PrivadoVPN Review 2024 | Is PrivadoVPN the Best VPN?

In today’s PrivadoVPN review, we’re going to take one of the smaller and newer competitors in the virtual private network (VPN) market through the wringer. PrivadoVPN, founded in 2019 in Switzerland, is a relatively new VPN service.

There’s some stiff competition in the VPN world from older and more established names, so PrivadoVPN needs to be pretty good to bring something new to the table. Being new in the VPN space also means that PrivadoVPN will have a smaller server farm than bigger VPNs. However, size and scale aren’t necessarily correlated directly to quality.

PrivadoVPN mainly utilizes tried-and-true, industry-leading VPN protocols such as OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2. While PrivadoVPN doesn’t utilize a custom protocol of its own, they boast a competitive price tag. In this PrivadoVPN review, we’ll take a closer look to see if it offers real value for money that some of the larger VPNs don’t.

PrivadoVPN Features

Before we delve deeper into PrivadoVPN’s performance, ease of use, and security, let’s explore its key features.

Split-Tunneling

Split-tunneling, or as PrivadoVPN calls it, “SmartRoute,” is a feature that allows you to pick out specific apps to use the VPN features with.

This feature can be used in certain situations where you need to access data from different locations on different apps at the same time.

For example, you’ll be able to stream movies while accessing your work VPN at home or setting up a certain game to work without the VPN while having everything else utilize the VPN, keeping yourself secure while also keeping your game ping optimal.

Split-tunneling isn’t a feature that you can find on every VPN provider out there. Being able to separate your VPN connection from your home connection is an elite feature that PrivadoVPN offers at a low cost.

In contrast, other budget providers may force you to cover your internet connection under a single VPN. PrivadoVPN currently offers this feature for Windows, Android, and Amazon devices, but implementation for Mac OSX and iOS is coming soon.

Kill-Switch

Any VPN focusing on privacy should implement a kill switch, and PrivadoVPN is no exception.

This feature keeps your connection constantly covered by PrivadoVPN, ensuring no data travels outside the encrypted connection while it’s turned on. This way, PrivadoVPN provides you with perfect leak protection 24/7 on the Windows, Android, iOS, and Mac OSX apps.

When you use a budget VPN without a kill switch, your connection will default back to your home internet when the VPN connection goes down. If your connection gets interrupted while you’re working with sensitive data, your privacy is now at risk as you’re no longer protected by a VPN.

If you’re working on a public access point like airport Wi-Fi, it takes a few seconds for your data security to potentially be compromised.

However, with a kill switch activated, if your VPN goes down, then the PrivadoVPN app will block any inbound or outbound network traffic. As soon as your connection to the VPN comes back up, you can resume normal internet browsing like nothing ever happened.

Even in the worst scenarios, both your data and your privacy will still be kept secure.

SOCKS5 Proxy

PrivadoVPN provides SOCKS5 proxy servers, which is another interesting feature that many VPNs don’t usually provide. There are a lot of similarities between SOCKS5 proxies and a VPN connection.

SOCKS5 Proxy is a feature that routes all the data coming to and going from a particular application through a server. Doing this changes your IP address, which practically hides your identity.

The main difference between this feature from a traditional VPN is that this feature doesn’t encrypt your data. This might sound counterintuitive at first notice; however, by not encrypting your data, the SOCKS5 proxy allows you to transfer your data faster than a traditional VPN.

This feature is especially useful for sharing files, especially through P2P networks. By mixing and matching the traditional VPN features and SOCKS5 Proxy features, you can customize your connection’s security and speed as you see fit.

No-Logging Guarantee

PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland, which has significantly stronger data-privacy laws than many other European countries. This means that any requests made by a law enforcement agency against a user of the PrivadoVPN service will be made aware of any investigation against them.

Furthermore, PrivadoVPN confirms in its Privacy Policy that they don’t store any information related to a user’s browsing data, IP address, connection requests, or DNS requests.

