"The Best Business VPN Options for Small Business (2026)"

Our guide to choosing between a traditional VPN and Zero Trust Network Access covers which model actually fits a small team — this one picks up from there with the actual products. If you haven't worked out whether you need a straightforward VPN or something more granular, start with that guide first; if you already know roughly what you're after, here's what's actually on the shelf in 2026.

Cloudflare Zero Trust

Cloudflare's Zero Trust suite — Access, Gateway, and the WARP client — is the option most small businesses should at least rule out before paying for anything else. Cloudflare's own pricing covers up to 50 users on the free tier with full ZTNA and secure web gateway functionality included, and the pay-as-you-go tier removes the user cap at $7 per user per month with no long-term contract. For a small team that needs per-application access control rather than a flat network tunnel, this is hard to beat on price alone, and it's backed by infrastructure Cloudflare already runs at a scale most dedicated VPN vendors can't match.

NordLayer

If Zero Trust feels like more setup than your team needs, NordLayer is the straightforward alternative — a traditional business VPN with centralised administration, fixed IP addresses, and identity integrations, priced roughly $7 to $14 per user per month depending on tier. It's the pick for a business that wants staff reliably tunnelling into shared drives and internal tools without configuring per-application access policies, and its admin console is built to be manageable without a dedicated IT person driving it daily.

Twingate

Twingate is a dedicated Zero Trust Network Access product, built specifically around the idea that a user should reach the one application they need rather than "the network." It has a genuine free tier that scales as you add users and resources, which makes it a reasonable next step up from Cloudflare's free tier if you want a product built exclusively around ZTNA rather than as part of a broader security suite.

Tailscale

Tailscale is the outlier on this list because it isn't really aimed at office staff remote access at all — it's an identity-based mesh network most at home connecting servers, cloud workloads, development environments, and infrastructure to each other and to the people who manage them. If your "remote access" problem is really a technical team needing to reach internal services and each other's machines rather than front-office staff reaching shared drives, Tailscale fits that shape of problem better than any VPN on this list.

Perimeter 81 (Check Point)

Perimeter 81, now part of Check Point, bundles traditional VPN tunnelling and Zero Trust Network Access into one platform rather than making you choose. It's positioned as a more fully-featured, enterprise-leaning option than NordLayer or Twingate, which suits a growing small business that expects to need both models as it scales, rather than picking one now and migrating later.

Proton VPN Professional

Proton VPN's business tier, at roughly $12 per user per month, leads with privacy and compliance rather than network architecture, which makes it the right shortlist entry specifically for small teams in regulated or sensitive fields — healthcare, legal, financial services — where your traffic goes and who can see it matters as much as the access model itself. If your business already has to think carefully about client or patient data handling, our guide to secure workspace platforms for healthcare data covers the wider set of decisions this sits alongside.

How to Choose

Team size and technical sophistication do most of the work here. A small office wanting simple, reliable access to shared systems fits NordLayer or Cloudflare's free tier. A team that already thinks in terms of "which application, not which network" fits Twingate or Cloudflare's paid tier. A technical team connecting infrastructure rather than office staff fits Tailscale. A growing business that expects to need both VPN and ZTNA as it scales fits Perimeter 81. And a business in a regulated field where compliance is non-negotiable fits Proton VPN Professional. Whichever you land on, the baseline doesn't change: enforce MFA on it, which our Essential Eight checklist covers in more depth.

Getting Help

The right product here depends more on your team's shape than on which vendor has the best marketing page — a two-person office and a ten-person team with sensitive client data need genuinely different tools, not just different pricing tiers of the same one. Our Small Business IT Support service can assess what your team actually needs and get the right option set up properly.