AirVPN Vs Le VPN Comparison: Thorough Look & Speed Test (2022)

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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 anyone can declare to be unique nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its dedication to securing user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site 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 claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of 2 lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. 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 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 larger business either.

Throughout 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 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than many, with only 246 servers spread out throughout 23 nations.

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

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to provide an accurate assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most reliable and secure method to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

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

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

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly improves users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely reputable. The absence of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol totally in place up until a few of its technical and privacy concerns are resolved.

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

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

You can keep an eye on 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 a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

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

A good feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service before registering. You do not need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

The company is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the outright concern, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual information 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 gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, but you can ask for this details to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of 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 using.

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

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

They likewise say they comply with EU personal privacy guidelines which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-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 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 online forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are stating about the service before signing up.

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

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best readily available. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real e-mail address. That’s fantastic considering that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you won’t be able to alter your account’s password if you don’t use one.

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

Who Or What Is Eddie??

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

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the information 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 might be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download choices. There are builds for various 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 new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing does not operate on your setup.

After introducing it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You just click Disconnect when you’re completed. Simple enough for anyone, but Eddie can do a lot more given that AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Even though it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in 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 safe tunnel. Most standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, but you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

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

The Overview 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 available servers in the network, in addition to comprehensive info about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing 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 number of servers offered in each nation at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like 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 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 eliminated, efficiently making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a nation, click the empty box.

By choosing a nation, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. 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).

The Speed tab displays 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 the majority of apps display 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, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information uploaded and downloaded, and a lot more.

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

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

This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it should constantly 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 really knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.

If the large feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be hard to determine what particular settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.

However, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its complexity. Keep in mind that the program typically operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings up until you search for them. Nevertheless, if you sometimes yearn for 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 extremely feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software provides the exact same extensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and useful status details.

Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and pick a particular city on the same page. Some helpful text additions make the information more reasonable, however it’s still quite tough to understand in some spots.

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than the majority of people will ever require. The software likewise tries a bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop notice, 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 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 since AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

Nevertheless, reviewers have reported speeds to be outstanding. One said there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly impressive overall.

While it wasn’t quite 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 streaming, video, and gaming conferencing definitely won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN lacks is a broader number of server places. This might limit the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will always lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, however maybe 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 U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is quite bad for streaming and does not work with any of the major streaming services. However, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix rarely work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs lengthy experimentation. This is most likely because, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

Luckily, 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.

Streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN excels, simply since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

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

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

File sharing has good 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 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 out unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

AirVPN provides a wider range of plans than the majority of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five gadgets simultaneously, 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 individuals who live in a household house or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN providers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Pricing differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. The majority of plans use good value; however, longer subscriptions use the very best deal.

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

The existing plans 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, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of global options are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

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

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

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than lots of other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it provides email support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a very active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Significantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t contracted out however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a reaction. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are handy and friendly, but the thorough responses can be pretty technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, including a big Frequently asked questions area that is broken up by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several topics, but newbies will have the very same difficulties understanding a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with very little 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 use.

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

Strong Customer Service.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Good prices, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t really user-friendly 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.

Perhaps there are a lot of advanced choices.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with great prices. It’s plainly 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 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 get much quicker speeds and much better results than much of its competing VPN competitors.

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

It might not ensure the very same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great choice for consumers who value their personal privacy.

While it does not 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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