PureVPN Review

PureVPN is among the best VPNs for travelers and has 6500+ servers in more than 78 countries including the U.K., France, Australia, Japan, Germany, Spain, the United Arab Emirates, Mexico, Netherlands, and Singapore. With this service, you can be free from shady Wi-Fi networks and internet censorship when traveling.

By using PureVPN, you could remain more anonymous online by hiding your IP address and browsing history. This VPN offers solid encryption and a variety of secure protocols, and seamless streaming and torrenting capabilities, making it a good choice for media consumption.

PureVPN offers a large and well-distributed server network, making it a good alternative for frequent fliers and those who need to hide their true location. Its revamped software, which is smarter and sleeker than ever, and its inexpensive selection of add-ons, including port-forwarding and private IP addresses, also impresses us.

However, its privacy regulations perplex us, and we’re concerned about its muddled pricing. We’re also dissatisfied that it doesn’t provide extra privacy features like multicast links.

  • Robust server network: With over 2,000 servers in 141 countries, PureVPN offers one of the widest server networks around. This makes it an ideal choice for anyone who travels frequently or needs to spoof their location.
  • Redesigned app: The updated PureVPN app is smarter and snazzier than ever before. It’s easy to use and provides all the information you need at a glance.
  • Affordable add-ons: If you need extra features such as port forwarding or dedicated IP addresses, PureVPN has a range of affordable add-ons available.
  • Safety and security features: PureVPN comes packed with safety and security features, including an automatic kill switch, 256-bit encryption, and DNS private server.
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By PureVPN used under Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Pricing

Starting price at $10.95 a month, which is a little higher than usual. At $3.74 per month, the yearly plan appears to be a decent deal, especially because it covers up to ten family members. However, this is due in part to a one-time discount, and it renews at $5.83.

A two-year special package costs $2.91 per month. It appears to be a nice deal, but it also refreshes on the usual annual plan of $5.83 each month. PureVPN’s webpage is up and running whenever customers visit it, dedicated IPs start at $2.99 per month for IPs in the United States, United Kingdom, Singapore, Canada, Germany, Malta, and Australia.

You’ll get the same benefits regardless of the PureVPN monthly subscription you choose, as well as the ability to use the VPN on up to 10 devices at once (but keep in mind that the VPN’s Terms of Service forbid sharing your membership with others, even relatives and friends).

PureVPN does not have a free version. However, you may test out the complete service for only $0.99 for the first seven days. This will show you whether the VPN meets your requirements, such as whether it connects with your favorite streaming sites.

PureVPN also provides a 31-day cash-back guarantee. As a result, you’ll have plenty of time to learn everything there is to know more about the product. PayPal, credit cards, and a number of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are all available as payment choices. Some PureVPN landing sites, however, do not show the crypto payment method, which is a bit misleading.

1 Month Plan
$10.95/mo
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1 Year Plan
$2.99/mo
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5 Year Plan
$1.50/mo
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Privacy and logging

PureVPN tries to be honest with its privacy policy, but it doesn’t always succeed. While the firm was usually quick to respond to our queries, we believe that the privacy policy would be unclear at best and alarming at worst for customers.

The company’s explanation of what information it collects about customers’ connections is particularly perplexing. According to the policy, IP addresses, allocated VPN IP locations, connection timestamps, DNS queries, and (most crucially) browsing activity are not stored. That’s fantastic. PureVPN does, however, know the day of each connection, how long it lasted, how much data was utilized, and the VPN location used, according to the policy—it simply doesn’t use timestamps or IP locations to provide it.

While PureVPN retains some of this data for the life of the session, it does not preserve all of it, and none of this can be linked to a single client. PureVPN does not log personally-identifying information on its users, according to a KPMG audit. The rules of the audit, according to PureVPN, preclude them from revealing the likely success.

However, that’s a lot of data for PureVPN to collect and keep track of. PureVPN must make an effort to collect and keep even fewer data. The corporation should also make its policies more clear.

The policy goes on to explain that any personal information provided by consumers is never shared or rented. PureVPN’s revenue is solely derived from subscription purchases, according to a business spokeswoman. The corporation is likewise adamant that it has no knowledge of user browsing habits.

PureVPN is a company based in the British Virgin Islands that works under the laws of that nation. The firm claims to have employees in Hong Kong, Karachi, and Toronto.

Some VPNs have begun conducting third-party audits in order to prove their privacy credentials. Although audits are poor tools, we believe they are vital evidence of a company’s dedication to client protection. PureVPN claims to have been inspected by Altius IT and has supplied us with the results, however, it does not offer a link to the inspection for users. We’d like the complete text to be made public.

