Surfshark Vs AirVPN

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

While anybody can claim to be distinct nowadays, when it comes to VPN service providers, AirVPN reveals that it truly is.

AirVPN stands apart 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, 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 special these days, when it comes to VPN companies, AirVPN shows that it truly is.

AirVPN Home Page

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

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

Throughout their About Us and Mission pages, the business’s history is explained and details the personal 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 supplying a VPN developed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts.

So how does AirVPN stack up against its rivals with such strong privacy credentials?

AirVPN’s Key Features

Servers

AirVPN’s network is much smaller than a lot of, with only 246 servers spread out across 23 nations.

The majority of servers are in Europe (besides those in the United States, Canada, and Hong Kong). A minor issue here is that the absence of variety of servers lowers the number of international AirVPN users who may access geo-restricted services in their home country while maintaining their personal privacy.

AirVPN Servers

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

They utilize transparent bandwidth allocation methods to provide a precise evaluation 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 utilize OpenVPN and WireGuard (in beta). OpenVPN is the most secure and trustworthy way to create encrypted tunnels. It provides 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. Furthermore, every Air server directly supports OpenVPN over SSH, OpenVPN over SSL, and OpenVPN over Tor. Forget about PPTP and other hazardous protocols.

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

The usage is OpenVPN is a huge plus as it automatically enhances users’ personal privacy and security and is extremely reputable. However, the absence of WireGuard as standard might reveal Air isn’t quite keeping up with its competitors. That stated, AirVPN says it is testing WireGuard, but it won’t put the more recent protocol completely in place up until some of its technical and personal privacy issues are attended to.

AirVPN has actually also included a lot for power users and tech-savvy people who like to experiment with things.

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

You can keep track of 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 brand-new tab).

There is an in-depth specifications page for AirVPN’s servers, with details like the available ports, protocols, DNS server info (AirVPN has its own DNS server), and the IP addresses of each VPN server’s gain access to points.

All of it is nice, however because there is no third-party audit, you have to rely on 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 nice aspect of this is that you can see what other people state about the service before signing up. 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 pertains to AirVPN’s no-logging policy, the company is really clear. Online privacy and security are the absolute priority, with protection from snoopers, data miners, and other entities that attack privacy. There is no individual info logged by AirVPN, which has a strong no-logging, tracking, or monitoring policy.

AirVPN doesn’t track what you do when you’re connected to the VPN, date/time stamps, or your IP address. It just collects non-identifiable “technical data” to keep the server running and improve services, but you can ask for this info to be deleted at any time. This makes it one of the most privacy-friendly VPN services.

As a result, nobody can identify you online; not even your ISP can figure out what type 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 methods will fail versus AirVPN due to the fact that your ISP and government will just see TCP or UDP communication on a single port.

They also state they comply with EU privacy guidelines which any servers outside the EU will be treated with the exact same or higher levels of privacy and data protection as those in the EU.

You can get a new IP address to conceal your IP so that nobody can use it to discover who you are. You’ll remain safe with the top-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 forum allow you to get a sense of what existing 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 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.

Relating to security, AirVPN’s cryptography is perhaps the finest offered. The very 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 info, not even your genuine e-mail address. That’s terrific considering that it lets you avoid leaving any sort of digital footprint. But be aware that you won’t be able to change your account’s password if you don’t utilize one.

Italy, where AirVPN is based, is a member of 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 main open-source application, offered on all major platforms and OSes, including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. Regardless of Eddie’s considerable ability with OpenVPN, it does not yet support WireGuard, so performance isn’t rather as great as those suppliers who utilize it as standard.

AirVPN Eddie Overview

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

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

With Windows, there are a heap of download choices. There are builds for various operating systems (from Windows XP to Windows 11), in 32- and 64-bit tastes, and in installable or portable formats. In addition, there’s a changelog to describe what’s new and an archive of past releases in case the most present doesn’t function on your setup.

After launching it, select ‘Connect to a recommended server,’ and the app will connect to your closest location. When you’re completed, you just click Disconnect. Simple enough for anybody, but Eddie can do a lot more considering that AirVPN uses more fine-tuned complete control over operations than any other VPN app we have actually seen.

AirVPN Eddie Servers List

2 key AirVPN functions through Eddie are its auto-connect and kill switch. AirVPN enables you to connect when your computer starts up, but you can’t select 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 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 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 6 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, in addition to detailed details about every one, such as the server’s nickname, location, latency in milliseconds from your location, and existing users and server load. Impressive stuff!

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

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

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

By picking a nation, you are not right away connected to a VPN server. To do so, return to the Servers page and select 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 also 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 changed, so you can see traffic from the last 10 seconds to one day.

