AirVPN Vs HideMyAss Comparison: What You Really Should Learn

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

While anyone can declare to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site starts with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “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 nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of 2 lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications service provider Iridium previously ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

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

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is explained and details the personal 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

So how does AirVPN compare to its competitors with such strong personal privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

The majority of servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the absence of diversity of servers reduces the number of global AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while preserving their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

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

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

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it immediately enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reputable. However, the absence of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the newer protocol fully in place till some of its technical and personal privacy problems are dealt with.

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

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

You can keep track of the existing load on each server, any existing problems, 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 details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.

All of it is nice, however since there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being used will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great thing about this is that you can see what other individuals state 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?

The company is very clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no individual information 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 gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request this information to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

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

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

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

They likewise state they adhere to EU personal privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the 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 use it to learn who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level security supplied.

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

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

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

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the best offered. It’s similar to that of some other suppliers, however still worth mentioning. The very first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can reduce this value. The primary data channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.

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

Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence information). However even if the federal government asked for user info, AirVPN would have 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 major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, in spite of Eddie’s substantial ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those suppliers who utilize it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is easy, and it has all the information 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 easy to use user interface, so it might be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a lot of download options. There are builds for different 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 explain what’s brand-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 simply click Disconnect when you’re finished. Easy enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more since AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer launches, but you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.

Despite the fact that it specifies “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 safe tunnel. Many standard 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 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 readily available servers in the network, in addition to in-depth details about each one, such as the server’s nickname, place, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing users and server load. Excellent stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the number of servers offered in each country at a glance, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise shown. Numerous 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 country, 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 nations as you like.

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

By selecting a nation, you are not instantly connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and choose the server you desire 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 likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab shows a simple 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 the majority of apps display your existing 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 much more.

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

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

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This allows 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 through more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The genuinely knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be difficult to figure out what particular settings do and how to get the preferred results. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of personalization.

Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program normally operates fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings up until you try to find them. If you sometimes 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 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 use an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application offers the exact same substantial setup options as its desktop sibling and useful 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 nation and pick a specific city on the same page. Some useful text additions make the details more easy to understand, but it’s still quite challenging to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than most people will ever need. The software application likewise attempts 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 go in 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 notice, 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.

It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition because AirVPN only supports OpenVPN.

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

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

What AirVPN does not have is a broader variety of server locations. This might limit the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, however 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 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 does not work with any of the major streaming services. It appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the ideal server requires prolonged experimentation. This is most likely since, unlike other companies, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

The good news is, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming websites 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 personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

Yes, it does; every internet 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. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.

Plus, you can use port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Numerous 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 good speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

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

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN provides a broader variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 gadgets at the same time, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.

This makes it an outstanding choice for people who live in a household house or wish to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for most people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Pricing differs based on the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. A lot of plans use good value; however, longer subscriptions provide the best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They utilize the European Central Bank to supply 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of international choices are likewise 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 coupon code they send you.

There’s also 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 support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it uses email support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has an extremely active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

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

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of details, consisting of a large Frequently asked questions area that is separated by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different subjects, however beginners will have the very same troubles comprehending a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with minimal loss.

Unrestricted 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.

Strong Client Service.

Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.

Excellent rates, especially for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists shield you from advertisements, 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 newer users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are a lot of advanced alternatives.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with great pricing. 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 company. But even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to use if you’re 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 securing your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.

It might not guarantee the same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for consumers who value their personal 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 excellent choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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AirVPN Vs Hide.Me Comparison: A Full Overview Of Pros & Cons