeps connection logs, which is why it lands 18th with a page score of 1.00. Proxy Mask aggregates up to 200 public SSTP servers but discloses too little to join the ranked list. Four services here (SmartyDNS, Trickbyte, SmartDNS Proxy, Getflix) are Smart DNS products that also run VPN servers; Smart DNS alone encrypts nothing.

SSTP FAQ

Picking a service

Windows machine behind a strict firewall: Trust.Zone, letting VLESS Reality and Shadowsocks carry the bypass work that SSTP cannot. A household of devices with audited no-logs: CactusVPN. Testing before you commit: Hide.me's free tier. On a network with real DPI, pick a provider that publishes a stealth mode or obfuscated protocols and use that instead of SSTP.