UPDATED ON SEP 21 2023 DUE TO ADDITION OF “PER APP” TRAFFIC SPLITTING FOR LINUX
UPDATED ON JAN 17 2024 DUE TO ADDITION OF WIREGUARD SUPPORT IN THE “SUITE” LINUX SOFTWARE
Here’s my AirVPN very personal review after a few years I have been using it. For my work I use it from central Europe, China and Japan, therefore my comments should be considered limited to those areas. I arranged the review in sections with bulleted lists.
THE GOOD
- blazing fast in Europe, Japan. Throughput is very high (> 700 Mbps with WireGuard) in Europe, good in Japan (250-300 Mbps when you obtain a high speed line in Japan). In China it consistently provides 5-7 Mbps with OpenVPN only (WireGuard is blocked), not bad for China
- ability to consistently bypass China blocks since 2017. I travel to China frequently, at least 2 times a year and AirVPN never failed me. Last time I checked and used it from China: early 2023. Only with OpenVPN and one of AirVPN specific connection modes to bypass blocks (they have many).
- I enjoy very much the port forwarding system. I can tell the system to automatically find a range of several contiguous ports to forward, an essential feature for FTP server and other services I need to run behind the VPN. What’s more, the ports stay reserved for an account, as long as they are not explicitly deleted, saving a lot of time
- ad and tracker blocking filters is a joy for me, with multiple lists selection, and customizable with exceptions or additions
- friendly and highly competent customer service. I contact the support only for problems that require a serious knowledge, and each time the person(s) supporting me was/were capable to drive me effectively and quickly to the solution. For example when I needed to connect a pfSense system to multiple VPN servers for failover and a basic load balancing. They also showed a lot of patience, really a lot, on some matters.
- you can register an account without e-mail address or anything else, you just pick a name or a code you like and that’s it
- I appreciate that they accept Bitcoin without intermediaries, saving me from annoying KYC procedures (from custodial companies and/or payment processor intermediaries) and their additional feeds
- from their periodic report, they claim IPMI and IPMI-like interfaces secured (not accessible from the Internet) and servers on RAM disks, with USB support disabled. These features are important for me and add that slight additional security which does not harm.
- the community forum they leave relatively unbridled with minimal moderation from the community itself is a lot of fun and often source of valuable information, when you have the time to read it
THE BAD
- Android and Linux software lets you split traffic “per app”. Their software for Windows, and Mac lets you split traffic only “per destinations”, i.e. you can only say which hosts or IP address ranges must have traffic inside or outside the VPN tunnel. I don’t like splitting traffic for some security concern, but this can be a serious flaw for many users
- while some software is well documented, the documentation for their software for Mac and Windows is insufficient. Some useful options are obscure and undocumented. Either you experiment, or you need to contact the customer service (or analyze the source code) to understand what they do. It’s very irritating, especially if you appreciate good manuals. What’s more, some of their manuals are greatly written, so you wonder why some other documentation is so poor
- deleted on January 2024 because the AirVPN Suite for Linux offers complete WireGuard support and management. No more a “bad” point.
AirVPN Suite for Linux is an interesting software which still lacks WireGuard integration, while AirVPN infrastructure supports WireGuard since a long time ago. So in Linux, if you want WireGuard, either you run Eddie (whose GUI requires Mono, notoriously heavy) or the WireGuard native software. WireGuard integration in the Suite has been announced and it is expected within October/November 2023 according to the support team. WireGuard integration is available anyway in Eddie Android, Windows, Linux and Mac editions.
MORE SUBJECTIVE CONSIDERATIONS: ETHICS
- AirVPN develops and releases only free and open source software. In my opinion this is essential in this field.
- they run and support a lot of Tor nodes, including Tor exit nodes
- they kept supporting WikiLeaks even during the “smear” and “character assassination” campaigns plotted by USA/UK/Sweden agencies
- they support Xnet project aimed to European schools to offer privacy aware, free and open source alternatives to Google and Microsoft online services
- they were and are early supporters of PeerTube and Mastodon
- they don’t pay for reviews and they don’t pay ransoms to improve negative comments/reviews
FINAL THOUGHTS
For my very personal needs AirVPN is irreplaceable for the mentioned reasons, especially when I need services behind VPN, when I need stellar speed, or when I am in China, where many other VPNs can’t connect at all. The VPN ethics, which may play a fundamental role when picking a sensitive service like a VPN, is high and good for me. However, consider carefully the “BAD” points.