No traffic history is kept, and this information cannot be made available to law enforcement because it simply doesn’t exist. Even in the worst scenario, hackers breaking into the system would simply find nothing.

A Legit, Free VPN

PrivadoVPN is one of the rare VPN providers that operate a legitimately free VPN service, albeit with some service restrictions we’ll get into later on.

Some untrustworthy VPN providers operate a free VPN service as a cover to commit identity theft, data fraud, and wholesale marketing analytics.

However, PrivadoVPN is so confident that you’ll find value in their paid service that you can try their VPN indefinitely.

Whenever you want to upgrade to the full paid service, PrivadoVPN makes it easy with a 24/7 support team ready to take your queries and suggestions at a moment’s notice.

PrivadoVPN’s Free VPN: Is it Worth it?

Free VPNs are always a controversial topic. And that’s because while they’re free, they usually don’t give you access to many of the features the paid plans offer.

The downsides don’t end there, though; most free VPNs also put a limit on your data usage and bandwidth and also limit the number of servers you can pick.

Worst comes to worst; some free VPNs will even attempt to sell your data, compromising your privacy and security.

In regards to PrivadoVPN’s free plan, you shouldn’t be worried about the latter. Your privacy and personal data will remain secure as PrivadoVPN is a legitimate VPN provider.

However, PrivadoVPN’s free plan still has limits, this includes:

• 10GB per month data limit
• One simultaneous connection at a time
• 12 server location options, as opposed to the usual 45

Besides this, you also lose access to certain features, such as the SOCKS5 Proxy.

Our advice regarding using PrivadoVPN’s free plan is that, while it’s better than most, it’s still a free VPN plan. Instead, we recommend using PrivadoVPN’s 30-day money-back guarantee and trying the service that way.

You get full access to all of Privado’s premium features for thirty days with no financial commitment, so you can try before you buy.

PrivadoVPN’s Ease-of-Use

When it comes to device compatibility, ease of use, and the installation process, knowing the ins and outs of a VPN in this respect is helpful when determining whether it’s a good option for you.

What Devices Can I Use PrivadoVPN on?

PrivadoVPN is available on every modern platform, including mainstream platforms like Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. Besides this, it’s also available on Linux, most routers, Amazon Fire TV, and Android TV.

Of course, just because your device isn’t natively covered doesn’t mean you cannot use PrivadoVPN’s services. If you want to secure a device that isn’t natively supported, all you need to do is put the device behind your router with PrivadoVPN installed on it.

This way, you can expand the effective compatibility of PrivadoVPN and get more out of it. We also have to mention how many devices you can install and consecutively use PrivadoVPN on.

PrivadoVPN allows you to install and subsequently use up to 10 devices, which is quite good compared to some of its competitors.

Also, we should mention that you can connect as many devices as you want to a router with PrivadoVPN installed on it, and doing so won’t count as an individual connection for each device but just the one for the router.

This can allow you to go over the 10-device limit if need be. Check out the huge range of devices PrivadoVPN is available on:

PC Devices

Installing and using PrivadoVPN on a Windows device is extremely simple. All it takes to install PrivadoVPN on a PC is to visit their website, download the installer .exe file, and launch it.

You’ll have to give the PrivadoVPN installer permission to install the app on your system, which may require administrator privileges. With that said, PrivadoVPN supports Windows 7, 8, 10, and 11, and all of these versions run very well.

The PC version of PrivadoVPN supports every feature offered on their website, including SOCKS5 proxy, all 3 VPN protocols offered by PrivadoVPN, and a system-wide kill-switch.

The app itself is inspired by the bold, minimalist UI style we’ve seen adopted by many top-tier VPN providers. Everything is easy to find, with the connect button placed first and foremost in the center of the app.

Changing locations is also super simple, and you’re reminded which location you’re connected to with just a glance at the app.

We tested the PrivadoVPN app for Windows to ensure it’s fit for purpose, and we’re happy to conclude that the app did well. The kill switch worked appropriately when tested under various knock-out scenarios, which is essential for consumer safety.

