AirVPN Vs ZenMate Comparison 2022: Thorough Comparison

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Do you want to stay anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN might be the ideal option for you if yes.

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

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. From the start, the AirVPN site begins 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 declare to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They’ve been around a very long time, since 2010, when it was begun with the aid of 2 lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications company Iridium formerly 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).

Throughout the last years, it hasn’t been dogged by security scandals like some VPNs have. Nor has it been acquired by a bigger business either.

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

So how does AirVPN compare to its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

The majority of servers are in Europe (other than those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small issue here is that the absence of diversity of servers reduces the number of worldwide AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while preserving their privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to supply a precise evaluation of performance, without any 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 utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most safe and reliable 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. Furthermore, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. So forget PPTP and other unsafe protocols.

No preference is given to any application, service, or protocol when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is upheld. Notably, you can overcome web constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographic restrictions, and traffic shaping.

The use is OpenVPN is a big plus as it instantly improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly trustworthy. However, the lack of WireGuard as standard might show Air isn’t rather staying up to date with its rivals. That stated, AirVPN states it is testing WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol fully in place until some of its technical and privacy concerns are resolved.

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

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

You can monitor the existing 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 comprehensive specs page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available ports, protocols, DNS server information (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 since there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on that what is being offered will work. Looking at the active community online forum or the comprehensive 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 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 company 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 invade privacy. There is no individual information logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN does not track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It just gathers non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, however you can request for this information 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 figure out what sort of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

Even the most ruthless surveillance, censoring, throttling, and traffic shaping tactics will fail against AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will only see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they abide by EU personal privacy policies and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the same or greater levels of personal 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 remain safe with the high-level protection provided.

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

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

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a huge plus. This suggests 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 inspected by a 3rd party.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the very best readily available. It resembles that of some other suppliers, however still worth pointing out. The first exchange utilizes 4096-bit RSA to accomplish Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) through Diffie-Hellman key exchange. Following the first key negotiation, re-keying takes place every 60 minutes, and the user can lower this value. The primary data channel utilizes 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 great because it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However know that you will not have the ability 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). But even if the government asked for user information, AirVPN would have nothing to provide.

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. In spite of Eddie’s substantial capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as excellent as those service providers who utilize it as requirement.

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 direct you. While it’s not tough to get things working, it doesn’t have the most easy to use user interface, so it may be a more difficult learning curve for inexperienced users.

With Windows, there are a heap of download choices. There are builds for different 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 explain what’s brand-new and an archive of past releases in case the most current does not operate on your setup.

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

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Despite the fact that it defines “kill switch” anywhere in the settings, AirVPN has a tab called “network lock” that does the very same thing. The distinction is that AirVPN’s “network lock” stops all traffic that isn’t going through its secure tunnel. Many basic kill switches only 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 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 offered servers in the network, together with detailed details about every one, such as the server’s nickname, area, latency in milliseconds from your location, and present users and server load. Excellent 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 variety of servers readily available in each nation at a glimpse, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is likewise 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 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 may select as many nations as you like.

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

By picking a nation, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and pick the server you want 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 also a “refresh” button to get updated details on ping times and load times.

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 many apps display your existing 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, data downloaded and uploaded, and much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to utilize a VPN with all the info they could ever want about the various locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s a priceless resource.

Logs is a comprehensive 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 tweak 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 attempt an SSH tunnel by means of more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really knowledgeable user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface through the Logs pane.

If the vast function list appears scary, even if you are a VPN expert, it might be difficult to determine what specific settings do and how to get the wanted results. In addition, it differs from any other service in regards to personalization.

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program usually works fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you look for them. Nevertheless, if you periodically long for power or configurability, the app will offer 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 exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application offers the same extensive setup choices as its desktop sibling and useful status information.

Separate pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app lacks that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a nation and choose a particular city on the exact same page. Some useful text additions make the information more easy to understand, but it’s still rather difficult to understand in some spots.

Android does not have as many settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still a lot more than most people will ever need. The software application also attempts a little more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each choice does.

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was good, with the app detecting when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop notification, and reconnecting us in seconds.

In terms of personal 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.

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

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

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

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server places. This may restrict the accessibility of neighboring servers for some users (which will always result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent option for the majority of 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 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 USA, whereas others do not.

Indeed, some report that Air is pretty bad for streaming and does not work with any of the significant streaming services. It appears to work with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and US Netflix seldom work, and when they do, finding the right server requires lengthy trial and error. This is probably due to the fact that, unlike other suppliers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

Yes, it does; every web protocol, consisting of peer-to-peer, is welcome. Undoubtedly, Air supports P2P file-sharing on all of its servers. There’s nothing to set up, no hoops to leap through. Merely connect to the VPN server of your choice and get going.

Plus, you can utilize 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 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 deals with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, activated 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 Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very practical, specifically 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 problems whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Prices

AirVPN uses a broader range of plans than a lot of VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 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 household home or want to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN companies provide 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Pricing varies based on the membership length, and each plan includes the same features. Many plans provide good value; nevertheless, longer memberships offer the very best deal.

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

The existing 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of international alternatives are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day totally free trial, which can be obtained by sending a message to the support team and using 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 used more than 5 GB of data during that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

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

Importantly, AirVPN’s e-mail assistance isn’t outsourced but can be a little inconsistent with the time it takes to get a reaction. That said, the e-mail assistance is high quality, and the representatives are helpful and friendly, but the comprehensive responses can be quite technical, which might put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, consisting of a large FAQs section that is separated by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover several subjects, but novices will have the same problems comprehending a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited 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 setup and use.

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

Solid Client Service.

Active Community Forums and Comprehensive Guides.

Great rates, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t really 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.

Maybe there are a lot of advanced options.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Very Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, dependable, and safe VPN service with great pricing. It’s clearly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN service provider. Even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

It may not guarantee the exact same level of privacy and privacy as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still a good alternative for consumers who value their 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 outstanding option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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