Recommended reading

AirVPN Review

Features
By published

AirVPN was the top write-in choice on our VPN survey, and today we're pairing our own test results with your reader assessments.

Features & Specifications

AirVPN is the highest rated VPN service by our readers because of the company's commitment to using strong modern cryptography, its zero-knowledge privacy policy, open source clients, and ease of use. While other VPNs have been found vulnerable to LogJam and other DNS hijacking vulnerabilities, AirVPN users have always been protected against those types of attacks thanks to the team’s careful configuration of its security and its DNS leak protection features. AirVPN is also highly reliable and has no time, traffic or speed limit.

Supported Encryption

Swipe to scroll horizontally
OpenVPN4096-bit RSA keys size, AES-256-CBC Data Channel, 4096-bit Diffie-Hellman keys size, HMAC SHA1 Control Channel, TLS additional authorization layer key: 2048 bit.
Perfect Forward Secrecy through Diffie-Hellman key exchange DHE. After the initial key negotiation, re-keying is performed every 60 minutes (this value can be lowered unilaterally by the client).

MORE: Best VPN Services Of 2015MORE: 
The Pros And Cons Of Using A VPN Or Proxy ServiceMORE: 
Private Internet Access VPN Service Review
MORE: Hide My Ass! VPN Service ReviewMORE: IPVanish VPN Service ReviewMORE: TorGuard VPN Service ReviewMORE: VPN Services in the Forums

Lucian Armasu
Lucian Armasu
Lucian Armasu is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He covers software news and the issues surrounding privacy and security.
11 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mamasan2000
    Did not see Astrill mentioned.

    Watch that video to get an idea of it's performance (it's very good).
    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9bhbEm7JAk

    That's what I'd go with. VPN always makes you loose bandwidth, the question is how much. Less the better.
    Reply
  • getochkn
    On my PC, using the PIA client, I only go down less than 10mb. I get 100mb/s without VPN, 92mb/s with VPN. The problem is trying to get it running on a router, then the speeds drop down to 20-30mbs. Router CPU's just can't handle VPN's with full speed yet. Sucks because I rather my router is VPN'd, then everything that connects goes through that connection. Most VPN's don't give you like 30 accounts and when you have a ton of devices in your house, it sucks. Also things like chromecast, roku's, etc, can't connect to a VPN directly without using a router, then I loose 70mb/s.

    Someone needs to make a VPN router. lol.
    Reply
  • Urzu1000
    I'm a little surprised to see this article. I just finished a free three-day trial of AirVPN last night.

    I've been testing out multiple VPNs over the past year, and I've gone from TorGuard to Private Internet Access, to IPVanish. All three of those were "Meh" in terms of the quality of their services.

    Then I tried AirVPN, and no pun intended, I was blown away. It had a proper client, lots and lots of transparency, stability, and best of all, speed.

    The other VPNs have been pretty inconsistent speed wise. IPVanish in particular was a bit odd. I did a speed test, and the speeds appeared amazing. However, in practice, I got much less than that on downloads. It could have been coincidence, considering how much that service lost connection, but it still seems a little shady.

    All in all though, I'm going to be purchasing a quarterly subscription to AirVPN later today.
    Reply
  • JacFlasche
    Well Tom's suggestion that PIA was a good service was totally wrong if you are interested in actual P2P speed. As I said in my response to the other article my actual download speed is 15 times faster over iPredator than the damn PIA account I bought on your advice. Unless you do download tests with actual movie files, what does it matter what the speed is, if the service is downgrading or filtering P2P activity. I tried every connection on PIA and the best I could get on a popular movie over P2P was 23Kb compared to over 600 on iPredator.

    What do you think the average person uses VPN for? It sure as hell ain't playing games online.

    Do a real test with a download over P2P
    Reply
  • Urzu1000
    16696463 said:
    Well Tom's suggestion that PIA was a good service was totally wrong if you are interested in actual P2P speed. As I said in my response to the other article my actual download speed is 15 times faster over iPredator than the damn PIA account I bought on your advice. Unless you do download tests with actual movie files, what does it matter what the speed is, if the service is downgrading or filtering P2P activity. I tried every connection on PIA and the best I could get on a popular movie over P2P was 23Kb compared to over 600 on iPredator.

    What do you think the average person uses VPN for? It sure as hell ain't playing games online.

    Do a real test with a download over P2P

    I can confirm that P2P downloading is extremely fast with AirVPN. They don't throttle it. During my three day trial, I downloaded ~80GB of files via torrents. They weren't the most popular in the world, with only a handful of seeders each, but I got on average around 3-5 MB/s download speed, which leads me to believe they don't throttle it at all. I was lucky get get 800KB/s with the others.
    Reply
  • getochkn
    Well I guess Tom's isn't interested in the movie torrent piracy aspect of VPN testing.
    Reply
  • ToineF
    When you click on the AirVPN logo, it doesn't bring you to the right website I think... or is it just me?
    Reply
  • paolob
    There is a critical mistake in the article, ToineF is right... when you click on the AirVPN logo or in the "Buy" icon you are directed to a totally different VPN web site which has nothing to do with AirVPN! The correct web site is airvpn.org
    Reply
  • Fabrizio76
    In more than one week, the article author Lucian Armasu don't read any comment on his article? Unbelievable.
    Reply
  • paolob
    Links have been fixed (Oct 7).
    Reply