AirVPN Vs SurfShark: The Champion Might Shock You

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

While anybody can claim to be unique these days, when it pertains to VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its dedication to securing user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN website starts 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 anyone can claim to be unique nowadays, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of 2 lawyers and a small group of hackers and activists. The satellite communications provider Iridium formerly 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 years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a larger business either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is described and information the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has 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 providing a VPN designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than a lot of, with only 246 servers spread out throughout 23 nations.

Many servers are in Europe (besides those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the lack of diversity of servers decreases 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 popular for its outstanding performance throughout its server network, with lots of countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They use transparent bandwidth allocation methods to provide a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, with no speed restrictions or time limits.

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

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

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it immediately enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trusted. The lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol totally in place until some of its technical and personal privacy concerns are dealt with.

AirVPN has likewise included a lot for power users and tech-savvy individuals who like to experiment with things.

Switching is limitless, so if you do not 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 brand-new tab).

There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server details (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, but since there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being provided will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to 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 business is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack privacy. There is no individual info 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 data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request this details 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 using.

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

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping strategies will fail versus 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 comply with EU personal privacy regulations which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of personal privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

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

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 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 huge 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 actually been checked by a third party.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the finest available. The first exchange uses 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 real e-mail address. That’s excellent since it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But be aware that you will not be able to alter 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 nations that share intelligence data). But even if the federal government asked for user information, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to provide.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, available on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as great as those service providers who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing 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 direct you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use user interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a heap of download options. There are builds for different 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 existing does not operate on your setup.

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do so much more given that AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Although it specifies “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. A lot of basic kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, but you can set up the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

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

The Overview simply 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 readily available servers in the network, in addition to comprehensive information about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your area, and existing users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the variety of servers readily available in each nation at a glance, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also revealed. 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 nation, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might pick as many countries as you like.

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

By selecting 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 shows an easy 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 many apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows 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, information uploaded and downloaded, and much more.

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

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

This enables you to tweak the setup, such as whether it must always 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 truly competent user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.

If the huge feature list appears scary, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be difficult to determine what specific settings do and how to get the wanted results. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to customization.

However, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program typically functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings until you try to find them. If you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish to utilize Eddie. In that case, you can also set up a router or firewall to send all traffic through a VPN tunnel. This works with routers running the open-source DD-WRT and Tomato firmware and the FreeBSD-based pfSense firewall.

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software offers the exact same substantial setup options as its desktop sibling and handy status information.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and select a specific city on the very same page. Some valuable text additions make the info more understandable, but it’s still rather difficult to understand in some spots.

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

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying 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 reveals that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

Because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN, it was always going to be slower than the WireGuard-equipped competitors.

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

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

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server locations. This might limit the accessibility of close-by servers for some users (which will always result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional option for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, but maybe less so for other areas.

Streaming

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

Certainly, some report that Air is quite bad for streaming and does not work with any of the major streaming services. However, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server needs prolonged experimentation. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly 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 up to 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with leading torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated by default, will block all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very convenient, specifically if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

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

This makes it an outstanding choice for individuals who live in a family house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five should suffice for most people, other VPN service providers provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Prices varies based on the membership length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. Most plans use good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions use the 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 converted to and paid for in the currency of your option.

The current plans available are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

Three months – EUR15 – works out to EUR 5/month

Six months – EUR29 – works out to EUR 4.83/month

One year – EUR49 – works out to EUR 4.08/month

Two years – EUR79 – works out to EUR 3.29/month

Three years – EUR99 – works out to EUR 2.75/month

AirVPN accepts major credit cards, PayPal, Amazon Pay, and a whole load of cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of global alternatives are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and utilizing the discount coupon code they send you.

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

AirVPN Customer Assistance

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

Significantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t outsourced however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get an action. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are handy and friendly, however the extensive responses can be pretty technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, including a big FAQs area that is broken up by subject.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little 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 installation and use.

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

Solid Client Service.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Good prices, 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 really user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app might overwhelm more recent users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are a lot of advanced choices.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with great prices. It’s plainly tailored 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. Even new users might do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll receive much quicker speeds and better results than a number of its competing VPN rivals.

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

Although it might not ensure the 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 alternative for customers who value their personal 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 outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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