When it comes to encrypting files on your computer, there are numerous options to choose from. However, my favorite is VeraCrypt. It's an open-source, cross-platform, completely free encryption program that you can use to manage your files, with a lot of features to make things even more secure.

If you're wondering why it's the best, these are the biggest reasons why and what makes it better than the rest.

4 Completely open-source and transparent

Not a guarantee of safety, but nice to have

VeraCrypt is a completely open-source encryption platform, with encryption methods that are peer-reviewed and vetted by others in the industry to ensure that they're robust. It's based on TrueCrypt which you may have heard of, which is considered dated nowadays.

While open-source doesn't inherently mean safe (as we've seen with XZ Utils), it's likely to be safer than proprietary software that does the same thing. After all, proprietary software for encryption might even have backdoors and ways for the company to gain access to your encrypted volumes.

Open-source isn't a guarantee of safety, but it is a positive for sure.

3 Hidden volume support

And it's impossible to tell if the hidden volume is there or not

VeraCrypt supports hidden volumes, which essentially means you can load two different file systems with two different passwords. When you create your volume in VeraCrypt, you have the option to create a "Hidden volume" which creates an outer volume and a hidden one. The outer volume contains sensitive files that you aren't actually trying to hide, and the hidden volume (which is held inside of the outer volume) contains the data you're actually trying to hide.

This is incredibly useful as it means if you're being forced to comply and unlock your data, you can give another password that doesn't actually hand over the information you're keeping safe. You then keep the password which maintains the security of the inner volume private. Hidden volume headers can't be identified either, as they look to be random data unless mounted with VeraCrypt with the correct password to decrypt it.

2 Full cross-platform compatibility

Windows, Mac, and Linux

VeraCrypt runs on Windows, Linux, and MacOS. While MacOS has a File Vault built in that you can use to achieve similar results (and all of the storage is encrypted as well), VeraCrypt is cross-platform in the sense that not only does it run on different platforms, but your faults are also transferrable to other platforms too. This means if you make a vault on a Linux machine, you can then copy that file to another machine and mount it with the password.

To run VeraCrypt on Mac, you'll need to install OSXFUSE (known now as macFUSE) and enable system extensions. This is a custom driver so that you can mount the volumes, and is not required on Windows or on Linux.

1 Customizable encryption

As complicated as you need it to be

Encryption can be computationally intensive, and not all users have the same hardware capabilities. With VeraCrypt, users can choose less resource-intensive algorithms if performance is a concern or opt for maximum security with multi-algorithm cascades. Your high-performance PC might handle AES-Twofish-Serpent cascades seamlessly, while an older laptop might perform better with just AES.

When using cascading cyphers, VeraCrypt will use AES as the final layer of encryption, meaning that an adversary attempting to break into your vault will simply see it as an AES-256 vault. While some security experts don't see AES ever being broken, advancements in quantum computing have people worried that soon it may not be enough,. That's why cascading cyphers like AES-Twofish-Serpent are fantastic, as they first encrypt your volume with Serpent, then Twofish, then finish off with AES.

In this mode, all encryption keys are mutually independent too, so there's no relation between any of them. This ensures maximum security. However, if you don't have a powerful enough PC or don't want to deal with multiple layers of encryption, AES is more than good enough.