AirVPN Vs Avira VPN Comparison – Are They Any Good? Site Beginner’s Candid View

  • Time to read: 16 min.
Affiliate Disclaimer

Full Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to products/services. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.

Do you want to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the best service for you if yes.

While anybody can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, specifying, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anyone can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium previously ran it, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

Throughout the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a bigger company either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is described and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has actually established or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.

AirVPN takes the unconventional route and breaks the mold by providing a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up versus its competitors with such strong personal privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with just 246 servers spread out throughout 23 countries.

Many servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the absence of variety of servers lowers the number of global AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while preserving their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is popular for its exceptional performance throughout its server network, with many countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to supply an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most reliable and safe way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

Many ports and protocols are offered; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Additionally, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.

When it comes down to it, no choice is given to any protocol, service, or application. Net Neutrality is maintained. Significantly, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical restrictions, and traffic shaping.

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reputable. The absence of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place till some of its technical and personal privacy issues are dealt with.

AirVPN has actually likewise included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can easily switch servers as often as you like.

You can monitor the current load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).

There is an in-depth specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, but given that there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being used will work. Looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good thing about this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to signing up. You do not have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

Just How Private Is AirVPN, & Does It Keep Logs?

The business is extremely clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual information logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It just collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, but you can request this information to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can tell what kind of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your information.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping methods will fail versus AirVPN since your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they abide by EU privacy regulations which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or higher levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can use it to learn who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection provided.

If your ISP or country blocks OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.

Open-source clients and a lively community forum enable you to get a sense of what present users are saying about the service before signing up.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This suggests that anyone can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a third party.

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best available. It’s similar to that of some other providers, but still worth mentioning. The very first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can decrease this value. The main information channel employs AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your real e-mail address. That’s excellent given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be conscious that you will not be able to alter your account’s password if you do not use one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence data). But even if the federal government requested for user details, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those service providers who use it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the details you need to connect to a VPN.

There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use user interface, so it might be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a heap of download choices. There are builds for numerous running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to discuss what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most present doesn’t operate on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Easy enough for anybody, however Eddie can do a lot more considering that AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 essential AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer starts up, but you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you selected last.

Although it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe tunnel. Most standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, but you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

Eddie’s design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely displays the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.

The Servers page displays all readily available servers in the network, together with comprehensive information about each one, such as the server’s label, location, latency in milliseconds from your area, and current users and server load. Remarkable stuff!

This tab likewise has an amber/green signal that lets you understand whether a server is suggested for you.

The Countries page displays the number of servers available in each nation at a glimpse, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise shown. Many servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller ones have a 100 Mb/s connection.

A green checkmark, a red “X,” and a blank box can be found on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might select as many nations as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that country will be removed, efficiently making it a blocklist/denylist. To remove the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.

By picking a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket).

The Speed tab displays a simple throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be altered, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.

While most apps display your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained details, such as the server’s location, load, current user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information downloaded and uploaded, and much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the details they could ever desire about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a detailed record of connections, routes, and other information.

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The truly skilled user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface via the Logs pane.

If the large function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to determine what specific settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in regards to customization.

Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just due to the fact that of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program generally works fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you try to find them. If you sometimes crave power or configurability, the app will offer it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish to utilize Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the exact same comprehensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and useful status details.

Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and pick a particular city on the same page. Some useful text additions make the info more understandable, but it’s still rather challenging to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than the majority of people will ever require. The software likewise tries a little bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN generally connects quickly and is ready to enter less than 10 seconds.

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notice, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of personal privacy, leak tests revealed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

Because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition.

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be excellent. Certainly, one stated there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually remarkable overall.

While it wasn’t rather at the top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for the majority of people, and scenarios like HD video, streaming, and gaming conferencing definitely won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a wider variety of server areas. This might limit the accessibility of nearby servers for some users (which will constantly result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for many people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has actually been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Indeed, some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. Nevertheless, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the right server requires prolonged trial and error. This is most likely because, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

Luckily, on AirVPN’s website, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming websites ever changes.

However, streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN excels, merely since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more concentrated on personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can use port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has good speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, triggered by default, will obstruct all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any problems whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

AirVPN offers a larger variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five gadgets simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.

This makes it an excellent choice for people who live in a family home or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN suppliers provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Rates varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. The majority of plans use good value; nevertheless, longer memberships use the very best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They utilize the European Central Bank to supply real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be easily converted to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

The existing plans offered are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month

Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month

One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month

Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month

Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month

AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide choices are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and using the discount coupon code they send you.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they haven’t broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than lots of other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it uses email support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a very active assistance forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced but can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a reaction. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the agents are handy and friendly, however the extensive responses can be quite technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of details, consisting of a large Frequently asked questions area that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, but beginners will have the very same difficulties understanding a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on servers and apps alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.

Network Lock/Kill Switch.

Split tunneling.

Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.

Supports Tor over VPN.

Easy app setup and use.

Many, many advanced settings and customization choices in the client app.

Solid Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent rates, particularly for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists protect you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and harmful sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t really easy to use or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm more recent users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are a lot of advanced alternatives.

Found in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with good prices. It’s clearly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. Even new users might do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to use if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and better results than many of its rival VPN competitors.

When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more focused on protecting your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

Although it might not guarantee the very same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great option for customers who value their privacy.

While it does not hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the very best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an exceptional option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

Click Here Or Below To Join AirVPN Today!!

AirVPN Vs Norton VPN: The Smart Pick Is