AirVPN Vs ProtonVPN Comparison: What You Really Should Find Out

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

While anybody can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to safeguarding user privacy. Right 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 anybody can declare to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of two lawyers and a small group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications service provider Iridium formerly 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).

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

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is described and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

So how does AirVPN stack up against its competitors 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 countries.

Many servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small concern here is that the absence of variety of servers reduces the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That stated, Air is popular for its exceptional performance across its server network, with numerous countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They use transparent bandwidth allocation methods to provide a precise assessment of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most protected and reliable way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

Various ports and protocols are available; 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. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reliable. However, the lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t rather staying up to date with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is testing WireGuard, but it will not put the more recent protocol completely in place until some of its technical and privacy problems are dealt with.

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 easily change servers as frequently as you like.

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

There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with info 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 considering that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being used will work. But looking at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great feature of this is that you can see what other people state about the service before 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?

The company is extremely clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the outright concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual info 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 collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can ask for this details 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 figure out what type of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping techniques will fail against AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also say they follow EU personal privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or higher 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 no one can use it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level security provided.

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 online forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are stating about the service before registering.

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

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

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s excellent because 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 utilize one.

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

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, offered on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, despite Eddie’s considerable ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers who utilize it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

Regrettably, 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 user-friendly interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a lot of download options. There are builds for different operating 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 new and an archive of past releases in case the most present doesn’t operate on your setup.

After introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Easy enough for anyone, but Eddie can do so much more considering that 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 permits you to connect when your computer system starts up, but you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Although it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. The majority of standard 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 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 shows all offered servers in the network, together with comprehensive details about each one, such as the server’s label, location, latency in milliseconds from your area, and current users and server load. Outstanding stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the variety of servers available in each country at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green sign is likewise shown. Lots of 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 discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, 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 nation will be removed, efficiently making it a blocklist/denylist. To get rid of the green checkmark from a country, click the empty box.

By choosing 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 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 many apps display your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained info, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data uploaded and downloaded, and much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever desire about the different locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s an invaluable resource.

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

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

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

If the huge feature list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be hard to find out what specific settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of customization.

Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program typically works fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings till you search for them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not want 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?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software provides the exact same substantial configuration choices as its desktop sibling and helpful status details.

Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and pick a particular city on the exact same page. Some valuable text additions make the details more reasonable, but it’s still rather tough 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 little bit more to assist you, with additional text subtitles to describe what each option does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, 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 revealed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

However, reviewers have reported speeds to be excellent. Indeed, one stated there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was actually 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 circumstances like HD streaming, video, and gaming conferencing absolutely won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive variety of server locations. This may limit the ease of access of nearby servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for many people in the United States and Europe, but possibly less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple TV, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the USA, whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is quite bad 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 says services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the ideal server requires lengthy experimentation. This is probably because, unlike other companies, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Allow P2P?

Yes, it does; every web protocol, including peer-to-peer, is welcome. Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to jump 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’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has good speeds on regional servers, allows 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 obstruct all traffic from leaving your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very convenient, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN offers a broader range 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 excellent choice for individuals who live in a family house or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five really should be enough for many people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Prices varies based on the subscription length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. The majority of plans provide good value; however, longer memberships use the very best deal.

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

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 international choices are likewise 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 voucher 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 assistance offering than many other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it uses email assistance and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has an extremely active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out 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 practical and friendly, but the extensive answers can be quite technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a great deal of information, consisting of a big FAQs section that is broken up by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various subjects, however newbies will have the exact same troubles comprehending a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Excellent speeds with minimal loss.

Unrestricted 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 options in the client app.

Strong Customer Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Good costs, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very easy to use or pretty 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 a lot of advanced alternatives.

Located in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

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

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

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

Although it may not ensure the same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent alternative for consumers 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 excellent option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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