The amount of information demands a corporation has obtained from government entities and law departments is usually included in a transparency report. PureVPN’s transparency report was just updated to include those demands, which we welcome. However, there is still no indication of how PureVPN handled these petitions. The corporation previously said that it did not cooperate with any of them; yet, this data must be reported in the analysis.

Positive
  • Servers from all across the world
  • Client design that is both smart and stylish
  • Several inexpensive add-ons
Negative
  • A few more privacy tools.
  • The location of virtual servers is unknown.

Speed and Performing

Your internet speed will most likely suffer regardless of the VPN you use. This usually results in slower upload and download rates as well as higher latency. To get a feel of such changes, we used the internet speed test tool to perform a series of tests when the VPN was connected and while it wasn’t. The % change among the two sets of results is then calculated. See our page on the issue for additional information on how we test VPNs.

PureVPN lowered download and upload performance diagnosis by 83.9 percent and 82.1 percent, respectively, in our testing. Both of these outcomes were much lower than the average results we’ve seen across all of the items we’ve examined so far. PureVPN had superior latency findings, with a 49.6% increase in delay.

With OpenVPN UDP, PureVPN demonstrated remarkable speed test results: several locations had minor download speed drop-offs. When connecting to a Canadian server, for example, the performance was reduced by only 17% contrasted to the baseline. Upload speeds are, on the other hand, fell a little more.

I like that you can check the ping of each place before connecting to it while using the Windows program. You can locate the quickest servers this way without having to test them beforehand. The program also shows the average upload and download speeds, as well as the transport protocol in use, while linked to a server.

Features

PureVPN may not be the best option if you want a lot of sophisticated features. If you’re satisfied with the essentials, such as a kill switch and divided tunneling, you’re set to all start.

Kill switch

A reliable kill switch is a must-have feature for every VPN. When activated, it will immediately deactivate your internet access if you accidentally disconnect from your VPN. It’s especially beneficial if you’re torrenting but don’t want your information to be compromised when utilizing public Wi-Fi (which is vulnerable to hacker assaults).

PureVPN’s kill switch is turned on by standard (you can disable it anytime). Sadly, it isn’t flawless in unexpected situations, even if it works almost all of the time.

Split Tunneling

The split tunneling functionality is currently only available in PureVPN’s Android app. This is a very useful function, so perhaps it will be added to the additional apps in the future.
Split tunneling saves network capacity by allowing you to select which programs (or, in certain cases, websites) will use the VPN connection. To put it another way, part of your apps’ traffic will be encrypted, but the rest of your web traffic will be sent via a public channel.

Port Forwarding

PureVPN offers port forwarding as a paid add-on for much less than a dollar per month. When correctly configured, it allows devices connected to your local network that connects to a specific device.

You may use port forwarding to set up game networks, run tiny webpages, monitor your security camera remotely, or just use your device anytime you need to use it.

Performance

Several performance analysis sites and tools (SpeedTest’s website and command-line software, TestMy.net, Netflix’s Fast.com, and others) were used to assess PureVPN speeds from US and UK locations. We verify each site’s download speeds at least five times, then check again using a different protocol, before repeating the process in the evening.

PureVPN’s UK OpenVPN speeds were 270Mbps, putting it in the high middle of our latest rankings. Although it can’t equal Hide. me (390Mbps) or ProtonVPN (400-460Mbps), the firm still exceeds certain well-known competitors.

PureVPN’s peak performance falls well behind the competition, but there’s adequate speed available for most circumstances. In testing, the majority of VPNs with WireGuard support surpass 400Mbps, with CyberGhost, IPVanish, Mozilla, NordVPN, and a few others reaching 750Mbps or higher.

Please remember that, while we test each VPN’s performance over 100 times, your results may vary greatly depending on the region and settings, so it’s worth trying the 7-day trial and doing a few connection speeds in your leisure.

Support

When we opened the link on PureVPN’s help sites, Chrome gave us a ‘this site can’t be reached error, which was more difficult than we expected.

The Support URL was erroneous, linking to support.www.purevpn.com instead of support.purevpn.com, as we discovered. We got in after removing the superfluous ‘www’. It’s not a big problem, but it doesn’t make a nice image if people have to travel to the Support site just to get help.

Once you’ve gotten beyond the kinks, PureVPN provides a vast help site with a wealth of lessons and troubleshooting information. Setup Guides, Troubleshoot, FAQ, and Membership and Billing are only a few of the categories listed on the home page, and many of these pages provide more material than you’d anticipate.

Additionally, you may utilize the website’s live chat. Even with simple requests, as we noted earlier, replies might be pretty basic. PureVPN couldn’t match the degree of help we’d gotten from top rivals like NortonVPN, but processing times are decent, and most responses were sufficient to resolve our urgent problems.

Simon
Tops3
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