During this review, we found that PrivadoVPN uses an internal service for DNS requests, which also has the added benefit of filtering out advertisements and malware distributors before the requests ever hit your PC.

We’ve concluded that every feature offered by PrivadoVPN works as intended and that you don’t need to worry about anything potentially going south.

Android

PrivadoVPN supports Android devices starting from Android 5.0 up to the most recent version of Android. The brand of your phone doesn’t matter as long as you satisfy this requirement.

You’ll also be able to take advantage of Android’s built-in VPN support, allowing you to use every feature PrivadoVPN offers.

Android Mobiles

Our tests on Android mobile phones, including various Galaxy S models, ran PrivadoVPN with no problems. The app was very responsive and lightweight, making any performance impact almost unnoticeable.

Connecting was super simple and fast, and the connections themselves were similarly just as good.

All our cutout tests showed the kill switch worked as indicated, meaning no device data leaks when connecting to the VPN. This is essential because using a VPN on Android means you can browse in confidence from public access points that could otherwise expose your data.

Android TV Devices

SmartTVs that operate using Android can download and use the official PrivadoVPN app. Simply launch the Google Play Store, and download the PrivadoVPN app.

Launch the app and enter your login credentials, and you’re ready to go. Now you can stream whatever content you’d like, region locked or not, without tampering with anything.

Fire TV

Amazon’s FireTV uses its own custom OS, called the FireOS. FireOS is, however, a fork of Android, and thus you can use the PrivadoVPN app the same way you would use it on Android TVs.

All you have to do is download the app from the Play Store or download it directly onto your Amazon FireTV as an .apk.

iOS

PrivadoVPN supports iOS devices from iOS 12.0 onwards. Our experience here was just like the Android app — very smooth and streamlined.

The application is very lightweight and uses almost no resources. You can access all three VPN protocols that PrivadoVPN offers on these devices. All of them provide a smooth, fast, and consistent connection.

One downside to this platform, however, is the exclusion of the split-tunneling feature. This is likely because of compatibility issues with iOS, as split-tunneling isn’t supported natively on this platform.

We do hope that in the future, PrivadoVPN will find a way to implement this feature on iOS devices. All in all, PrivadoVPN on iOS works as you’d expect without any major issues.

Linux

Linux support for PrivadoVPN is rather bare-bones compared to the full-feature PC and Mac OSX apps. There’s also a bit more effort to get it up and running.

Instead of downloading a custom software-based VPN, the only way to get PrivadoVPN on Linux is to download the OpenVPN configuration files available from their support site.

These files are loaded into the default OpenVPN client you have installed on Linux, which allows you to open an encrypted connection to Privado’s servers.

PrivadoVPN does provide instructions on how to set up your network manager to connect to Privado in the future automatically. However, it’s still not the same experience as working on the PrivadoVPN app.

You’ll have to load a new server configuration every time you wish to change the server location, and although this process only takes a minute or so, it’s an interruption you wouldn’t be experiencing on the app.

You also won’t have access to some of the extra PrivadoVPN features, like a system-wide kill switch or split-tunneling, without additional work to set up these features inside OpenVPN.

Browser Extensions

The only platform PrivadoVPN is lacking is browser extensions.

PrivadoVPN currently doesn’t have an official browser extension. However, considering all the other platforms they support, this is unlikely to be an issue for any user.

Regardless of how minor of an issue this is, though, we do hope PrivadoVPN launches a browser extension of their VPN service at some point in the future.

Routers

PrivadoVPN does offer some functionality on Asus, DD-WRT, and Pfsense routers. Although PrivadoVPN says they support only these 3 router types, with some tinkering, any OpenVPN-capable router should be able to make use of PrivadoVPN.

While the service works fine on these devices, the setup might be a little convoluted for some users, and the functions have been trimmed a little because of platform limitations.

Luckily, PrivadoVPN offers detailed guides on how to set up their service on a supported router on their website. As for its functionality, PrivadoVPN currently only supports one of its 3 VPN protocols — OpenVPN.

