AirVPN Vs TunnelBear Comparison: Give Us 3 Mins, We’ll Give You The Simple Facts

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Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the best service for you if yes.

While anybody can declare to be special nowadays, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website begins 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 pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN Home Page

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

During 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.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is described and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has developed 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 developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up versus its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

A lot of servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small concern here is that the absence of variety of servers decreases the number of international AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while keeping their 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 utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide an accurate evaluation of performance, with no 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 utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most dependable and safe and secure method 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. Moreover, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

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

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly enhances users’ privacy and security and is extremely dependable. However, the lack of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t rather staying up to date with its rivals. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, but it will not put the newer protocol fully in place up until a few of its technical and privacy concerns are addressed.

AirVPN has actually also added a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

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

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

There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details 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 trust that what is being offered will work. However taking a look at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good aspect of this is that you can see what other people state about the service before signing up. You 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 comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is very clear. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no personal information 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 gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request this info to be erased at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one 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 wireless network without fretting about your computer and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping methods 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 likewise state they comply with EU personal privacy guidelines and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can use it to learn who you are. You’ll remain 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 nation blocks OpenVPN.

Open-source clients and a lively community forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are saying about the service before registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This means that anyone can check out AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been examined by a 3rd party.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the very best offered. It’s similar to that of some other companies, however still worth mentioning. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying happens every 60 minutes, and the user can decrease this value. The primary data channel employs AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal information, not even your real email address. That’s excellent given that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be aware that you won’t be able to alter 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 information). Even if the federal government asked for user details, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to offer them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

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

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

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

With Windows, there are a ton of download alternatives. There are builds for different running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, 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 introducing it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You simply click Disconnect when you’re completed. Simple enough for anybody, however Eddie can do so much more since AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer launches, however you can’t choose which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Although it specifies “kill switch” throughout the settings, AirVPN has actually 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 and secure tunnel. A lot of standard kill switches only 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 six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

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

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

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

The Countries page displays the number of servers readily available in each country at a glimpse, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also revealed. Many 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 select as many countries as you like.

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

By picking a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and choose the server you desire in a specific country. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “indication out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are also 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 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 the majority of apps show your existing 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, information downloaded and uploaded, and much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the details they could ever want about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a particular server. It’s a valuable resource.

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

This allows you to fine-tune 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 assistance, custom-made DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The truly skilled user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, to name a few things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface through the Logs pane.

If the vast feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN specialist, it might be hard to determine what particular settings do and how to get the preferred outcomes. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to personalization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program typically operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings till you search for them. Nevertheless, if you sometimes yearn for power or configurability, the app will offer 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 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 use a very feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application supplies the exact same substantial configuration choices as its desktop sibling and useful 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 pick a particular city on the same page. Some valuable text additions make the information more easy to understand, however it’s still rather challenging to comprehend 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 most people will ever require. The software application likewise tries a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each alternative 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 detecting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of personal privacy, leak tests showed that AirVPN’s Windows client didn’t have any DNS leaks, which shows that the Network Lock/Kill Switch works well.

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

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

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

What AirVPN does not have is a wider variety of server areas. This might restrict the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for many people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps 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 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 pretty bad for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the significant 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 US Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, discovering the best server needs prolonged trial and error. This is most likely because, unlike other service providers, AirVPN doesn’t provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

The good news is, on AirVPN’s website, there is a list of ‘blocked websites’ that users can examine 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 privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Permit Torrenting?

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

Plus, you can use port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Numerous 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 decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, triggered by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving 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 really hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

AirVPN uses a broader range of plans than the majority of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five devices simultaneously, 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 people who live in a household house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Pricing differs based on the membership length, and each plan consists of the same features. Most plans use good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they utilize the European Central Bank to supply real-time currency exchange rate for those overseas, so it can be easily transformed to and paid for in the currency of your choice.

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, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of global options 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 using the discount coupon code they send you.

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

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer assistance offering than many other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it uses e-mail support and frequently asked questions (FAQs) and has a really active assistance online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t contracted out but can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a reaction. That said, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are friendly and useful, however the extensive responses can be quite technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.

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

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different subjects, but beginners will have the same difficulties understanding a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with minimal loss.

Unrestricted 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 options in the client app.

Strong Customer Support.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Great prices, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t really easy to use or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are too many advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with good 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 service provider. Even brand-new users could 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 many of its competing VPN rivals.

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

It may not guarantee the very same level of personal privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent alternative for consumers who value their privacy.

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

Highly recommended!

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