AirVPN Vs Norton VPN Pricing: A Thorough Guide For 2022

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

While anyone can claim to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website begins with an appeal for your trust, specifying, “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 these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the help of two lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications 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 years, 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 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than most, with just 246 servers spread out across 23 nations.

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

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to offer an accurate evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely 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 trustworthy and safe way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.

Various 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 risky protocols.

No preference is given to any application, protocol, or service when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can overcome internet constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical limitations, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly enhances users’ privacy and security and is extremely reputable. Nevertheless, the absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place up until some of its technical and privacy problems are addressed.

AirVPN has actually likewise added 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 quickly change servers as often as you like.

You can monitor the existing load on each server, any existing concerns, 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 info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, however because there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being provided will work. Looking at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good aspect of this is that you can see what other individuals say about the service before signing up. You don’t need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

The business is very clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the outright priority, 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 data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request for this information 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 type of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi 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 methods will fail against AirVPN since your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they adhere to EU privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can utilize it to learn who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection offered.

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

Open-source clients and a lively community online forum enable you to get a sense of what current users are stating about the service prior to registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This indicates 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 actually been checked by a 3rd party.

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the best available. It resembles that of some other providers, but still worth pointing out. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The main information channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s excellent given that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you will not be able to change your account’s password if you don’t utilize 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 requested user details, 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, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s substantial ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as good as those companies who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is easy, 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 does not have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more challenging learning curve for inexperienced users.

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

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

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 crucial AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN permits you to connect when your computer system starts up, but you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked 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 secure tunnel. The majority of 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 design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely shows the server to which you are connected, the download and upload speeds, the exit IP address, and the connection time. This is where you log into your account.

The Servers page shows all available servers in the network, along with in-depth information about every 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 variety of servers offered in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green sign 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 essentially a favorites list; you might choose as many nations as you like.

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

By choosing a country, you are not instantly 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 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 most apps display 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, existing user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data downloaded and uploaded, and far more.

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

Logs is an in-depth record of connections, routes, and other information.

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

The really competent user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface by means of the Logs pane.

If the large function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to find out what particular settings do and how to get the preferred results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of customization.

However, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Remember that the program generally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you look for them. If you periodically crave power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish to utilize 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 use an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the same extensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and handy status info.

Different pages for country 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 very same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more understandable, but it’s still quite difficult 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 many people will ever require. The software application likewise attempts a bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app identifying when the VPN tunnel drops, alerting us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In regards to personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which reveals that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. Undoubtedly, one said there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was really outstanding overall.

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

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server places. This might restrict the ease of access of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for most people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the huge 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 powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks used by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Certainly, some report that Air is quite poor for streaming and does not work with any of the significant streaming services. However, 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 rarely work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs lengthy experimentation. This is most likely because, unlike other service providers, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

Thankfully, 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.

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

Does AirVPN Allow 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 utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Numerous applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has good speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (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 exiting your gadget 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 really hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN offers a wider variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 devices all at once, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional option for individuals who live in a family home or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for most people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Rates differs based on the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. The majority of plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions provide the very best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to offer real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be quickly transformed to and paid for in the currency of your option.

The current 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 free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using the coupon 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 throughout 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 offers e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a very active support 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 inconsistent with the time it requires to get a reaction. That said, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and helpful, but the thorough responses can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a great deal of information, consisting of a large Frequently asked questions section that is broken up by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, but beginners will have the exact same difficulties understanding a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P allowed 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 Care.

Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.

Great 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 really user-friendly or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are too many advanced alternatives.

Located in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

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

While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and better results than many of its rival VPN competitors.

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

It may not guarantee the exact same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which appoints you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great choice for customers who value their privacy.

While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the very best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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