9 Best Enterprise VPN Solutions and Vendors

Enterprise VPNs are in an odd spot heading into 2026. Consumer VPN usage keeps growing, roughly 1.6 billion people worldwide use one, about 30% of all internet users, according to GWI's VPN Usage Report cited in Swif's 2026 VPN statistics roundup. But on the enterprise side, the picture is much rougher. Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report found that vulnerability exploitation targeting edge devices and VPN concentrators jumped from 3% of breach-related exploitation to 22% in a single year, roughly an eightfold increase. Exploits are now nearly as common an entry point as stolen credentials.

That context matters before you pick a vendor. A VPN is still a legitimate tool for a lot of use cases. It is no longer the default safe choice it was five years ago, and any evaluation needs to weigh that risk honestly rather than treat VPN selection as purely a features-and-pricing decision.

What an enterprise VPN is, and where it starts to strain

An enterprise VPN creates an encrypted tunnel between a device and a company's network, letting employees, contractors, and branch offices reach internal resources as if they were sitting in the building. That model has worked for decades. The problem in 2026 is architectural: once a user authenticates to a traditional VPN, they typically get broad access to the internal network, not just the one application they needed. If an attacker steals valid VPN credentials, they often inherit that same broad access.

Google Cloud's Mandiant, drawing on more than 450,000 hours of incident response in 2025, found that exploits were the top initial-access vector for the sixth consecutive year at 32% of intrusions, and the four most exploited vulnerabilities of 2024 all sat inside edge devices: Palo Alto's PAN-OS GlobalProtect, two separate Ivanti Connect Secure flaws, and a Fortinet FortiClient management server bug. CISA added multiple actively exploited Ivanti Connect Secure vulnerabilities to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities Catalog through 2025, including one that allowed unauthenticated remote code execution.

The patch lag makes this worse. Per Verizon's data, only 54% of vulnerable edge devices were fully remediated during the observation period, and median time to remediate sat at 32 days, while the median time between a flaw's public disclosure and mass exploitation was effectively zero. Attackers are scanning for vulnerable appliances before most organizations have even started patching.

Where MFA gaps turn a VPN breach into a ransomware incident

Sophos' 2025 Active Adversary Report found that vulnerable VPNs served as the entry point in 12% of ransomware cases its incident response teams handled in 2024, and that exploited vulnerabilities overall were the single most common ransomware initial-access vector at 32%. The part that should concern any IT leader evaluating a VPN today: the share of breached organizations with no MFA configured on the compromised account nearly tripled, from 22% in 2022 to 63% in 2024, per the same Sophos research. Verizon separately found ransomware present in 88% of breaches at small and medium-sized businesses specifically, a segment that disproportionately runs older VPN appliances without enforced MFA.

The takeaway is not "don't use a VPN." It is that MFA on every VPN account, conditional access tied to device posture, and aggressive patch timelines are no longer optional hardening steps, they are the entry-level requirement for running a VPN safely in 2026.

"Attackers will increasingly leverage AI for automated reconnaissance, intelligent password spraying, and rapid exploit development, allowing them to compromise VPNs at scale," said Deepen Desai, CSO at Zscaler, when the company released its ThreatLabz 2025 VPN Risk Report. "To address these risks, organizations should shift to a zero trust everywhere approach." That report, based on a survey of more than 600 IT and security professionals, found over half of organizations now say security and compliance risks make traditional VPNs effectively obsolete for enterprise use.

Enterprise VPN and ZTNA vendors worth evaluating

1. Check Point Harmony SASE (formerly Perimeter 81)

Perimeter 81 was acquired by Check Point in 2023 and has since been folded into the company's Infinity Architecture and rebranded first to Harmony SASE, now marketed as part of Check Point's broader SASE platform. It retains the core strengths that made Perimeter 81 popular: a dedicated management console, straightforward deployment, and plans that scale from small businesses to larger enterprises. If you evaluated Perimeter 81 previously and are revisiting it, expect the Check Point branding and a tighter integration with Check Point's existing Quantum and CloudGuard product lines.

2. NordLayer

NordLayer, the business arm of Nord Security, remains one of the more actively maintained options in this space. Current published pricing runs Lite at $8 per user per month, Core at $11, and Premium at $14, with enterprise volume pricing starting lower, according to 2026 vendor comparisons. Standout features include Single Sign-On integration with Google Workspace, Azure AD, and Okta, granular team permission controls, and dedicated server options for businesses that need fixed IP addresses across multiple regions. NordLayer continues to lean into a hybrid VPN-plus-ZTNA positioning rather than committing fully to one model, which suits organizations mid-transition.

