AirVPN Vs TunnelBear: Discover Which One We Would Prefer

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

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

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its dedication to protecting user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site 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 anyone can claim to be unique nowadays, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of 2 lawyers and a small 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 presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

During the last decade, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a bigger organization either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and information the 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 providing a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

So 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 most, with only 246 servers spread across 23 nations.

The majority of servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor problem here is that the lack of variety of servers minimizes the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is popular for its impressive performance throughout its server network, with many countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They use transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to offer an accurate 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 reliable and safe and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.

Various ports and protocols are available; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

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

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The absence of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t rather keeping up with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN says it is evaluating WireGuard, but it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place up until a few of its technical and privacy problems are addressed.

AirVPN has also 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 often as you like.

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

There is a comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available ports, protocols, DNS server details (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 provided will work. Looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service before signing up. You do not need to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

The business is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online personal privacy and security are the absolute concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no personal 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 gathers non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can ask for this information to be deleted 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 determine what sort of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wi-fi 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 since your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also say they adhere to EU personal privacy policies and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or higher levels of personal privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that no one can use it to learn who you are. You’ll remain safe with the high-level protection supplied.

If your ISP or country obstructs OpenVPN, you can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor.

Open-source clients and a lively community online forum allow you to get a sense of what existing users are stating about the service prior to signing up.

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, however just ProtonVPN’s apps have been inspected by a third party.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best readily available. It’s similar to that of some other service providers, but still worth pointing out. The very 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 happens every 60 minutes, and the user can decrease 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 e-mail address. That’s excellent considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. However be aware that you will not be able to alter your account’s password if you do not use one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence information). However even if the government requested for user information, AirVPN would have 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, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s significant ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as good as those suppliers who use it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

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

With Windows, there are a heap of download options. There are builds for numerous operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to describe what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most existing doesn’t operate on your setup.

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

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Despite the fact that it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. Most standard kill switches just 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 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 displays all available servers in the network, along with comprehensive details about each one, such as the server’s nickname, location, 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 displays the number of servers readily available in each country at a glimpse, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green sign is also 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 discovered on the right rail of the Countries tab. Highlight a country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that nation will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is basically a favorites list; you might choose as numerous nations as you like.

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

By choosing a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and select the server you desire in a specific country. 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). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated details on ping times and load times.

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 the majority of apps show your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained details, such as the server’s location, load, existing user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, information uploaded and downloaded, and a lot more.

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

Finally, Logs is an in-depth record of connections, routes, and other data.

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This enables you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to try an SSH tunnel by means of more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The genuinely skilled user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface through the Logs pane.

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

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Remember that the program typically operates fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you look for them. Nevertheless, if you periodically crave power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not 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 utilize an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software offers the very same extensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and practical status details.

Separate pages for country and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a nation and pick a particular city on the same page. Some practical text additions make the info more easy to understand, however it’s still quite challenging 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 the majority of people will ever need. The software also tries a little bit more to help you, with additional text subtitles to discuss what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

Using OpenVPN, the Eddie Windows app from AirVPN usually connects quickly and is ready to go in less than 10 seconds.

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app identifying when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop alert, and reconnecting us in seconds.

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

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

Reviewers have actually reported speeds to be excellent. Undoubtedly, one stated there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly outstanding overall.

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

What AirVPN does not have is a broader variety of server places. This may restrict the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for most people in the United States and Europe, but perhaps less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the huge 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 effective enough to bypass the VPN blocks utilized by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is pretty bad for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. Nevertheless, it appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, finding the best server needs prolonged trial and error. This is most likely since, unlike other providers, AirVPN doesn’t provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

Nevertheless, streaming is certainly not an area in which AirVPN stands out, simply because that’s not what the service is about, as they are more focused on privacy and security.

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

Yes, it does; every internet 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 jump through. Just connect to the VPN server of your choice and start.

Plus, you can use port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. Several applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer system’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with leading 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 will not be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really hassle-free, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

AirVPN provides a wider range of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to 5 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 excellent option for individuals who reside in a household house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for most people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Pricing differs based on the subscription length, and each plan consists of the same features. A lot of plans provide good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the very best offer.

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 easily transformed 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, consisting of Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of worldwide options are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

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

There’s also 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 lots of other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it offers e-mail support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t outsourced but can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a response. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are friendly and practical, but the extensive answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of information, including a big FAQs section that is separated by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover various subjects, but newbies will have the same difficulties comprehending a great deal of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little loss.

Unrestricted P2P enabled 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 choices in the client app.

Solid Customer Support.

Active Community Forums and In-depth Guides.

Good rates, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

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

Client app might overwhelm more recent users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are a lot of advanced choices.

Located in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with good pricing. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. Even brand-new users could 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 much of its competing VPN competitors.

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

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

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

Highly recommended!

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AirVPN Vs FastestVPN Comparison 2022: In-Depth Comparison