Most routers accept an OpenVPN configuration file and not much else, so this isn’t surprising.

Router app

Unfortunately, at this time, PrivadoVPN hasn’t developed a custom router app to manage the VPN connection. This is a feature that only the very top-end of VPN providers offer, and we acknowledge that PrivadoVPN is still a relatively new provider.

We hope that in the future, they’ll bring a PrivadoVPN router app to the market, which should make changing the location of the VPN on routers much simpler.

How to Install PrivadoVPN

The installation methods for PrivadoVPN differ depending on your platform. The process is the same for every platform. Here’s what you do:

1. Sign up for a subscription with PrivadoVPN through their website (don’t forget that PrivadoVPN has a 30-day money-back guarantee on any of their subscriptions so that you can try it out without any commitment).
2. Download the software and install it from whichever application distribution platform you see fit — through the website or app stores. Apart from these, PrivadoVPN’s website also allows you to download the .APK file for the software.
3. Launch the application, and log in with your login credentials when prompted.
4. Choose a server from any of PrivadoVPN’s servers located in more than 45 countries around the globe. Connect to the server and start browsing the internet with your privacy secured.

PrivadoVPN Performance | How Fast is PrivadoVPN?

Relative to its competitors, PrivadoVPN is fast when working well. Unfortunately, in the tests that we have conducted daily, PrivadoVPN would often display wildly inconsistent results.

Some of the speeds we observed while connecting to the US East servers ranks within the speeds we see from our top 10 fastest VPNs. At other times, often relative to peak usage hours, our net could slow to a crawl for moments at a time.

We experienced no real slowdowns or other issues, such as lag, while conducting streaming tests. We streamed 4K Netflix content from American servers via the New York servers.

Our tests for download speeds using OpenVPN over a 100Mbps Broadband connection in the UK yielded results around 80-90Mbps on various American servers, depending on the time of the day.

This number stayed relatively consistent during our tests of the European servers, which gave us a consistent 90-95Mbps download speed. Australian servers performed worse compared to the rest of these servers, however, with the average floating around 60Mbps throughout the day.

Every speed test in this review was carried out using the Ookla speed test, with minimal network disruptions. However, these results are only for OpenVPN, the slowest VPN protocol among the ones at PrivadoVPN’s disposal.

Users can experience faster speeds using one of the other protocols, such as WireGuard, which averages around 450Mbps. Be sure to configure and customize your VPN settings and protocol according to your needs.

In conclusion, PrivadoVPN performs very well according to our tests. However, while PrivadoVPN performed well under lab conditions, no test can be a real replacement for actual real-world usage.

That’s why we recommend testing out PrivadoVPN yourself by making use of their 30-day money-back guarantee and Ookla’s speed tests.

How Secure is PrivadoVPN? | Is PrivadoVPN Safe?

When choosing a VPN, security is often a key factor for most users. Let’s take a closer look at how safe PrivadoVPN is — from its protocols to its jurisdiction, audits, and logging policy — here’s what you need to know.

PrivadoVPN’s Encryption Protocols

To begin with, let’s explore PrivadoVPN’s protocols:

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is one of the most widely-used VPN protocols, and you’ll be able to find support for this protocol from almost every VPN provider.

It’s an open-source protocol that’s been constantly improved over the last twenty years, making it an excellent choice for encrypted and secure communications.

It’s trusted by banks, large corporations, and security-focused communications developers. It might sound complex, but the way OpenVPN operates can be explained fairly simply.

Commonly, most of the traffic you send through the internet can be observed by anyone who handles routing on your internet connection. This can be your Internet Service Provider, other users on a public Wi-Fi connection, or in the worst case, hackers sitting on the internet.

OpenVPN solves this problem by creating a data tunnel between your device and the VPN servers. Any traffic that travels through this tunnel is encrypted and cannot be seen by any outside observer or hacker.