While many 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, data downloaded and uploaded, and much more.

Power users, in particular, should value the capability to use a VPN with all the information they might ever desire about the numerous locations, down to the variety of users on a specific server. It’s a priceless resource.

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

This permits you to fine-tune the setup, such as whether it must always connect when opened, which protocol to utilize between UDP and TCP, and which port number. Proxies, Tor support, custom-made DNS servers, and routes can be modified.

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

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

Nevertheless, don’t dismiss AirVPN’s Eddie even if of its complexity. Bear in mind that the program typically works fine by itself, and you’ll never see the settings up until you search for them. If you periodically long for power or configurability, the app will supply 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 utilize an extremely feature-rich Android VPN app rather. This software application supplies the same substantial configuration options as its desktop sibling and useful status info.

Different pages for nation and server lists are what the Android app does not have that the desktop versions provides. Rather, you can expand a country and pick a specific city on the exact same page. Some useful text additions make the info more easy to understand, however it’s still quite challenging 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 most people will ever require. The software application also attempts a bit more to assist you, with extra text subtitles to explain what each option does.

Speeds/Performance

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

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

In terms of 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.

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

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

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

What AirVPN does not have is a broader variety of server areas. This might limit the accessibility of neighboring servers for some users (which will constantly lead to much 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 areas.

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 used by Netflix in the U.S.A., 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. Nevertheless, 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 most likely since, unlike other service providers, AirVPN does not use 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 inspect to see if the situation with these streaming sites ever changes.

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

Does AirVPN Allow Torrenting?

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

Plus, you can use port forwarding to enhance your file-sharing performance. A number of applications, such as BitTorrent and eMule clients, would run poorly without it, and your computer’s shares might be inaccessible from the Web.

File sharing has decent speeds on local servers, allows port forwarding for as much as 20 ports at the same time (which lets you connect to more peers for faster speeds), and works with top torrenting clients like qBitTorrent and uTorrent.

AirVPN’s integrated kill switch, triggered by default, will obstruct all traffic from leaving your gadget if the VPN connection ever drops. That way, you won’t 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 shown torrenting to be outstanding, smooth running with quick download and upload speeds, and with no concerns whatsoever.

AirVPN Plans & Rates

AirVPN provides a broader range of plans than many VPNs. As standard, each plan lets you connect as much as five devices 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 excellent choice for individuals who reside in a household house or want to use a VPN on a public network. While 5 should suffice for the majority of people, other VPN suppliers offer 7 or even 10 if you need more.

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

The standard pricing is in Euros. Nevertheless, they utilize the European Central Bank to offer real-time currency exchange rate for those abroad, so it can be quickly converted to and paid 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 options are likewise accepted, such as Alipay and Giropay.

AirVPN offers a three-day complimentary trial, which can be obtained by sending 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 throughout that time.

AirVPN Customer Support

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

Importantly, AirVPN’s email support 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 valuable, however the extensive answers can be quite technical, which may put off those new to VPNs.

AirVPN’s website has a great deal of details, consisting of a big Frequently asked questions section that is broken up by topic.

AirVPN’s community forums cover many different subjects, but beginners will have the very same difficulties understanding a lot of the tech lingo in the posts.

AirVPN Pros & Cons

Pros:

No logging Whatsoever.

Exceptional speeds with minimal loss.

Unlimited P2P permitted with Port Forwarding.

Strong security on apps and servers alike, with advanced protocols and encryption.

Network Lock/Kill Switch.

Split tunneling.

Supports Windows, Mac, Linux, mobile, and routers.

Supports Tor over VPN.

Easy app installation and use.

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

Solid Customer Care.

Active Community Forums and Detailed Guides.

Excellent costs, especially for longer-term plans.

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

Cons:

Only fully supports OpenVPN.

Client app isn’t very user-friendly or pretty like other services.

Client app may overwhelm newer users.

It is extremely hit and miss with streaming services.

No native iOS or ChromeOS apps.

Perhaps there are a lot of advanced choices.

Found in 14-Eyes Nation.

Server numbers are reasonably low.

Rounding Things Up – Is AirVPN The Best Option?

The bottom line is that AirVPN is a strong, reliable, and safe VPN service with good rates. 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 company. But even brand-new users might 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 much better results than much of its rival VPN competitors.

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

It may not ensure the very same level of personal privacy and anonymity as a service like Mullvad, which appoints you a random account number and enables you to pay in cash, AirVPN is still an excellent option for customers 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 exceptional option for online filesharing.

Highly recommended!

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