VPNs Based in Germany: Eight Registered Companies and the Rules They Answer To

What "based in Germany" means on this list

Registration is the criterion. Eight products trace back to six companies: five are classic consumer VPNs, and three come from security-software vendors. Steganos Software GmbH owns two of the entries by itself. Read each product's description before buying; the German imprint tells you whom you can hold liable, nothing more.

The legal frame a German VPN answers to

The GDPR applies to all six companies. It caps what a provider may store, for what purpose and for how long, and gives you rights of access and deletion.

Data retention is the recurring fight. Germany once required telecoms to store traffic and location data across the board, and the CJEU ruling of 20 September 2022 in SpaceNet and Telekom Deutschland declared those rules incompatible with EU law. The government is now pushing a narrower bill, adopted by cabinet on 22 April 2026 and read for the first time in the Bundestag on 24 June 2026: providers that assign IP addresses would store the subscriber's public IP, port numbers, line and user identifiers plus the exact start and end of each assignment, for three months. Destination addresses, sites visited, data volumes and content stay out. The bill also introduces "quick freeze" preservation orders of up to three months, extendable once with a court's approval. It is not law yet; the Legal Affairs Committee held its public hearing on 7 October 2026, and the Bundesrat wanted six months of retention instead.

The draft obliges internet access providers that assign IP addresses; legal commentary lists fixed-line ISPs, mobile carriers and public Wi-Fi operators as the targets and does not list VPN services, but the bill is not law and the final wording is open. The 14 Eyes membership concerns intelligence sharing between agencies, not a storage obligation for a GmbH.

OnionHop, ZenMate and OkayFreedom compared

The weak spot of each

All three claim no logs and none has an audit. OnionHop wins the page because no account and no email exist, but it publishes no server network and has no iOS or Android app. ZenMate's checkout now sells a CyberGhost plan, and the renewal is more than double the first bill. OkayFreedom counts traffic volume per pseudonymous ID, hashes the MAC address as an identifier, and if the tunnel fails, traffic keeps flowing outside it.

Where the German label stops

The chain often leaves the country after the imprint. G DATA's tunnel runs on IPVanish, Inc. of the USA as a subprocessor. Avira sits under Gen Digital, and the two Avira products record the IP you connect from, which zeroes their privacy sub-index. Shellfire's policy names Google, Meta, PayPal and Stripe among recipients, with US transfers under the Data Privacy Framework or standard clauses.

What the eight policies admit

The scores come from what providers publish, and the site does not test logging itself. Two of the policies do not say whether the connection IP is kept.

FAQ

Germany-based VPNs in short

Eight products, six companies, zero audited no-logs claims, and a median price of €2.91 a month with a floor of €1.44. For privacy, OnionHop leads on paper; for a conventional multi-platform subscription, ZenMate scores highest but sells a network owned elsewhere. Of the three VPNs from security vendors, the two Avira products record the connection IP and G DATA VPN processes a hashed IP alongside connection duration and data volume, so skip them if privacy is the goal.