Brave vs Vivaldi in 2026

Brave and Vivaldi are both Chromium browsers built by people who thought Chrome was insufficient, but they disagreed about why. Brave decided the problem was advertising. Vivaldi decided the problem was the interface. Both block ads, trackers and cookie banners by default and both score 4 or better on privacy, so the choice comes down to which frustration you actually have.

Blocking versus building

Brave goes further on privacy and scores 5 for it. Its Shields include fingerprinting protection, which Vivaldi does not offer, and it ships private windows that route through Tor for genuine IP-level anonymity. It also strips targeted advertising from YouTube. If your goal is the maximum amount of blocking with the minimum amount of thought, Brave is the more thorough tool, and its extension score of 5 matches the best available.

Vivaldi scores 5 for customisability, the joint highest we award, and that is its entire argument. Tabs can sit on any edge of the window, stack into groups, tile side by side, or run in a two-level hierarchy. You can write custom keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures for nearly any command and theme the interface down to individual colours. It also folds whole applications into the sidebar: a genuine email client, a calendar, an RSS reader and notes. Brave has vertical tabs and nothing else in this category.

VPN, crypto and openness

Two practical differences are worth weighing. Vivaldi includes a free VPN; Brave sells one as a subscription. And Brave carries a cryptocurrency component — the optional, off-by-default Rewards system and a built-in wallet — which Vivaldi has nothing equivalent to. For some people that alone decides it in Vivaldi's favour.

On openness both are compromised in different ways. Brave's source is partially open; Vivaldi's Chromium core is open but its interface layer is proprietary. Neither is fully auditable, and if that is your requirement, LibreWolf or Firefox is the honest answer.

Both score 3 for ease of use, for opposite reasons: Brave because Shields sometimes break sites, Vivaldi because the first launch presents more options than most people want.

Which should you choose?

Choose Brave if privacy is the point — you want the most aggressive default blocking, fingerprinting protection and Tor windows, and a simple interface around them.

Choose Vivaldi if you have forty tabs open and opinions about all of them, want mail and calendar inside the browser, and would like a free VPN while you are at it. Its blocking is good enough for most people even if it is not Brave's equal.