AirVPN Vs StrongVPN Comparison: Do I Recommend Them?

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

While anybody can claim to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN suppliers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to protecting user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website begins 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 claim to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of two lawyers and a little group of hackers and activists. 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 currently 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 organization either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and information the personal 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up versus its competitors with such strong personal 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 nations.

Most servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the absence of diversity of servers minimizes the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while keeping 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 use transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, with no 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 reliable and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.

Numerous 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 PPTP and other risky protocols.

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

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly reliable. The lack of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is testing WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol fully in place up until a few of its technical and privacy issues are dealt with.

AirVPN has also 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 quickly change servers as frequently as you like.

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

There is a comprehensive specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with information 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, however because there is no third-party audit, you have to trust that what is being offered will work. But taking a look at the active community 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 individuals say about the service before registering. You don’t have 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 absolute concern, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no personal 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 just collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and enhance services, however you can request this information to be deleted 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 kind of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless 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 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 stick to EU personal privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater 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 offered.

If your ISP or country 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 present users are saying about the service before registering.

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

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the best available. It resembles that of some other companies, but still worth mentioning. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can lower this value. The primary data channel uses AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s terrific considering that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be conscious that you won’t be able to alter 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). 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, available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, in spite 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 use it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to direct you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it does not have the most user-friendly user interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a load of download choices. 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 existing doesn’t work on your setup.

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You simply click Disconnect when you’re completed. Easy enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more considering that AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

Two crucial AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer system starts up, but you can’t select which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.

Even though it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has actually 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 tunnel. A lot 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 six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely 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 available servers in the network, together with comprehensive info about each one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your area, and current users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the number of servers available in each nation at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise revealed. 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 basically a favorites list; you may pick as numerous countries as you like.

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

By choosing 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 displays a basic 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 display your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained info, 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 use a VPN with all the info they might ever want about the different locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

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

This allows you to tweak the setup, such as whether it needs to constantly connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom-made 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 Interface by means of the Logs pane.

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

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Keep in mind that the program generally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you try to find them. If you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish 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?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software supplies the exact same extensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and useful status information.

Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and choose a particular city on the very same page. Some useful text additions make the details more understandable, however it’s still rather tough to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than the majority of people will ever need. The software application also tries a bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to discuss what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

Utilizing 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 great, with the app detecting when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In regards to privacy, leak tests revealed 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.

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

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be outstanding. One said there wasn’t a single country where they could complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.

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

What AirVPN lacks is a wider 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 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 Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has actually been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is powerful enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Indeed, 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 says services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server needs lengthy trial and error. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

Yes, it does; every internet protocol, including peer-to-peer, is welcome. Undoubtedly, 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 start.

Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. A number of 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 local servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (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 exiting your device 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 extremely hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually revealed torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

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

This makes it an exceptional choice for people who reside in a family house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for many people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Prices varies based upon the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. The majority of plans offer good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions provide 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 transformed to and paid for in the currency of your option.

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 likewise 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 using the coupon code they send you.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or used more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

AirVPN has a different customer support offering than many 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 forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t contracted out however can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a reaction. That stated, the email support is high quality, and the agents are helpful and friendly, however the extensive responses can be pretty technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of information, consisting of a large FAQs section that is broken up by topic.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P permitted 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 usage.

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

Solid Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Great rates, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t extremely user-friendly or pretty 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.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. 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 service provider. But even 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 much better results than a number 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.

It might not ensure the exact same level of privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for consumers 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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AirVPN Review – Is It Any Good? A Newbie’s Candid View