AirVPN Vs ZenMate Comparison (2022) – 1 Obvious Winner

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

While anyone can claim to be special nowadays, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN site 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 anybody can declare to be distinct nowadays, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

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

Throughout the last decade, 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 explained and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than the majority of, with only 246 servers spread out across 23 countries.

Many servers are in Europe (aside from those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the absence of diversity of servers minimizes the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while preserving their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to offer an accurate assessment 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 reputable and protected way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

Various ports and protocols are readily 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. So forget PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it instantly improves users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely trustworthy. However, the lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t quite staying up to date with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it won’t put the newer protocol completely in place until a few of its technical and personal privacy issues are dealt with.

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

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

You can keep an eye on the current load on each server, any existing issues, 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 info like the offered ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, however because there is no third-party audit, you need to trust that what is being offered will work. However looking at the active community forum or the detailed open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A nice feature of this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before signing up. 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?

The business is really clear when it comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy. Online privacy and security are the absolute priority, with defense from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade privacy. There is no individual information logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN 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, but you can ask for this details to be deleted at any time. This makes it among 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 stressing over 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 just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They likewise state they comply with EU personal privacy policies 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 conceal your IP so that nobody can utilize it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level protection offered.

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

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

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge 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 third party.

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the best offered. It’s similar to that of some other companies, but still worth mentioning. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to attain Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) by means of Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The primary information channel employs AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your real email address. That’s fantastic because it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. But be aware that you won’t have the ability to change 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 data). Even if the government asked for user info, AirVPN would have absolutely nothing to give them.

Who Or What Is Eddie??

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

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is simple, and it has all the details you need to connect to a VPN.

Regrettably, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to guide you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it doesn’t have the most user-friendly user interface, so it might be a more difficult learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download alternatives. There are builds for various running systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in portable or installable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to describe what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most present does not work on your setup.

After launching it, choose ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. When you’re ended up, you just click Disconnect. Simple enough for anyone, however Eddie can do so much more because AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 crucial AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer launches, but you can’t pick 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” throughout the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the exact same thing. The difference is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its protected tunnel. Many 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 design is easy to understand. Along the top, there are 6 tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview just 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, together with detailed info about each one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and current users and server load. Outstanding 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 offered in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Just like 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 country, 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 choose as lots of nations as you like.

If you click the red “x”, that nation will be gotten rid of, 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 select the server you want in a specific nation. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking 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 details 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 display your current VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows 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, data uploaded and downloaded, and much more.

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

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

This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it needs 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 experienced user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which enable, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface via the Logs pane.

If the large function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to figure out what specific settings do and how to get the desired results. In addition, it is unlike any other service in terms of personalization.

However, do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program normally operates fine on its own, and you’ll never see the settings until you try to find them. Nevertheless, if you occasionally yearn for 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 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 utilize an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application provides the same comprehensive configuration options as its desktop sibling and helpful status details.

Different pages for country 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 handy text additions make the details more reasonable, however it’s still rather difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as numerous settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still a lot more than most people will ever need. The software likewise tries a little bit more to assist you, with additional text subtitles to explain what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

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

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

In regards to 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.

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

However, reviewers have reported speeds to be exceptional. One said there wasn’t a single nation where they might complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly excellent overall.

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

What AirVPN lacks is a broader number of server locations. This might limit the ease of access of close-by servers for some users (which will always lead to much better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an outstanding choice for the majority of 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 Television, 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 used by Netflix in the U.S.A., whereas others do not.

Indeed, 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 says services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix rarely work, and when they do, finding the ideal server needs prolonged experimentation. This is most likely due to the fact that, unlike other providers, AirVPN does not provide servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Allow P2P?

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 improve 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 Web.

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, enables port forwarding for as much as 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, activated 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 hassle-free, particularly if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have actually shown torrenting to be remarkable, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN uses a larger variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect up to five gadgets 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 exceptional choice for people who reside in a household home or want to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should be enough for the majority of people, other VPN suppliers provide 7 or even 10 if you need more.

Prices differs based upon the subscription length, and each plan consists of the exact same features. The majority of plans use good value; nevertheless, longer subscriptions provide the very best offer.

The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they use the European Central Bank to provide real-time exchange rates for those abroad, so it can be easily converted to and spent for in the currency of your choice.

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 global alternatives 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 using the discount coupon code they send you.

There’s also a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they have not broken the terms of service or used more than 5 GB of data during that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

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

Significantly, AirVPN’s email support isn’t outsourced however can be a little irregular with the time it takes to get a reaction. That said, the email support is high quality, and the agents are friendly and handy, but the detailed responses can be pretty technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, consisting of a big Frequently asked questions area that is broken up by subject.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.

Unrestricted 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 installation and usage.

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

Strong Client Service.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Excellent rates, particularly 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 extremely user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app might overwhelm newer users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are a lot of advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Country.

Server numbers are relatively low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Option?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with excellent pricing. 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. Even new users could do much, much worse.

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

When it comes down to it, this VPN service is more concentrated on protecting your privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu.

Although it may not guarantee the same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and permits you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a great alternative for customers who value their privacy.

While it does not 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 option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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