AirVPN Vs NordVPN: First-Class VPNs Compared

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

While anyone can claim to be special nowadays, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. Right 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 anyone can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it really 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 small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly ran it, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

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 company’s history is explained and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with just 246 servers spread across 23 countries.

A lot of servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small 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 maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That stated, Air is popular for its impressive performance across its server network, with lots of nations having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to supply a precise assessment of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, without any speed restrictions or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most secure and reputable method to create encrypted tunnels. It uses 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. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

No choice is given to any service, protocol, or application when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can get rid of internet 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 reliable. The absence of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol totally in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy issues are resolved.

AirVPN has likewise added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

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

You can monitor the present load on each server, any existing concerns, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a brand-new tab).

There is an in-depth specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server information (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 because there is no third-party audit, you need to rely on that what is being provided 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 individuals state about the service before signing up. 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?

When it pertains to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is really clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal details logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and enhance services, but you can ask for this info to be deleted 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 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 fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your information.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping strategies 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 also state they stick to EU personal privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

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

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 allow you to get a sense of what present users are stating about the service before signing up.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This implies that anybody can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but only ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a 3rd party.

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

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

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of 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 absolutely nothing to provide.

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, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, despite Eddie’s considerable capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those companies who utilize it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing 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 assist you. While it’s not difficult to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a lot of download choices. There are builds for numerous running 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 current does not operate on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. When you’re completed, you simply click Disconnect. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more since AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two crucial AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer system launches, but you can’t select which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Although it specifies “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure 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 just 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 displays all offered servers in the network, along with in-depth details about every one, such as the server’s nickname, place, latency in milliseconds from your place, and present 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 displays the variety of servers readily available in each country at a glimpse, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also shown. Numerous 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 found 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 choose as numerous countries as you like.

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

By choosing a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and choose the server you desire in a specific nation. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are also a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab displays a simple 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 a lot of apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows 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, data downloaded and uploaded, and a lot more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the info they could ever want about the different locations, down to the number of users on a specific server. It’s a priceless resource.

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

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

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

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

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just due to the fact that of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program normally functions fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings till you try to find them. Nevertheless, if you sometimes long for power or configurability, the app will supply 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?

There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application supplies the very same extensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and handy status details.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a nation and select a specific city on the exact same page. Some useful text additions make the details more reasonable, however it’s still rather challenging to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still a lot more than many people will ever require. The software also tries a little more to help you, with additional text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app finding when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting 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 because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

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

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

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

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 U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. It appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the right server requires lengthy experimentation. This is probably because, unlike other service providers, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

Thankfully, on AirVPN’s site, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.

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

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

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

Plus, you can use 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 system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.

File sharing has decent speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for up to 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 built-in kill switch, triggered by default, will block all traffic from exiting your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t 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 shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any problems whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN offers a broader variety 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 devices all at the same time.

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

Pricing varies based on the subscription length, and each plan includes the exact same features. Most plans offer good value; however, longer memberships offer the best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they use the European Central Bank to supply real-time currency exchange rate for those overseas, so it can be easily converted to and spent 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, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide options are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing the 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 used more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

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

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a response. That said, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and handy, but the thorough answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of info, consisting of a big FAQs area that is separated by subject.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with very little loss.

Unlimited 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 use.

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

Solid Customer Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent rates, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t really user-friendly 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.

Perhaps there are a lot of advanced alternatives.

Located in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with good pricing. 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 supplier. But even brand-new users might 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 better results than a number of its rival VPN rivals.

When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more focused 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 privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great 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 best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an excellent option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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