AirVPN Vs TunnelBear: Learn The Main Differences

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Do you want to stay anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the perfect solution for you.

While anyone can declare to be distinct these days, when it comes to VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN stands apart from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, mentioning, “A VPN based on OpenVPN and operated by activists and hacktivists in defence of net neutrality, privacy and against censorship”.While anybody can claim to be special these days, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN shows that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was started with the help of 2 lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly ran it, but AirVPN took over in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently 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.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has developed 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 non-traditional route and breaks the mold by providing a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

Most servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small concern here is that the absence of variety of servers lowers the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to offer an accurate evaluation of performance, without any overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, with no speed constraints or time limits.

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

Numerous ports and protocols are offered; they use OpenVPN on the following ports: 80 TCP/UDP, 443 TCP/UDP, and 53 TCP/UDP. Moreover, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

When it boils down to it, no choice is given to any service, protocol, or application. Net Neutrality is upheld. Importantly, you can overcome web restrictions such as avoiding censorship, geographic constraints, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it immediately improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly dependable. However, the absence of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather staying up to date with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the more recent protocol completely in place until some of its technical and privacy problems are dealt with.

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 don’t like one server, you can easily switch servers as frequently as you like.

You can keep an eye on the existing 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 specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server information (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s access points.

All of it is nice, but because there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being used will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great thing about 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?

When it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is extremely clear. Online personal privacy and security are the outright top priority, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal 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 only collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and enhance services, however you can request this information to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can figure out what 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 system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping methods 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 state they stick to EU privacy policies which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

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

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

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

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

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best available. It resembles that of some other service providers, but still worth mentioning. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to attain 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 main information channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s excellent considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. However be aware that you won’t have the ability 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 nations that share intelligence data). However even if the government requested for user details, 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, available on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, in spite of Eddie’s considerable capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those suppliers who use it as standard.

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

With Windows, there are a load of download choices. There are builds for numerous operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to explain what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most current doesn’t function on your setup.

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

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 essential AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer system starts up, however you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you picked last.

Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its safe and 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 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 readily available servers in the network, together with comprehensive information about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the variety of servers offered in each country at a glimpse, 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 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 country, click the green checkmark, and the servers for that country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is basically a favorites list; you may select as many countries as you like.

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

By choosing a nation, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and select the server you desire in a particular 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 likewise a “refresh” button to get updated information on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab displays a simple throughput graph with thin plot lines. Its temporal resolution can be changed, 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 info, such as the server’s location, load, current 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 ability to use a VPN with all the information they could ever want about the numerous locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

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

This allows you to tweak the setup, such as whether it ought to always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The genuinely competent user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.

If the huge function list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be hard to determine what specific settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of personalization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program normally works fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings till you search for them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally crave power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not want 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?

There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application provides the very same comprehensive configuration choices as its desktop sibling and practical status info.

Different pages for country and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and pick a particular city on the same page. Some helpful text additions make the details more reasonable, however it’s still quite challenging to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than most people will ever require. The software application also attempts a bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

In terms of 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.

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

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

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

What AirVPN lacks is a wider variety of server areas. This may restrict the ease of access of neighboring servers for some users (which will always lead to better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for most people in the United States and Europe, however maybe less so for other regions.

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 U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Indeed, some report that Air is pretty poor 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 seldom work, and when they do, discovering the ideal server needs prolonged trial and error. This is probably due to the fact that, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

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

Plus, you can use port forwarding to improve your file-sharing performance. A number of applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.

File sharing has good speeds on regional servers, enables port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (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, triggered by default, will block all traffic from exiting your device if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is really practical, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be excellent, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Pricing

AirVPN provides a wider range of plans than a lot of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 gadgets concurrently, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other gadgets all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional choice for people who live in a family home or wish to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 really should be enough for many people, other VPN providers provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Rates varies based upon the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. The majority of plans use good value; nevertheless, longer memberships offer the best deal.

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to offer real-time exchange rates for those overseas, so it can be easily converted to and paid for in the currency of your option.

The existing plans readily available are:

Three days- EUR2

One month – EUR7

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

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

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

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

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

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

AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and utilizing the 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 throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

AirVPN has a different customer support offering than lots of other VPNs. While it doesn’t have live chat, it provides 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.

Notably, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get an action. That stated, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the agents are useful and friendly, but the thorough answers can be quite technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

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

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different subjects, however novices will have the exact same problems comprehending a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with very little loss.

Unlimited P2P enabled 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 setup and use.

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

Solid Customer Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent 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 easy to use or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are a lot of advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, trusted, and safe VPN service with excellent rates. 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 brand-new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

It may not ensure the very same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which designates you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good option for consumers who value their privacy.

While it doesn’t 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 outstanding option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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