3. Cisco Secure Client (formerly AnyConnect)

Cisco's remote access VPN client has been rebranded Cisco Secure Client, reflecting the company's move to fold VPN, endpoint posture, and zero trust network access into a single unified agent rather than a standalone VPN tool. That consolidation is a useful signal about where the whole category is headed: even legacy VPN vendors are repositioning around identity and device posture rather than pure tunnel-and-forget access. Pricing remains license-based and scales with an organization's existing Cisco security investment.

4. Twingate

Founded in 2019 (not 2014, correcting an earlier error in vendor history), Twingate has built its entire product around zero trust from day one rather than retrofitting it onto a VPN. Current pricing starts at $5 per user per month with a free tier covering up to five users, making it accessible for smaller teams evaluating a full ZTNA switch without a large upfront commitment. Twingate's resource mapping avoids needing changes to existing network topology, and per-request access verification means a compromised credential alone is not sufficient for an attacker to reach a resource, unlike a traditional VPN session.

5. VyprVPN (Golden Frog)

VyprVPN remains active in the business VPN market, still built around a no-logging policy and company-owned server infrastructure rather than leased capacity. Split tunneling and a reliable kill switch remain the standout features. It is a reasonable fit for smaller teams that want straightforward VPN functionality without a full zero trust migration, though it does not offer the identity-centric access controls that have become standard among the ZTNA-native vendors on this list.

Why so many organizations are moving to zero trust instead

Gartner's Market Guide for Zero Trust Network Access names VPN replacement as the leading driver of ZTNA adoption, and the shift is well underway: Gartner projected that 70% of new remote-access deployments would rely on ZTNA rather than legacy VPN by the end of 2025. A separate 2026 industry survey found 63% of organizations have adopted or plan to adopt zero trust, and Zscaler's ThreatLabz 2025 VPN Risk Report, based on a survey of more than 600 IT and security professionals, found 65% of organizations plan to replace their VPN service within the year, a 23% jump from the prior year's findings. Ninety-six percent of respondents in that survey said they favor a zero trust approach overall.

The economics back up the shift. IBM's 2025 Cost of a Data Breach Report found organizations with a mature zero trust architecture saved $1.76 million per breach on average compared to peers without one, placing it among the top four cost-reducing security controls IBM tracked that year. Gartner's own analysis is candid about the business case, though: the justification for ZTNA adoption comes primarily from risk reduction, not from direct cost savings. Organizations switching should not expect a cheaper monthly bill, they should expect fewer catastrophic incidents.

VPN versus zero trust, concretely

A traditional VPN authenticates a user once and then grants relatively broad access to whatever sits inside the network perimeter. Zero trust network access flips that model: every request to every resource gets evaluated individually against identity, device posture, and context, continuously, not just at login. A user granted access to a finance application at 9am can be denied access to that same application an hour later if their device fails a compliance check in between.

This is a meaningfully different security posture, not just marketing language. It directly addresses the failure pattern Sophos and Verizon both documented: an attacker who steals a VPN credential today typically inherits broad network access. An attacker who steals a credential in a properly configured zero trust environment still has to pass a device-posture and context check before reaching anything sensitive.

Honest tradeoffs before you switch

Moving from VPN to ZTNA is not free, and it is rarely a weekend project. Legacy applications built without support for modern authentication protocols can require real engineering work to bring into a zero trust model, and per-user ZTNA pricing can get expensive fast for organizations with large contractor or seasonal workforces. Some vendors on this list, NordLayer and VyprVPN in particular, still price per user in a way that scales linearly with headcount, which is worth modeling honestly against your actual growth plans before committing. If your organization runs mostly legacy on-premises applications with no appetite for a phased identity overhaul, a well-hardened traditional VPN with enforced MFA and aggressive patch discipline may remain the more practical near-term choice, even if it is not the architecture most analysts are recommending for new deployments.

Whichever direction you choose, the baseline for 2026 is non-negotiable: MFA on every remote-access account, patch timelines measured in days rather than weeks for anything internet-facing, and a documented decision about whether your organization's tolerance for network-wide access after a single authentication event still makes sense given what the breach data now shows.

For related reading, see our comparison of cloud versus on-premise deployment tradeoffs, and if you are weighing this decision for the first time, it is worth consulting a cyber security firm before committing to either a VPN refresh or a full zero trust migration.