The only way to observe this data is with an encryption key — a secret password used to encrypt and decrypt data.

OpenVPN does this by using the OpenSSL library, which allows OpenVPN to utilize a wide variety of network and encryption protocols. This also makes OpenVPN very customizable for many personal and enterprise applications.

There is a downside to all this, however. OpenVPN might be tried-and-true and very secure, but it’s lacking in the speed department. It can also be quite difficult to utilize correctly because of how customizable it is.

It would be tough to verify the security of an OpenVPN setup that utilizes third-party plug-ins and scripts. OpenVPN being open-source, compounds this problem, making it even more difficult to verify the security of the massive open-source code base.

OpenVPN being very customizable also means that inexperienced users might use outdated or insecure encryption methods, which makes verifying the security of a particular OpenVPN setup even harder to confirm.

WireGuard

WireGuard is another open-source VPN protocol, just like OpenVPN. Where WireGuard conceptually differs from OpenVPN, though, is the fact that it’s a lot newer and more streamlined.

It was developed from scratch to answer the problems and complications brought to the table by OpenVPN and its old and bloated code.

WireGuard, in general, is much faster than its spiritual predecessor, OpenVPN. WireGuard is also usually deployed on the OS kernel level rather than just the external software level.

This deployment method allows WireGuard to access the computer’s resources a lot easier and faster than OpenVPN would allow. The connection stability of WireGuard is also significantly improved compared to OpenVPN.

However, the location of the server you’re connecting to and your local network bandwidth usually have a bigger impact when utilizing the WireGuard protocol rather than OpenVPN.

IKEv2

IKEv2 is a technology that works similarly to WireGuard and OpenVPN, in which it also creates an encrypted network tunnel. IKEv2 is, however, paired up with another technology called IPsec.

Since these two technologies are paired up 99% of the time, anytime IKEv2 is mentioned, you could assume IPsec is included as well. PrivadoVPN’s IKEv2 protocol works over macOS, iOS, and Android platforms at the moment.

However, like with every technology, there are also some downsides to IKEv2. For starters, IKEv2 is only offered over UDP, making it harder to make it look like normal traffic. On top of this, IKEv2 works over port 500, which is frequently blocked by firewalls.

Considering these downsides, IKEv2 is mainly offered as a means of compatibility for certain devices — such as BlackBerry mobile devices, which only support IKEv2 — instead of being your go-to VPN protocol.

Jurisdiction

PrivadoVPN is based in Switzerland, meaning they’re not under the jurisdiction of any other countries, such as the United States, the United Kingdom, or the European Union.

Switzerland also isn’t a part of any international surveillance agreements, such as the 14 Eyes Alliance, which requires countries that are a part of it to share information among their intelligence services.

Based on these facts and PrivadoVPN’s superb features, we can guarantee that using PrivadoVPN will keep your network traffic safe from any kind of hacker, spy, or even authoritarian governments.

We’re confident that with PrivadoVPN, privacy when using the internet won’t be a concern that you’ll have.

PrivadoVPN’s Transparency Reputation

As with all of the best VPN services, independent third-party audits and the VPN logging policy are key factors worthy of consideration. Here’s what you need to know about PrivadoVPN’s privacy.

Audits

Third-party audits are absolutely key to establishing trust between companies that provide a service and their customers, especially when the said product is something that’s meant to enhance your security and privacy, like a VPN.

Currently, PrivadoVPN hasn’t had a third-party auditor to affirm its security and privacy policies. PrivadoVPN, does, however, inform us of what information they do and don’t collect in a very transparent manner on their website.

We hope that PrivadoVPN does eventually reach out to one or more third-party auditors and confirm their security and privacy status through their services, especially since trust is paramount when the service being provided is all about security and privacy.

Logging

Information about PrivadoVPN’s logging policies can be found on their website’s privacy policy page. We’ll sum up the contents of this page for you below.

PrivadoVPN, of course, being a VPN provider, claims to absolutely never keep any record of the content you’re viewing, browsing, streaming, sharing, or communicating through PrivadoVPN’s connections.

