Why does size matter? Mullvad is fast, has quite a few locations/endpoints, and good service.

Mullvad is not small.

True that. IIRC Mullvad was literally the world’s largest Wireguard deployment until Cloudflare did Warp. Just because people haven’t heard of it doesn’t mean it’s small. They just don’t advertise on shitty podcasts, so it doesn’t have the same brand recognition.

Mullvad isn't small, and I'm not sure how Nord specifically compares, but its probaubly worth noting they mostly use 100TB, Tzulo, Quadranet, M247, and 31173. They use a bunch of others but not much.

Mullvad for obvious reasons is used for less... wonderful usecases. It's not uncommon for websites to block you due to abuse from that exit. ASN blocking is rather common with mullvad too though that's less avoidable.

I have less info on Nord, although I can see it has about 4x the ip's. No idea if they are more diverse network wise. Their accepted payment methods suck though.

I saw NordVPN ads in German TV. At this point I would say they invest all of their money into marketing - my reason for never ever buying their product. I haven't had any issues in terms of blocking on mullvad but my sample size is small since I don't change the servers that often.

Yeah my impression is they're all marketing and care relatively little about privacy. How you can claim to care about privacy but still require an email is beyond me.

Would you accept RC Cola?

- A loyal Mullvad customer

If mullvad is RC Cola then I'll switch immediately. Love that stuff.