I’ve been using Mullvad for quite a while, and overall think it’s a great product. I find DAITA and also their DNS options to both add a lot of confidence. However, lately I’ve been noticing a sizable increase in the number of “CAPTCHAS” I’m seeing. It’s mostly through Cloudflare, but certain websites are taking quite a long time to pass the Cloudflare checks, and some websites are newly not allowing access at all.
Has anyone else noticed this trend? Is it something with my settings?
Additionally, I’m starting to consider other options for “VPN” in case these issues with Mullvad become too burdensome. Are the offerings from Obscura or Nym anywhere near the quality of Mullvad? Nym sounds great in theory, but something about it gives me strange vibes, and I don’t think it’s just the crypto aspect. Obscura seems like a step up from Mullvad in terms of protecting your internet browsing data, but they’re much newer. They also claim "By blending in with regular internet traffic, Obscura avoids being detected by network filters – keeping your internet access unrestricted." I’m unsure how much I believe this though since the exit hop is coming from a Mullvad IP address.
Anyone have insight into these quandaries? What products are y’all considering for your “VPN” needs over the next year or so? Are there other products I should be considering? (Not going to use Proton, but I could be sold on IVPN I guess.)
IVPN: The Mullvad alternative with fewer CAPTCHAs.
Mullvad’s absolute anonymity (no email required) is awesome, but it also attracts a massive crowd of bots, scripts, and heavy torrenters. Because thousands of users share the exact same datacenter IPs, security networks like Cloudflare flag them instantly. The result. You get stuck in endless CAPTCHA hell or blocked from sites entirely.
Think of IVPN as a cleaner alternative you get a similar privacy first vibe, but with IPs that actually let you browse the web in peace.
The CAPTCHA trend is pretty normal for shared VPN exit IPs, unfortunately. Before switching, I would try a few less popular Mullvad locations and turn off any extra routing that is not needed for normal browsing, then keep a separate “shopping/banking” browser profile where you do not clear cookies every session. It is not as clean, but it often reduces Cloudflare loops.
For Obscura specifically, if the exit is still Mullvad, I would not expect it to magically fix sites that block Mullvad exits. IVPN is the most boring alternative I would test first, mainly because boring is good for a household setup.
I’ve found a Mullvad server that Cloudflare and others love, so I just use that on my router and then if I want more privacy I’ll use Mullvad browser with random mode which uses a different server for each website and changes on close.
To check the IP reputation the best thing is just how sites perform, but that can be a little slow so I used to use scamalytics, ipqualityscore, cloudflare tools(this shows what cloudflare thinks of your browser+IP), and others. So idk why, but this Mullvad server I found gets low detection scores and it works on sites so I just stick with it.
Obscura wont help because it’s the same exits as Mullvad except even less choice.
One more thing is you can try moving to frontends for popular websites using libredirect or predirect which helps a lot with privacy and not getting blocked. https://redlib.catsarch.com is great for reddit specifically.