All data that goes through PrivadoVPN’s connections are fully encrypted. No browsing history, traffic destination, IP addresses, DNS queries, or data content ever gets logged while using PrivadoVPN’s connections.

No specific users can be connected to any activity that originates from an IP address on PrivadoVPN’s servers. And, of course, no data is sold to third parties under any circumstances.

Other than these key points, they openly state what information they do have to collect, as they’re necessary to the basics of purchasing a service, such as payment.

Minimal data is collected when your account is created. This is just the data that you provide to PrivadoVPN as you sign up, which includes the email address that you used to sign up and your username.

PrivadoVPN themselves don’t collect your payment information whatsoever. All payments are processed through reputable third-party payment processors.

If you used a credit card, for example, any data collected would be collected by the payment processor and not PrivadoVPN. PrivadoVPN does recommend utilizing cryptocurrencies while buying your subscription, just to minimize the data being collected.

PrivadoVPN also states that they do collect data that you share with them when you’re interacting with their customer service or support requests.

Besides all of these points, which could be considered somewhat personal information, PrivadoVPN’s privacy policy also mentions that they collect some anonymized device data to improve their services.

These include data points like:

• Which version of the PrivadoVPN application you’re using
• Anonymous statistics about what type of device and operating systems are being used

This gives PrivadoVPN data about the total amount of installs, uninstalls, and active users on a specific platform and helps them identify any platform or operating system-specific problems with their services.

PrivadoVPN also collects crash reports via self-hosted Sentry crash reporting tools. Crash reports don’t contain any information that could be tied to any specific users, but PrivadoVPN does give you the option to opt-out of them if you’d like.

PrivadoVPN’s website does utilize cookies, with the main purpose being to improve its website. These cookies allow PrivadoVPN to see how many users visit which page, which pages or features are the most popular ones, etc., which in turn allows them to improve upon their website and provide a better user experience.

These cookies contain no personally identifying information, such as your email address, and they do not track your activity outside their website. On top of this, none of the limited data being kept by PrivadoVPN are shared with any third parties.

The only exception to this is if PrivadoVPN is compelled by the Swiss authorities to share whatever limited data they have. This is limited to your email address and username, as those are the only data PrivadoVPN keeps, which are required to keep operating their service.

PrivadoVPN’s Server List

Albeit boasting fewer servers than leading VPNs, PrivadoVPN’s global distribution is solid. Here are all the server locations:

PrivadoVPN Price | How Much Does PrivadoVPN Cost?

As of today, PrivadoVPN costs just $7.99/month. However, if you were to purchase for 12 months instead of just one month, this price gets discounted by around 37%, dropping from $95.88/year to $59.88/year, which comes out to about $4.99 per month.

This makes PrivadoVPN one of the best budget VPN services. Plus, they also offer a 30-day money-back guarantee, so you could test out the service without any real commitment.

PrivadoVPN’s payment processor accepts a myriad of payment options, which include most major credit cards, such as Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Paypal, and even Bitcoin.

Bitcoin

It’s great to see that Privado offers a variety of payment methods, including handling Bitcoin transactions via Coinbase.

However, regarding Bitcoin transactions, it’s important to remember that every transaction made via Bitcoin is inherently traceable via the blockchain network.

This isn’t a big deal for most people, as using Bitcoin can still help you preserve your privacy from other individuals in most cases.

For example, Bitcoin works well if you’re worried about a spouse spying on your bank account and need to transfer money without leaving a trace.

Where Bitcoin falters in its privacy, though, is when large entities like government organizations get involved. Every transaction made with Bitcoin will be recorded permanently on the blockchain, even if you use a coin tumbler or other chain-mixing technology.

This means that if you’re worried about being traced by government entities for doing, for example, journalism work, using Bitcoin to process your payments won’t guarantee your privacy.

For these situations, we recommend contacting PrivadoVPN directly to discuss payment options.

PrivadoVPN FAQs