AirVPN Vs ZenMate Comparison – Are They Any Good? Website Novice’s Candid View

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

While anybody can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it pertains to VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to securing user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website 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 anybody can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN reveals that it really is.

AirVPN Home Page

They have actually been around a long time, since 2010, when it was started with the aid of two lawyers and a little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications supplier Iridium formerly ran it, however AirVPN took control of in November 2012. According to the owner’s listing, AirVPN, based in Perugia, is presently owned by Paolo Brini (Italy).

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

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is discussed and details the personal privacy projects that AirVPN has actually 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 unconventional route and breaks the mold by supplying a VPN created 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 a lot of, with just 246 servers spread across 23 nations.

Many servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A small problem here is that the absence of variety of servers lowers the number of worldwide AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They use transparent bandwidth allocation methods to supply a precise evaluation of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most reliable and secure way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides more security than the military.

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

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

The use is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically enhances users’ privacy and security and is extremely reliable. The lack of WireGuard as standard may reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, however it will not put the more recent protocol completely in place until some of its technical and privacy issues are dealt with.

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 change servers as often as you like.

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

There is a detailed specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details 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 offered will work. Looking at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A good feature of this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service prior to registering. You do not have to take their word for it or the word of an audit.

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

When it concerns AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is very clear. Online privacy and security are the absolute concern, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack privacy. There is no individual details 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 enhance services, however you can request for this details to be deleted at any time. This makes it among the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, no one can identify you online; not even your ISP can tell what kind of traffic or protocol you’re utilizing.

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

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

They also state they stick to EU privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the very same or greater levels of privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to hide your IP so that nobody can use it to learn who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection offered.

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 allow you to get a sense of what current users are saying about the service prior to signing up.

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

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is arguably the best readily available. It’s similar to that of some other suppliers, but still worth discussing. 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 occurs every 60 minutes, and the user can minimize this value. The main information channel utilizes AES-256-CBC encryption.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real email address. That’s excellent because it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. Be mindful that you will not be able to change your account’s password if you do not utilize one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, belongs to the 5/9/14 Eyes Alliances (a group of countries that share intelligence information). However even if the federal government requested user info, 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, readily available on all significant platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Despite Eddie’s considerable ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as great as those service providers who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Setting up the app is easy, and it has all the information you require 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 easy to use interface, so it may be a more challenging learning curve for inexperienced users.

With Windows, there are a lot of download alternatives. There are builds for numerous 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 current doesn’t function on your setup.

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

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 key 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.

Although it specifies “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 safe and secure tunnel. The majority of standard kill switches only do this when the VPN is on, however 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 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 shows all available servers in the network, along with comprehensive info about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your place, and existing users and server load. Remarkable stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the variety of servers available in each nation at a glance, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also 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 country will appear on the Servers tab. This whitelist is essentially a favorites list; you might pick as many nations as you like.

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

By selecting a nation, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and pick the server you want in a specific country. Connect to a server by marking it and clicking on the “sign out” icon on the right-hand side (a right-facing arrow pointing into a square bracket). There are likewise a checkmark, “X,” and blank box icons. There’s also a “refresh” button to get updated info 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 show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained info, such as the server’s location, load, existing 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 might ever desire about the different locations, down to the number of users on a particular server. It’s an invaluable 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 permits 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 attempt an SSH tunnel by means of more versatile ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The truly experienced user can go into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which allow, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management User Interface by means of the Logs pane.

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

Don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie simply because of its intricacy. Keep in mind that the program generally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings up until you search for them. If you sometimes long for power or configurability, the app will supply it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

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

How Good Is AirVPN’s Mobile App?

There isn’t any VPN software for iOS, you can utilize an incredibly feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software provides the exact same extensive setup options as its desktop sibling and practical status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Instead, you can expand a country and select a particular city on the very same page. Some useful text additions make the details more easy to understand, however it’s still quite difficult to comprehend in some spots.

Android does not have as lots of settings as Windows. That’s not a significant critique; there are still much more than many people will ever need. The software also tries a little bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to discuss what each option does.

Speeds/Performance

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

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

In regards to 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 competitors since AirVPN only supports OpenVPN.

Nevertheless, reviewers have actually reported speeds to be excellent. Certainly, one said there wasn’t a single country where they could grumble about the speed. On the contrary, it was really impressive 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 scenarios like HD gaming, streaming, and video conferencing certainly won’t slow you down.

What AirVPN does not have is a more comprehensive variety of server areas. This might restrict the ease of access of nearby servers for some users (which will always result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an excellent choice for many people in the United States and Europe, however possibly less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the big 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 bad 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 states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix hardly ever work, and when they do, discovering the ideal server requires lengthy trial and error. This is most likely because, unlike other providers, AirVPN does not use servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

Fortunately, 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.

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

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

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

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

File sharing has good speeds on local servers, permits port forwarding for as much as 20 ports simultaneously (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, triggered by default, will block all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you will not be sending out unencrypted packets to the Web. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely practical, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

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

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN uses a wider variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as 5 gadgets all at once, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.

This makes it an exceptional option for people who reside in a household home or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five really should suffice for many people, other VPN companies offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

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

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

The current 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 global choices are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day free trial, which can be obtained by sending out a message to the support team and using the 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 utilized 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 does not have live chat, it provides e-mail support and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active assistance forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Significantly, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t contracted out but can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get a reaction. That stated, the email support is high quality, and the agents are friendly and valuable, but the comprehensive responses can be quite technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a lot of info, including a large Frequently asked questions section that is broken up by topic.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with minimal 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 usage.

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

Solid Client Service.

Active Community Online Forums and In-depth Guides.

Excellent costs, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very easy to use or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm more recent users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Maybe there are too many advanced options.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are fairly low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Choice?

So the bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reputable, and safe VPN service with good pricing. It’s plainly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN company. Even brand-new users might do much, much worse.

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

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

Although it might not ensure the exact same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which assigns you a random account number and allows you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent choice for customers 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 option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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