PrivateVPN Review: Market Disruption?

PrivateVPN is a relatively new player in the VPN market. It markets itself as an all-in-one solution that offers security, privacy, and the ability to stream anything from anywhere. In this PrivateVPN review, we will put these claims to the test.

The short version is that PrivateVPN can do a lot of what it claims, but never as well as you’d like, with the exception of communicating with Netflix, which it does quite well. While there’s a lot to like here, most of the providers in our roundup of the best VPNs do a better job and I have a feeling the main draw of PrivadoVPN will be its generous free plan, which gives you 10GB of bandwidth. of band per month.

Note: We tested PrivateVPN on a Windows virtual machine. It also offers facilities for Mac and Linux, as well as for Android, iPhone, iPad, routers, and smart TVs.

PrivateVPN Free and Paid Plans

Compared to other reliable free VPNs, not that there are many of those, keep in mind that 10 GB of data is generous. Only Windscribe offers so much. All you need to do to get access to the free plan is to sign up with your email address and you will be able to choose from 12 servers around the world, which is pretty cool.

However, if forced to choose, I would probably go with Windscribe as it has a longer and better track record. But there are no rules that state you can’t use both. Having two VPNs on the same system is generally not a problem.

As for their paid plans, PrivateVPN is right in the middle of the pack at just under $60 per year. For this money, it gives you 10 above-average simultaneous connections and servers in 58 cities around the world. That server count is a bit low, but it’s well spread out across the world, so you should be fine.

It’s hard to say if PrivateVPN is worth $60 per year; For one thing, it’s significantly cheaper than ExpressVPN, which costs $100 a year. On the other hand, you can sign up for Surfshark or NordVPN for their promotional prices and pay less than half for an equivalent utility. Maybe if PrivateVPN added a few more features or beefed up the ones it has, it could be a solid competitor. As it is, the free plan is the best.

What can PrivateVPN do?

For $60 a year, you get a VPN that does the basics mostly right, but has a few issues. The biggest of these are its speeds, which I discuss in detail below, as well as its less-than-great interface. However, it does have an ace up its sleeve, namely Netflix.

PrivateVPN and Netflix

PrivateVPN’s biggest strength is how good it is at accessing Netflix, with the US servers doing an especially good job. I tried three and they all worked. Similar to my Surfshark review, this is surprising as smaller services generally had a lot of trouble communicating, but apparently, that’s no longer the case, at least for now.

The UK servers also did a good job, although I had slightly more problems there, one in three was down. However, BBC iPlayer was accessible, so that makes up for it perfectly.

Overall, if you like your streaming, PrivateVPN seems like a good option, as long as you can handle some speed issues.

Other features of PrivateVPN

Before I get to that though, I should probably point out that Netflix connectivity is pretty important when it comes to the premium features of PrivateVPN. Unlike many competitors, who give you functionality, or even hype useless features (like double VPN). PrivateVPN just has…nothing. No split tunnels, no special servers. What you see is what you get.

While I have nothing against this kind of basic approach, it works best if a service handles the basics well. PrivateVPN achieves this in most cases, but there is one obvious issue I need to address: its speeds.

Internet Speeds: They’re Everywhere

Testing the speeds of any VPN is a fuzzy science at best: time of day, distance, type of server, there are a lot of different factors at play that can affect the kind of readings you get. However, it is extremely rare to find a service like PrivateVPN where speeds fluctuate this much.

Generally speaking, I like to connect to four places in the world from my location in Cyprus. I try to keep them roughly the same for every VPN I try: Israel, the UK, New York City, and Japan. I then run each test three times, taking the best of those three. If I feel that there is something strange in the reading, I repeat the process an hour later. I’ll usually switch the VPN to the OpenVPN-TCP protocol as well, if you’re not already using it.

In the case of PrivateVPN, the test results fluctuated so much that I had to run them three times and I have no idea how to put them in a table. For example, I tested the speed of the connection from Cyprus to New York City and got readings that ranged from incredibly good to really bad.

My base download speed on an unprotected connection was about 50Mbps. The first time I tried the NYC server, I got an incredibly good reading of 42Mbps. The second time, 25Mbps. The third one was around 40 Mbps again. Other US servers fared much worse, which is weird, so I tried an hour later. Afterwards, I got much worse speeds, around the 20Mbps mark.

This process was repeated with all the other servers I tried, all over the world. The only server that was always more or less the same was the one in Japan, which was uniformly horrible at around 5Mbps.

It is extremely rare for a VPN to be this erratic and as a result I cannot recommend PrivateVPN for its speeds as it fluctuates too much. Subscribers are owed some kind of stability, especially if they are going to download torrent files or use their VPN for streaming.

UI: ExpressVPN Task Copy

When it comes to ease of use, PrivateVPN is just fine. You’ve clearly taken a leaf out of the ExpressVPN book with a recent update, offering a simple interface that’s essentially just two buttons: a main button to turn it on and another to select a location. it’s quite nice

There’s very little that can go wrong here, which makes it perfect for people who don’t need all the bells and whistles that some VPNs offer (looking at you, NordVPN.

Overall, PrivateVPN gets the job done. Like Surfshark and NordVPN, the kill switch is off by default (seriously, why do so many VPNs do this?), but unlike them, the button to turn it on is right on the main screen. It’s an ingenious solution.

Speaking of settings, PrivateVPN is pretty straightforward here and offers some extremely basic options. While I like the simplicity, if you like to mess around with your VPNs, you won’t like PrivateVPN too much.

That said, the fact that there is so little that can go wrong with PrivateVPN’s interface might recommend it to users who want something they can turn on and then not think about. The result is that the user interface is nothing revolutionary. On the other hand, it doesn’t have to be.

Security and privacy: the bases are covered

When it comes to security and privacy, PrivateVPN seems to be doing just fine. There are no reports of serious breaches and the company appears to take privacy very seriously. However, I wouldn’t put too much faith in the company’s claims about how being located in Switzerland protects you. The Swiss authorities are more than happy to cooperate with law enforcement agencies around the world.

Regarding security, I did not detect any problem. I ran security tests on several connections and nothing out of the ordinary came up, except that some UK servers appeared as if they were in France. This happens sometimes, usually not a big deal, but it could mean that PrivateVPN is using virtual servers for some locations.

However, there is a knock against the service: Like Surfshark, PrivateVPN defaults to IKEv2 as its VPN protocol, which I’m not a huge fan of. While it is extremely fast, it does have some security issues. As such, I recommend that you manually switch to OpenVPN in the settings menu.

Should I use PrivateVPN?

It is very difficult to sum up PrivateVPN in one word or even one sentence. Some things it handles very well, others not so well, and yet other things are just plain shaky. While it’s far from a bad VPN, it’s not really a good one either. While I won’t say you should stay away from it, I won’t recommend it either.

The thing is, there are too many competitors who can do what he does, but have an advantage over him. Surfshark is cheaper, NordVPN has more servers, ExpressVPN is faster, Mullvad is more private… the list goes on. Regardless, give PrivateVPN a try, but don’t be surprised if you end up using the 30-day money-back guarantee.