AirVPN Vs Avira VPN: Excellent VPNs Reviewed

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Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN could be the perfect service for you if yes.

While anyone can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site 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 concerns VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of two lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications supplier Iridium formerly 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).

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

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually developed 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.

So how does AirVPN stack up against its competitors with such strong personal privacy qualifications?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than the majority of, with just 246 servers spread out across 23 countries.

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

AirVPN Servers

That stated, Air is popular for its outstanding performance throughout its server network, with numerous countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to supply an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, with no speed restrictions or time limits.

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

Various ports and protocols are available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Furthermore, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

No choice is given to any protocol, service, or application when it comes down to it. 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 big plus as it immediately enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trusted. Nevertheless, the absence of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite staying up to date with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place up until a few of its technical and privacy problems are resolved.

AirVPN has also included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out 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 present load on each server, any existing concerns, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).

There is a comprehensive specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

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

A nice aspect of this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before registering. 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 company is extremely clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the outright top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual info logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN does not 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, however you can ask for this information to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

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

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

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping techniques will fail against AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they follow EU personal privacy guidelines which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or higher levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that no one can utilize it to discover who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level security offered.

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

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

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This suggests that anybody can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, however only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been checked by a 3rd party.

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best readily available. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth discussing. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can lower this value. The primary data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s terrific given that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. But be aware that you will not have the ability to alter your account’s password if you don’t use one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence information). Even if the government asked for user information, AirVPN would have nothing to give them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, offered on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, regardless of Eddie’s substantial capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those suppliers who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is simple, and it has all the information you require to connect to a VPN.

Sadly, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most user-friendly user interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.

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

After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest area. You just click Disconnect when you’re completed. Easy enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more since AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two crucial AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer launches, however you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Even though it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. Most basic kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, but you can set up the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

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

The Overview simply 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 offered servers in the network, along with comprehensive info about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing users and server load. Outstanding stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the variety of servers offered in each nation at a glimpse, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also shown. Many servers have up to 1000 Mb/s bandwidth, while some smaller sized 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 nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might choose as numerous countries as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that country will be gotten rid of, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To eliminate the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.

By selecting a nation, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and select the server you want in a specific country. 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). There are also a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s likewise a “refresh” button to get updated details on ping times and load times.

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

Power users, in particular, should value the ability to utilize a VPN with all the info they could ever want about the numerous locations, down to the number of users on a specific server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a comprehensive record of connections, routes, and other data.

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables 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 try an SSH tunnel via more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

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

If the large function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be difficult to determine what particular settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in regards to personalization.

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Keep in mind that the program normally functions fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings until you try to find them. However, if you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t want 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?

There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use a very feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application supplies the very same substantial setup choices as its desktop sibling and valuable status details.

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

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than many people will ever require. The software also tries a bit more to assist you, with additional text subtitles to explain what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

Utilizing OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN typically connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.

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

In regards to personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which reveals that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors since AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

However, reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. Undoubtedly, one said there wasn’t a single country where they might grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really outstanding overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server locations. This may restrict the accessibility of neighboring servers for some users (which will always result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for most people in the United States and Europe, but perhaps less so for other regions.

Streaming

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

Some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. It appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs prolonged trial and error. This is most likely since, unlike other service providers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

Nevertheless, streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, merely because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

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

Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. A number of 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 decent speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely convenient, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually revealed torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

AirVPN provides a larger range of plans than the majority of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 gadgets at the same time, 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 individuals who live in a family house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five should be enough for most people, other VPN providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Rates varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the exact same features. Most plans offer good value; however, longer memberships provide the very best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they use the European Central Bank to supply real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be quickly transformed to and spent 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 international alternatives are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

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

There’s likewise a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data during that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than numerous other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it provides e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has an extremely active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Significantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a response. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the agents are valuable and friendly, but the comprehensive responses can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a lot of info, consisting of a big FAQs section that is broken up by topic.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little loss.

Unlimited P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on apps and servers 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 installation and usage.

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

Strong Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent prices, especially for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists protect you from ads, adware, trackers, and damaging sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t extremely user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are a lot of advanced alternatives.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with excellent pricing. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. Even new users could do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than a number of its rival VPN rivals.

This VPN service is more focused on securing your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.

Although it might not guarantee the exact same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great alternative for consumers who value their privacy.

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

Highly recommended!

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