Finest VPN Providers Compared By Experts

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

While anyone can claim to be unique nowadays, when it concerns VPN suppliers, AirVPN reveals that it genuinely is.

AirVPN stands out from other VPN services because of its commitment to protecting user privacy. Right from the start, the AirVPN website begins 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 unique these days, when it concerns VPN service providers, 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 help 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 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 larger business either.

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the company’s history is described and information the privacy projects that AirVPN has developed or supported. These include an online encryption tool, a net neutrality monitor, and other projects such as Tor, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and WikiLeaks.

AirVPN takes the unconventional route and breaks the mold by providing a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

How does AirVPN stack up against its competitors with such strong privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

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

Many servers are in Europe (other than those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor concern here is that the lack of diversity of servers lowers the number of global AirVPN users who might access geo-restricted services in their home nation while keeping their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They use transparent bandwidth allocation techniques to provide a precise assessment of performance, with no overbooking or overselling. Plus, they are completely 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 reliable and protected way to create encrypted tunnels. It offers more security than the military.

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

No choice is given to any application, service, or protocol when it comes down to it. Net Neutrality is maintained. Importantly, you can overcome internet constraints such as avoiding censorship, geographical constraints, and traffic shaping.

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically improves users’ personal privacy and security and is highly trusted. Nevertheless, the lack of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t rather keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, however it will not put the newer protocol fully in place up until some of its technical and personal privacy problems are attended to.

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

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

You can keep an eye on the current 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 information like the readily available ports, protocols, DNS server information (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 need to rely on that what is being offered will work. But taking a look at the active community forum or the comprehensive open-source clients puts your mind at ease.

A great thing about this is that you can see what other individuals say about the service prior to registering. 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 personal privacy and security are the absolute top priority, with security from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that invade personal privacy. There is no personal 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 only collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can request for this info to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of 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 fretting about your computer system and the Wi-Fi hotspot spying on your data.

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

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

You can get a brand-new IP address to hide your IP so that no one can utilize it to find out who you are. You’ll stay safe with the top-level protection supplied.

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 forum allow you to get a sense of what present users are saying about the service before registering.

All of AirVPN’s software is open-source, which is a big plus. This indicates that anyone can look into AirVPN’s security. ProtonVPN, Private Internet Access, and Mullvad VPN have open-source apps, but only ProtonVPN’s apps have actually been checked by a third party.

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

When creating an account, you are not required to input any personal info, not even your real e-mail address. That’s terrific because it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. However know that you will not be able to alter your account’s password if you don’t 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 federal government asked for user information, AirVPN would have nothing to provide them.

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, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regrettably, regardless of Eddie’s substantial ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t quite as good as those providers who use it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

Unfortunately, there are no maps or clearly indicated buttons to assist you. While it’s not hard to get things working, it does not have the most easy to use interface, so it might be a more tough learning curve for unskilled users.

With Windows, there are a ton of download options. There are builds for numerous operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit flavors, 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 existing does not work on your setup.

After introducing it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. You simply click Disconnect when you’re finished. Simple enough for anyone, but Eddie can do a lot more because AirVPN offers more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we’ve seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 key AirVPN features through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN allows you to connect when your computer system launches, however you can’t choose 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. The majority of standard kill switches just do this when the VPN is on, however 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 six tabs: Overview, Servers, Countries, Speed, Stats, and Logs.

The Overview just 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 readily available servers in the network, along with detailed details about each one, such as the server’s label, place, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing users and server load. Outstanding stuff!

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

The Countries page displays the number of servers offered in each nation at a look, together with an indicator of server load and user numbers. Similar to 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 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 pick as many countries as you like.

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

By picking a nation, you are not instantly connected to a VPN server. To do so, go back to the Servers page and pick the server you desire in a specific nation. Then, connect to a server by marking it and clicking 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 likewise a “refresh” button to get updated info on ping times and load times.

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

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

Logs is an in-depth 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 use between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Or whether to attempt an SSH tunnel via more flexible ports such as 22, 80, and 443. Proxies, Tor assistance, custom DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

The really experienced user can enter into Advanced and Expert Mode settings, which permit, among other things, sending orders to the OpenVPN Management Interface via the Logs pane.

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

Do not dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie just because of its intricacy. Bear in mind that the program normally functions fine by itself, and you’ll never ever see the settings till you search for them. If you sometimes long for power or configurability, the app will provide 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 extremely feature-rich Android VPN app instead. This software application supplies the exact same substantial configuration 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. Rather, you can expand a nation and select a specific city on the very same page. Some practical text additions make the information more easy to understand, however it’s still quite difficult to understand 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 most people will ever require. The software likewise attempts a little bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to describe what each alternative does.

Speeds/Performance

Utilizing 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 great, with the app identifying when the VPN tunnel drops, informing us with a desktop alert, 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.

Nevertheless, reviewers have actually reported speeds to be exceptional. Certainly, one said there wasn’t a single nation where they could complain about the speed. On the contrary, it was truly remarkable overall.

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

What AirVPN lacks is a more comprehensive number of server locations. This may restrict the availability of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly result in better speeds). As a result, this VPN is an exceptional choice for the majority of people in the United States and Europe, however perhaps less so for other areas.

Streaming

Streaming the big services such as Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, Apple Television, Hulu, HBO, BBC iPlayer, and Discovery+ has 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 poor for streaming and doesn’t work with any of the significant streaming services. However, it appears to deal with less-popular streaming apps like Peacock and Sony Crackle.

Another reviewer states services like BBC iPlayer and United States Netflix rarely work, and when they do, finding the right server needs prolonged trial and error. This is probably because, unlike other providers, AirVPN does not offer servers that are optimised for accessing streaming websites.

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

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

Does AirVPN Permit P2P?

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

Plus, you can use 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, allows port forwarding for up to 20 ports at once (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s built-in kill switch, triggered by default, will obstruct all traffic from exiting your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t be sending unencrypted packets to the Internet. If you are file sharing, a kill switch is very convenient, 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 without any issues whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

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

This makes it an exceptional choice for individuals who reside in a household house or want to utilize a VPN on a public network. While five should be enough for many people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you require more.

Rates varies based upon the subscription length, and each plan includes the exact same features. Many plans use good value; however, longer subscriptions offer the best offer.

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

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 options are also accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day complimentary 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 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 provides e-mail assistance and frequently asked questions (Frequently asked questions) and has a really active support forum with contributors from both the service itself and the community.

Notably, AirVPN’s email assistance isn’t contracted out however can be a little irregular with the time it requires to get a reaction. That stated, the e-mail support is high quality, and the representatives are friendly and useful, but the extensive answers can be pretty technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s site has a great deal of info, including a big FAQs area that is broken up by subject.

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different topics, but beginners will have the same troubles comprehending a lot of the tech jargon in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional 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 installation and use.

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

Solid Client Service.

Active Community Online Forums and Detailed Guides.

Excellent prices, particularly for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

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

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is really hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are too many advanced options.

Located 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, trustworthy, and safe VPN service with good prices. It’s clearly geared towards more power and advanced users, so those brand-new to VPNs will be better served by a less, shall we say, specialized VPN service provider. Even brand-new users could do much, much worse.

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

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

Although it might not guarantee the very 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 customers who value their personal privacy.

While it does not 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 choice for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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