AirVPN Vs TunnelBear Comparison 2022 – Don’t Pay Out Until You Check This

  • Time to read: 16 min.
Affiliate Disclaimer

Full Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links to products/services. We may receive a commission for purchases made through these links.

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

While anyone can declare to be unique these days, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, stating, “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 companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of two lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. 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 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.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is explained 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 providing 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 than most, with just 246 servers spread out across 23 countries.

The majority of servers are in Europe (aside from those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small concern here is that the lack of diversity of servers decreases the number of international AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while maintaining their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They use transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to provide a precise evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely 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 trusted and safe and secure method to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

Numerous ports and protocols are available; 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. Forget about PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

No preference is given to any application, protocol, or service when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is maintained. Importantly, you can overcome internet constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic limitations, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it automatically improves users’ privacy and security and is extremely reputable. However, the lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN says 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 concerns are addressed.

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

Switching is limitless, so if you do not like one server, you can quickly change servers as often as you like.

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

There is a detailed specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with information like the available 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, however given that there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being offered will work. However looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A nice thing about this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to registering. You don’t need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

When it pertains to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is really clear. Online personal privacy and security are the outright top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade 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 enhance services, but 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, 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 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 versus AirVPN because your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also say they follow EU personal privacy regulations which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater 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.

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

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

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This implies 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 inspected by a 3rd party.

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the best readily available. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth mentioning. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish 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 main data channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your real email address. That’s terrific given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be aware that you will not 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 nations that share intelligence information). But even if the government requested for user information, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to provide.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s primary open-source application, readily available on all major platforms and OSes, consisting of 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 suppliers who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use user interface, so it may be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a load 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 doesn’t function on your setup.

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You just click Disconnect when you’re finished. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do a lot more because AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Even though it defines “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 safe tunnel. Most standard kill switches only 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 readily available servers in the network, in addition to in-depth information about every one, such as the server’s nickname, 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 understand whether a server is suggested for you.

The Countries page shows the variety of servers offered in each country at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise shown. Numerous 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 nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you may select as many countries as you like.

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

By picking a nation, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and choose the server you desire in a specific nation. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking 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 likewise a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.

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 many apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained information, 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 much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the ability to use a VPN with all the info they might ever desire about the various locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a detailed 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 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 by means of the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to find out what particular settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of personalization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program typically operates fine on its own, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you try to find them. If you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you don’t 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 use a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software provides the same comprehensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and useful status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and choose a particular city on the exact same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more easy to understand, but it’s still quite tough to understand in some spots.

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

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop notification, 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 shows 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.

However, reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. Indeed, one said there wasn’t a single nation where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a broader number of server areas. This may limit the availability of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, however 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 actually been a mixed bag for reviewers. Some report that AirVPN is effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks used 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. 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 rarely work, and when they do, discovering the best server requires prolonged trial and error. This is probably since, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not use 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 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 personal privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

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

Plus, you can utilize port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. A number of 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 good speeds on regional servers, permits port forwarding for up to 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with leading 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 unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

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

This makes it an outstanding choice for individuals who live in a household house or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for most people, other VPN providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Rates differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. Many plans provide good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the best offer.

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 choice.

The existing 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 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 utilizing the voucher 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 used more than 5 GB of data during that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than many other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it uses e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has an extremely active assistance forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t contracted out but can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a response. That stated, the email assistance is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and useful, but the comprehensive responses can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a lot of information, including a big FAQs section that is broken up by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various topics, however beginners will have the very same difficulties understanding a great deal of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Excellent speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P allowed 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 installation and use.

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

Strong Client Service.

Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.

Excellent costs, particularly for longer-term plans.

Optional block lists protect you from advertisements, adware, trackers, and hazardous sources.

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very easy to use or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm more recent users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are too many advanced options.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. It’s clearly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. Even brand-new users might do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to use if you’re brand-new to VPNs, you’ll get much quicker speeds and much better results than many of its rival 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 may not ensure the same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent option for customers who value their personal privacy.

While it does not hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s absolutely the very best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

Click Here Or Below To Join AirVPN Today!!

AirVPN Vs Le VPN: Check Out Which One We Prefer