AirVPN Vs ExpressVPN: The Victor May Shock You

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

While anybody can declare to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site begins 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 concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of 2 lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications provider Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently 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 larger company either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is explained and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than the majority of, with only 246 servers spread throughout 23 nations.

Many servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor issue here is that the absence of variety of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to offer an accurate assessment 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 use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most dependable and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses 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. Moreover, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.

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

The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it immediately improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly 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 more recent protocol totally in place till a few of its technical and privacy concerns are dealt with.

AirVPN has actually also included a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to try out things.

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

You can keep track of the present 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 a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the readily 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 considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being offered will work. But taking a look at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A nice feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to registering. You don’t have 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 privacy and security are the outright top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack 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 only collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, however you can ask for this details 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 tell what kind of traffic or protocol you’re using.

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 information.

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

They likewise say they comply with EU personal privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or higher levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can use it to discover who you are. You’ll remain safe with the top-level protection supplied.

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

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

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

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best offered. 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 information, not even your real email address. That’s excellent since it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be aware that you won’t be able to change your account’s password if you do not utilize one.

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

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, readily available on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, regardless of Eddie’s substantial ability 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

Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the info you need 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 user interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a lot of download alternatives. There are builds for numerous operating 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 current doesn’t work on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You simply click Disconnect when you’re finished. Simple enough for anyone, but Eddie can do so much more because AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Despite the fact that it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe tunnel. A lot of standard kill switches just 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 shows all available servers in the network, in addition to in-depth information about every one, such as the server’s label, location, latency in milliseconds from your place, and current users and server load. Impressive 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 indicator is also shown. Lots of 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 discovered 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 basically a favorites list; you may pick as lots of countries as you like.

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

By selecting a nation, you are not instantly connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and choose the server you desire in a particular 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 also a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab shows an easy 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 most apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, existing user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data downloaded and uploaded, and far more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever want about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s an invaluable resource.

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

This enables you to tweak the setup, such as whether it needs to constantly connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really experienced user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface by means of the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be tough to find out what specific settings do and how to get the desired outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of personalization.

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Remember that the program generally operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings till you look for them. Nevertheless, if you periodically long for power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out 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 an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application supplies the same comprehensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and handy status information.

Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and select a specific city on the very same page. Some practical text additions make the information more easy to understand, however it’s still rather difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than many people will ever need. The software also attempts a little bit more to help you, with extra text subtitles to discuss what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app identifying when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop alert, 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 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.

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be excellent. Certainly, one said there wasn’t a single country where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually outstanding overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a more comprehensive variety of server places. This may restrict the accessibility of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent choice for most people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other areas.

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 effective 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 US Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the ideal server requires prolonged trial and error. This is probably since, unlike other companies, 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 sites ever changes.

Nevertheless, 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 privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

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 configure, no hoops to leap through. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

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

File sharing has decent speeds on regional servers, allows port forwarding for as much as 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 integrated kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Rates

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

This makes it an outstanding option for individuals who live in a family house or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Prices varies based on the subscription length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. Many plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer memberships use the very best deal.

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

The current 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 international choices are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

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

There’s likewise 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 numerous other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it uses e-mail support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has an extremely active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Significantly, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t outsourced however can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get a reaction. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and handy, but the detailed answers can be quite technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of information, including a large FAQs section that is separated by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, but novices will have the exact same problems comprehending a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Excellent speeds with very little loss.

Unrestricted 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 Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Detailed Guides.

Excellent prices, particularly 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 might overwhelm more recent users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are too many advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with excellent rates. It’s clearly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN service provider. But 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 many of its rival VPN competitors.

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

Although it might not ensure the exact same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for customers who value their personal privacy.

While it doesn’t 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!

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AirVPN 101 – A Newcomer’s Guide To Selecting The Right VPN Service Provider