AirVPN Vs FastVPN Comparison (2022) – 1 Obvious Champion

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

While anybody can declare to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN providers, 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 website 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 claim to be distinct nowadays, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications provider Iridium formerly ran it, however 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 years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger company either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is discussed and information the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has 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 supplying a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than a lot of, with just 246 servers spread throughout 23 countries.

The majority of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the lack of diversity of servers reduces the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to supply an accurate assessment of performance, with no 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 safe and secure and reputable method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.

Many ports and protocols are readily available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So ignore PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately improves users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trustworthy. The absence of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the newer protocol fully in place up until some of its technical and privacy issues are attended to.

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

Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can easily change servers as often as you like.

You can keep an eye on the existing 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 a comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the readily available 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, however given that there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being offered will work. Looking at the active community forum or the comprehensive 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 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 personal privacy and security are the absolute concern, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack privacy. There is no individual 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 only gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can ask for this info 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 tell what sort 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 information.

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

They also say they abide by EU privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very same or higher levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that no one can utilize it to find out who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection 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 enable you to get a sense of what current users are stating about the service before signing up.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This means that anyone can look into 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 3rd party.

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

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your real email address. That’s terrific considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. However know that you will not be able to change 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 countries that share intelligence data). However even if the government requested user information, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to provide.

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. In spite of Eddie’s considerable ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as great as those providers who utilize it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

Regrettably, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most user-friendly user interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download choices. There are builds for different running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, 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 does not function on your setup.

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You just click Disconnect when you’re finished. Easy enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more considering that 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 permits you to connect when your computer starts up, but you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.

Even though it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has 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 protected tunnel. A lot of standard 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 design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely shows 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, together with comprehensive info about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your area, and present users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the variety of servers available in each nation at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also revealed. 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 discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, 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 select as numerous countries as you like.

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

By picking a nation, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and pick 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 likewise a “refresh” button to get updated info 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 most apps show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained info, such as the server’s location, load, existing user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information uploaded and downloaded, and far more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the details they might ever desire about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a valuable resource.

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

This allows you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it needs to constantly connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor support, custom-made DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really proficient user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.

If the vast feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be difficult to determine what specific settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of personalization.

Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its intricacy. Remember that the program normally operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings up until you try to find them. However, if you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish 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 a very feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software supplies the exact same extensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and valuable status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and choose a specific city on the exact same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more understandable, however it’s still rather challenging to understand in some spots.

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

Speeds/Performance

Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN normally 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, alerting us with a desktop alert, 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 shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

Reviewers have reported speeds to be outstanding. One stated there wasn’t a single nation where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.

While it wasn’t quite at the top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for most people, and situations like HD video, video gaming, and streaming conferencing certainly will not slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a more comprehensive number of server locations. This might limit the availability of nearby servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for most people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, 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 used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Certainly, some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the significant 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 US Netflix seldom work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs prolonged experimentation. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other providers, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

The good news is, 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 absolutely not an area in which AirVPN excels, just since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more concentrated on privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

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

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

File sharing has decent speeds on regional servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports simultaneously (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 obstruct all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out 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 & Pricing

AirVPN offers a broader variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five devices 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 option for individuals who reside in a household house or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for most people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Prices differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. A lot of plans provide 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 easily converted to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

The current 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 options are also 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 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 doesn’t have live chat, it provides e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a very active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a response. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are handy and friendly, however the extensive answers can be quite technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of info, including a large FAQs section that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several subjects, however novices will have the same problems understanding a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Excellent speeds with minimal 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 use.

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

Solid Customer Service.

Active Community Online Forums and In-depth Guides.

Good costs, particularly for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists shield you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and damaging sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

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

Client app might 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 Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be much 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 utilize if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and much better results than a number of its competing VPN competitors.

When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on securing your personal 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 enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent option for consumers who value their 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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