AirVPN Vs Private Internet Access Comparison: Are These Service Providers Still Trustworthy?

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Do you wish to stay anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the ideal service for you.

While anyone can claim to be special these days, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website 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 anyone can declare to be distinct these days, when it concerns VPN companies, 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 hackers and activists. The satellite communications supplier Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently 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 bigger business either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is discussed and details 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.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

Most servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the lack of diversity of servers minimizes the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while maintaining their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to supply an accurate assessment of performance, with no 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 safe and dependable way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

Many ports and protocols are offered; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Moreover, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

When it comes down to it, no preference is given to any application, service, or protocol. Net Neutrality is upheld. Significantly, you can get rid of web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographical constraints, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it immediately improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, but it will not put the newer protocol fully in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy problems are addressed.

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

Switching is unlimited, so if you don’t like one server, you can easily switch servers as frequently 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 specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with info like the available 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 need to trust that what is being provided will work. But taking a look at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good aspect of this is that you can see what other people state about the service before signing up. 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?

When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is really clear. Online privacy and security are the outright concern, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal 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 only gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request 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 type of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics 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 regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very 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 protection offered.

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

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

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

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the finest readily available. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of 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 excellent given 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 do not utilize one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence data). However even if the government requested for user details, AirVPN would have nothing to give them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

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

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the information you require to connect to a VPN.

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

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

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest area. You just click Disconnect when you’re completed. Easy enough for anyone, but Eddie can do so much more because AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 crucial AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system starts up, however you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Although it defines “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and secure tunnel. The majority of standard kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, but you can establish the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

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

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

The Servers page displays all available servers in the network, in addition to detailed information about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your place, and existing users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the number of servers readily available in each country at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise revealed. 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 discovered 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 might select as lots of countries as you like.

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

By selecting a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and choose the server you want in a particular country. 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 likewise 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 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 most apps display 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, current 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 capability to use a VPN with all the details they might ever want about the different locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s an invaluable resource.

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

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

The genuinely knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface via the Logs pane.

If the huge function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be hard to determine what particular settings do and how to get the preferred results. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of personalization.

However, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program typically works fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings until you try to find them. If you occasionally long for power or configurability, the app will offer it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not 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 exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application supplies the same substantial configuration choices as its desktop sibling and useful status details.

Different pages for country 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 same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more reasonable, however it’s still rather challenging to understand 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 most people will ever need. The software also tries a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app detecting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of 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.

It was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competition because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. Indeed, one stated there wasn’t a single nation where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly remarkable overall.

While it wasn’t quite on top tier for VPNs that use WireGuard, it was still more than fast enough for many people, and circumstances like HD streaming, gaming, and video conferencing certainly will not slow you down.

What AirVPN lacks is a wider number of server locations. This may limit the accessibility of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, but maybe less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the big 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.

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

Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix seldom work, and when they do, discovering the best server requires lengthy trial and error. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other providers, AirVPN doesn’t provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Allow P2P?

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 nothing to configure, no hoops to leap through. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can use port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Several 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 decent speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for up to 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, 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, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN uses a larger variety of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five gadgets simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional option for people who live in a family home or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN providers provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Prices differs based on the membership length, and each plan includes the exact same features. A lot of plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions use the very best deal.

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

The present 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 totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and utilizing the discount coupon code they send you.

There’s likewise 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 support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it provides e-mail 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 requires to get a reaction. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the agents are handy and friendly, but the comprehensive answers can be quite technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a great deal of info, including a large Frequently asked questions area that is broken up by topic.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little 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 installation and use.

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

Strong Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Great prices, particularly 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 extremely user-friendly or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are too many advanced alternatives.

Located in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with great rates. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN provider. But even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

Although it may not guarantee the same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits 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 absolutely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an excellent option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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