AirVPN Vs PIA Comparison – Are They Any Good? Site New User’s Candid View

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

While anyone can declare to be special nowadays, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to protecting user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site 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 claim to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

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

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

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually established 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 supplying a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than the majority of, with just 246 servers spread out across 23 countries.

Most servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the absence of variety of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to supply an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, with no speed restrictions or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most trustworthy and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides 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. Forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically enhances users’ privacy and security and is highly trustworthy. The absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol fully in place up until some of its technical and personal privacy issues are addressed.

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

Switching is limitless, so if you don’t like one server, you can quickly change servers as often as you like.

You can keep an eye on the existing load on each server, any existing problems, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).

There is an in-depth specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with info like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.

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

A nice feature of this is that you can see what other people state about the service prior to registering. You do not have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

The business is extremely clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack privacy. There is no individual 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 collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request for this info to be erased 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 tell what sort of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

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

They also state they follow EU personal privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or higher 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 nobody can utilize it to discover who you are. You’ll remain safe with the top-level protection offered.

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

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

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

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

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your genuine email address. That’s fantastic considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you won’t be able to change your account’s password if you don’t use one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of nations that share intelligence data). But even if the government asked for 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, available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. In spite of Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as great as those service providers who utilize it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is simple, and it has all the details you require to connect to a VPN.

There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it doesn’t have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.

With Windows, there are a load 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 describe what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most current doesn’t function on your setup.

After launching 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. Easy 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’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has 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 secure tunnel. The majority of basic kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, however you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

Eddie’s design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview simply 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 readily available servers in the network, along with in-depth details about each one, such as the server’s nickname, area, latency in milliseconds from your area, and present users and server load. Remarkable 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 offered in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green sign is likewise 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 country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might pick as numerous nations as you like.

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

By picking a nation, you are not right away 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 a lot of apps show your existing VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, current 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 capability to use a VPN with all the information they might ever want about the different locations, down to the number of users on a specific server. It’s an invaluable 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 enables 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 try 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 truly competent user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface via the Logs pane.

If the large feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to figure out what particular settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to personalization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program typically functions fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings until you look for them. Nevertheless, if you periodically crave power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t want to utilize 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 utilize a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software supplies the same comprehensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and practical status information.

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 same page. Some helpful text additions make the info more easy to understand, however it’s still quite difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still many more than the majority of people will ever need. The software likewise attempts a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app spotting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop alert, 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 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 competitors due to the fact that AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

Reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. Indeed, one stated there wasn’t a single country where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly outstanding overall.

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

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server areas. This might limit the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for many people in the United States and Europe, however possibly 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 utilized by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Certainly, some report that Air is quite bad 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 US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server requires prolonged experimentation. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other service providers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

The good news is, 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 certainly not an area in which AirVPN excels, merely since that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

Yes, it does; every internet protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s absolutely nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.

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

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving 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 practical, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

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

This makes it an exceptional choice for people who live in a family house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should suffice for many people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Pricing varies based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. Many plans provide good value; however, longer subscriptions provide the best deal.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use 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 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide 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 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 utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

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

Significantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t outsourced but can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a reaction. That said, the email support is high quality, and the agents are friendly and useful, however the detailed answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a great deal of info, consisting of a large FAQs area that is separated by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different subjects, but novices will have the exact same difficulties comprehending a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Excellent 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 setup and usage.

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

Solid Customer Support.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Good costs, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app might overwhelm newer users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are too many advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with excellent pricing. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. But even 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 lot of its rival VPN rivals.

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

It may not ensure the very same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good choice for customers who value their 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 exceptional option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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