AirVPN Vs ExpressVPN (2022) – “The Winner Is”

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Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the perfect option for you.

While anybody can declare to be special these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to protecting user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, stating, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can declare to be special these days, when it pertains to VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

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

During the last years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger business either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is discussed and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has established or supported. These consist of 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 offering a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up against its rivals with such strong privacy qualifications?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than most, with only 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 lack of variety of servers lowers the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to offer an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, without any 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 trusted and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.

Numerous ports and protocols are readily available; 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. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

No choice is given to any protocol, application, or service when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Importantly, you can get rid of internet restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographical constraints, and traffic shaping.

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it instantly improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reputable. The lack of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, but it will not put the more recent protocol totally in place up until some of its technical and privacy problems are addressed.

AirVPN has actually likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to try out things.

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

You can keep track of the current load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous problems 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 available ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.

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

A good aspect of this is that you can see what other people state about the service before registering. You don’t need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is really clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal details 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 improve services, however you can request for this info to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, nobody can identify you online; not even your ISP can figure out what sort of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

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

They also state they adhere to EU privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to conceal your IP so that no one can use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level protection offered.

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

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

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This means that anyone can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but just ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a third party.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the finest readily available. The very first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s terrific since it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However understand that you will not have the ability to change 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 countries that share intelligence information). Even if the federal government asked for user details, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to give them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, available on all significant platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Unfortunately, despite Eddie’s considerable capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those service providers 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.

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

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

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You simply click Disconnect when you’re completed. Easy enough for anyone, but Eddie can do so much more since AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Although it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. A lot of basic kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however 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 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 shows all readily available servers in the network, in addition to in-depth details about every one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Remarkable 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 available in each country at a glance, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to 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 discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a nation, 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 countries as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that country will be gotten rid of, successfully making it a blocklist/denylist. To remove 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 choose the server you want in a particular nation. 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 also a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.

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

While many apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained details, such as the server’s location, load, existing 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 capability to use a VPN with all the info they might ever desire about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s a valuable resource.

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

This permits you to tweak the setup, such as whether it must always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom-made DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The genuinely proficient user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface by means of the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be tough to find out what particular settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to customization.

Nevertheless, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program typically operates fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you look for them. If you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not want to use 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 use an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application offers the very same extensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and helpful status info.

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 exact same page. Some useful text additions make the information more reasonable, however it’s still quite difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than the majority of people will ever need. The software application likewise tries a little bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to discuss what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app identifying when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of 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.

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

However, reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. Indeed, one stated there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly impressive overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a wider variety of server areas. This might limit the accessibility of close-by servers for some users (which will always result in much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the big 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 pretty 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 right server needs prolonged experimentation. This is most likely because, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

Streaming is certainly not an area in which AirVPN stands out, just because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

Yes, it does; every web protocol, including peer-to-peer, is welcome. Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Simply connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.

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

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very convenient, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no problems whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

AirVPN offers a larger variety of plans than a lot of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 devices concurrently, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional option for individuals who reside in a household house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN service providers provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Prices differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. Many plans use good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions provide the very best offer.

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

The existing plans readily available 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of global alternatives 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 coupon 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 Assistance

AirVPN has a different customer support offering than many other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it offers e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a very active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t outsourced however can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the agents are helpful and friendly, however the detailed answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of details, including a big FAQs area that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, however novices will have the same problems comprehending 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 allowed 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 setup and usage.

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

Solid Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.

Good costs, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t extremely 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.

Possibly 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?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with great prices. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. However even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

It may not ensure the very same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good option for consumers who value their privacy.

While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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