AirVPN Vs NordVPN: Which Is Far Better? (2022 Compared)

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

While anybody can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to protecting 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 claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of 2 lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications service provider Iridium previously 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 decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger organization either.

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

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

The majority of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the lack of variety of servers reduces the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to supply a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no 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 reputable and protected method to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.

Numerous ports and protocols are 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. Forget about PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

No preference is given to any service, protocol, or application when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is maintained. Notably, you can get rid of internet constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately enhances users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol totally in place till a few of its technical and privacy issues are attended to.

AirVPN has actually also included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

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

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

There is a comprehensive 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 gain access to points.

All of it is nice, but given that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being provided will work. However looking at the active community forum or the in-depth open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great aspect of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to 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?

When it concerns AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is very clear. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal 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 enhance services, however you can ask for this info to be erased 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 kind 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 and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

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

They likewise say they follow EU privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or higher levels of personal privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can utilize it to discover who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level security supplied.

If your ISP or nation 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 existing users are stating about the service prior to registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This implies that anyone can check out 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 third party.

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the very best readily available. It resembles that of some other providers, but still worth pointing out. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can lower this value. The main information channel uses 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 because it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But know that you won’t have the ability to change your account’s password if you do not utilize one.

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

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, offered on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. In spite of Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as excellent as those companies who utilize it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

Sadly, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide 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 tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a load of download alternatives. There are builds for various running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to describe what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most present does not work on your setup.

After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You just click Disconnect when you’re ended up. Simple enough for anybody, however Eddie can do so much more given that AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two essential AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system 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” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe tunnel. A lot of basic 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 layout 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 available servers in the network, in addition to comprehensive details about each one, such as the server’s label, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Excellent stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the number of servers readily available in each country at a glimpse, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also shown. Lots of 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 nation, 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 nation will be gotten rid of, efficiently 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. 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 shows an easy throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.

While the majority of apps show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained details, 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 ability to utilize a VPN with all the information they might ever desire about the various locations, down to the number of users on a specific server. It’s a valuable resource.

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

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel via more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom 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 User Interface via the Logs pane.

If the large function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be difficult to figure out what specific settings do and how to get the desired outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its complexity. Remember that the program generally works fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings up until you look for them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally long for power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t want to use Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send out all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

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 setup options as its desktop sibling and helpful status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and pick a specific city on the exact same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more understandable, however it’s still rather tough 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 require. The software also tries a bit more to assist you, with additional text subtitles to discuss what each option does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In regards to 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. Indeed, one said there wasn’t a single nation where they might grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a broader number of server locations. This may limit the ease of access of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent choice for most 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 used by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Certainly, some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and does not work with any of the major 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 rarely work, and when they do, discovering the right server requires prolonged trial and error. This is probably because, unlike other companies, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

Streaming is definitely not an area in which AirVPN stands out, just 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 choice 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’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.

File sharing has good speeds on local servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, triggered by default, will block all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very practical, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN provides a larger range of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 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 excellent choice for people who reside in a family home or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for many people, other VPN companies provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Pricing varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the exact same features. A lot of plans use good value; nevertheless, longer memberships use the very best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. However, they utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time currency exchange rate for those overseas, so it can be quickly transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

The current plans readily available are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month

Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month

One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month

Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month

Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month

AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide alternatives are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day free 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 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 lots of other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it offers email support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Significantly, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t contracted out but can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and handy, but the detailed answers can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, including a large Frequently asked questions section that is separated by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several subjects, but beginners will have the exact same troubles comprehending 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 enabled with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on servers and apps 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 Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent rates, 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 extremely user-friendly or attractive like other services.

Client app might overwhelm newer users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are too many advanced choices.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with excellent rates. It’s plainly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. However even 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 better results than many of its rival VPN competitors.

When it boils down to it, this VPN service is more focused on safeguarding your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

Although it might not ensure the 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 customers who value their personal privacy.

While it does not 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 outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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