AirVPN Vs ZenMate: The Victorious One May Shock You

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Do you want to remain anonymous while surfing the web? AirVPN could be the perfect solution for you if yes.

While anyone can claim to be unique these days, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it genuinely is.

AirVPN sticks out from other VPN services because of its commitment to safeguarding user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website starts with an appeal for your trust, stating, “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 these days, when it concerns VPN providers, AirVPN reveals that it really 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 little group of activists and hackers. The satellite communications supplier Iridium previously ran it, but AirVPN took control of 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 organization either.

Across their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is described and details the privacy projects that AirVPN has actually established 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 providing a VPN created by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

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

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller sized than most, with only 246 servers spread across 23 countries.

A lot of servers are in Europe (besides those in the US, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the absence of diversity of servers lowers the number of international AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home country while keeping their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

That said, Air is well known for its exceptional performance throughout its server network, with lots of countries having high-performance physical individual servers.

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation strategies to provide a precise assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are entirely unlimited, without any speed constraints or time limits.

To establish a connection between your machine and their servers, they use OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most trustworthy and safe and secure 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. Forget about PPTP and other risky protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a big plus as it automatically enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is highly trusted. The absence of WireGuard as standard may show Air isn’t quite keeping up with its rivals. That said, AirVPN states it is evaluating WireGuard, but it will not put the newer protocol totally in place till some of its technical and privacy concerns are addressed.

AirVPN has actually also included 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 easily change servers as frequently as you like.

You can monitor the existing load on each server, any existing concerns, 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 information like the offered 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, but since there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on 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 great aspect of this is that you can see what other individuals state about the service before 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 comes to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the business is really clear. Online privacy and security are the outright top priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no individual details logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It only collects non-identifiable “technical information” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can ask for this info 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 using.

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 techniques 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 likewise say they comply with EU privacy regulations and that any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or greater levels of personal privacy and information protection as those in the EU.

You can get a brand-new IP address to conceal your IP so that no one can utilize it to learn who you are. You’ll stay safe with the high-level protection provided.

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

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

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

Regarding security, AirVPN’s cryptography is probably the finest available. The first exchange uses 4096-bit RSA to achieve Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) via Diffie-Hellman key exchange.

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal details, not even your genuine email address. That’s excellent considering that it lets you prevent leaving any sort of digital footprint. However understand that you won’t be able 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). However even if the federal government asked for 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, available on all significant platforms and OSes, consisting of Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s considerable capability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as good as those companies who use it as requirement.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

Establishing the app is simple, and it has all the info you need to connect to a VPN.

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

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

After introducing it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest place. You just click Disconnect when you’re ended up. Simple enough for anyone, but Eddie can do a lot more given that AirVPN provides more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

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

Even though it specifies “kill switch” throughout 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 safe and secure tunnel. Many standard kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, but you can set up the “network lock” to filter your traffic at all times.

Eddie’s layout is easy to understand. Along the top, there are six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview merely 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 available servers in the network, along with detailed information about each one, such as the server’s label, area, latency in milliseconds from your place, and current users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

The Countries page shows the number of servers readily available in each nation at a look, together with a sign of server load and user numbers. As with the Servers page, the amber/green indicator is also shown. Many 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 might select as lots of nations as you like.

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

By selecting a country, you are not immediately connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and select the server you want in a specific country. 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 info on ping times and load times.

The Speed tab shows an easy 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 most apps show your present VPN server location and IP address at most. Eddie’s Stats page also shows fine-grained details, such as the server’s location, load, present user count, protocol, port, encryption algorithm, session start time and length, IPv6 exit address, data downloaded and uploaded, and a lot more.

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

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

A million and one other settings are hidden in the app’s Settings menu. This allows you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it should always connect when opened, which protocol to use 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 support, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The genuinely proficient user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface by means of the Logs pane.

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

However, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Remember that the program normally works fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings till you look for them. Nevertheless, if you sometimes long for power or configurability, the app will provide it.

AirVPN Software Configurations

Suppose you do not wish 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 use an exceptionally feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application supplies the same comprehensive setup options as its desktop sibling and useful status information.

Separate 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 choose a specific city on the very same page. Some handy text additions make the details more understandable, however it’s still rather tough to understand in some spots.

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

Speeds/Performance

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

Online reviewers felt the connection monitoring was excellent, 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 showed 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 competitors because AirVPN just supports OpenVPN.

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

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

What AirVPN lacks is a broader number of server places. This may limit 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 most people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other regions.

Streaming

Streaming the big 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.

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 US Netflix rarely work, and when they do, finding the right server needs prolonged experimentation. This is probably since, unlike other companies, AirVPN doesn’t offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming sites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Permit 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 utilize port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. A number of applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run badly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Internet.

File sharing has good speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for as much as 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 integrated kill switch, triggered 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 Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is extremely convenient, especially if you need to leave your connection unattended.

Reviewers have shown torrenting to be impressive, smooth running with fast download and upload speeds, and without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN offers a broader variety of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five devices simultaneously, so you can connect your PC, phone, tablet, and a couple of other devices all at the same time.

This makes it an outstanding choice for individuals who live in a family house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While five should be enough for many people, other VPN service providers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

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

The standard pricing is in Euros. They use the European Central Bank to supply real-time exchange rates for those abroad, 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, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, and Doge. Lots of international 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 utilizing the discount coupon code they send you.

There’s likewise a 30-day money-back guarantee, as long as they haven’t broken the terms of service or utilized more than 5 GB of data throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Assistance

AirVPN has a different customer support offering than numerous other VPNs. While it does not have live chat, it offers email assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has an extremely active support online forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s e-mail support isn’t outsourced but can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get a response. That stated, the email support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and practical, but the thorough answers can be pretty technical, which might put off those brand-new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a lot of info, including a big FAQs area that is separated by topic.

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

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Outstanding speeds with very little 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 Customer Support.

Active Community Online Forums and Detailed Guides.

Excellent costs, especially 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 really easy to use or attractive like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is very hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Possibly there are a lot of advanced choices.

Located in 14-Eyes Nation.

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 good rates. It’s plainly tailored towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be much better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN service provider. However even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

While it could be challenging to utilize if you’re brand-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 protecting your personal privacy than unblocking streaming services like Netflix or Hulu when it comes down to it.

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

While it doesn’t hit the speed heights of a WireGuard service, performance-wise, it’s definitely the best purely OpenVPN service out there. In addition to being an outstanding choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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