AirVPN Vs Windscribe: 5 Tests To Decide “Who’s Best” In 2022?

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Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? If yes, then AirVPN could be the best option for you.

While anyone can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

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

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a long period of time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of two lawyers and a small group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications provider Iridium previously ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is currently 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 business either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is explained and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by offering a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

So how does AirVPN stack up against its competitors with such strong privacy qualifications?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than many, with just 246 servers spread throughout 23 countries.

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 absence of diversity of servers decreases the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is well known for its impressive performance across its server network, with numerous countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to supply a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are totally 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 safe and secure and reputable way to create encrypted tunnels. It uses more security than the military.

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

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it instantly improves users’ privacy and security and is highly trusted. Nevertheless, the absence of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t quite staying up to date with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is testing WireGuard, however it won’t put the more recent protocol fully in place until some of its technical and personal privacy concerns are dealt with.

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

Switching is unlimited, so if you don’t like one server, you can quickly switch servers as frequently as you like.

You can monitor the present load on each server, any existing issues, and a history of previous issues on AirVPN’s network status page (which opens in a new tab).

There is a detailed specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with info like the readily 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 comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A nice feature of this is that you can see what other people say about the service prior to 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?

The business is extremely clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack personal privacy. There is no individual 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 collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request for this details to be erased at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, nobody can identify you online; not even your ISP can figure out what type of traffic or protocol you’re using.

There’s no listening in, so you can connect to any wireless network without worrying about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping strategies will fail versus AirVPN because your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They likewise state they abide by EU privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very same or higher levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that no one can use it to discover who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level security provided.

You can still connect to an AirVPN server through OpenVPN over SSH, SSL, or Tor if your ISP or country obstructs 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 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, but just ProtonVPN’s apps have been checked by a 3rd party.

Concerning security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the finest offered. The very first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real e-mail address. That’s fantastic considering that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But understand that you will not 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 countries that share intelligence data). Even if the government asked for user info, AirVPN would have nothing to provide them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

The Eddie UI is the name of AirVPN’s main open-source application, available on all significant platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Sadly, despite Eddie’s considerable ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers 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.

There are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not difficult to get things working, it does not have the most user-friendly interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download options. There are builds for different running 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 present doesn’t operate on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You just click Disconnect when you’re finished. Simple enough for anyone, but 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 functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer launches, however you can’t pick which VPN server it will connect to; it will always connect to the one you chosen last.

Despite the fact that it specifies “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has actually a tab called “network lock” that does the same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. The majority of 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 readily available servers in the network, along with comprehensive info about every one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your area, and existing users and server load. Outstanding stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the number of servers available in each nation at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise revealed. 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 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 lots of nations as you like.

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

By choosing a country, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket).

The Speed tab shows 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 existing VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also reveals fine-grained information, such as the server’s location, load, current user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data uploaded and downloaded, and much more.

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

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

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 utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to try an SSH tunnel through more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

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

If the huge feature list appears frightening, even if you are a VPN professional, it might be difficult to find out what specific settings do and how to get the preferred results. In addition, it differs from any other service in terms of personalization.

Nevertheless, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program typically functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you try to find them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally long for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

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

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

Although there isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can use a very feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application offers the exact same extensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and helpful status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and select a specific city on the very 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 numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than most people will ever need. The software also attempts a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each option does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was great, with the app discovering when the VPN tunnel drops, notifying us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.

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

Now let’s get to those speeds.

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

Nevertheless, reviewers have actually reported speeds to be exceptional. Indeed, one stated there wasn’t a single country where they might complain 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 the majority of people, and scenarios like HD video gaming, streaming, and video conferencing certainly won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a wider number of server places. This may restrict the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will constantly result in much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for many people in the United States and Europe, but possibly 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 utilized by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Some report that Air is pretty poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the major streaming services. 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, discovering the ideal server needs lengthy trial and error. This is most likely because, unlike other providers, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Permit 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. Numerous 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 once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, activated by default, will obstruct all traffic from exiting your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have revealed torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN provides a larger range of plans than most VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five gadgets all at once, 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 individuals who reside in a family home or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for most people, other VPN service providers provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Pricing varies based on the subscription length, and each plan includes the same features. Many plans use good value; however, longer memberships offer the best deal.

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

The existing plans offered 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 international options 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 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 Assistance

AirVPN has a different customer assistance 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.

Importantly, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little inconsistent with the time it requires to get a reaction. That said, the email assistance is high quality, and the agents are friendly and useful, but the extensive answers can be quite technical, which may put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of information, including a large FAQs section that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several topics, however newbies will have the same troubles understanding a great deal of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little 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 installation and usage.

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

Strong Customer Support.

Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.

Excellent prices, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are a lot of advanced alternatives.

Found in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with excellent prices. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN supplier. However even new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

It may 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 choice for consumers who value their personal privacy.

While it doesn’t 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 excellent choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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