Today's best PureVPN deals
(opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab) (opens in a new tab)PureVPN has been in the VPN business since 2007, so it's no surprise that the company has built a long list of features.
The service covers most of the technical bases: strong encryption via WireGuard, OpenVPN, and IKEv2; Protection against DNS and IPv6 leaks; torrent support; split tunneling to control which apps use the VPN; and a smart kill switch to protect you if the VPN goes down.
Platform support is a strong point, with dedicated apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux, extensions for Chrome and Firefox, and more downloads and tutorials to help you set up the service on routers, Kodi, Android TV, Fire from Amazon. TV stick and more.
- PureVPN subscription options:
- 12 month plan - €1.99 per month (€23.88 total cost) (opens in a new tab)
You can use PureVPN on up to 10 devices simultaneously, and as an unusual bonus, this provider allows you to share those 10 locations with your family. If there are four people with phones, say, they can each install and use PureVPN with their own connection, and you can still connect six other devices at home.
PureVPN's network has 6500 servers spread across 96 locations and 78 countries. It can't quite match CyberGhost (8900+ servers, 115 locations, 91 countries), but it's a much bigger network than most. And it's fast, too: While other providers boast 10Gbps server connections (if they have any), PureVPN started upgrading its servers to 20Gbps in late 2021.
What's New?
PureVPN's recent improvements include a major overhaul of its Android TV and Fire Stick apps.
New WireGuard support speeds up performance; enhanced split tunneling lets you decide which apps use the VPN and which don't; The app now supports 11 more languages (Chinese, Dutch, Spanish, French, and more), and in-app support makes it easy to get help when you need it.
A handy new Shortcuts feature allows mobile users to save their favorite streaming service and best location right in the app. You can add a US Netflix shortcut to the Locations menu that connects to your favorite US server, for example, and then opens the Netflix site, all with one click.
New obfuscation support hides your VPN usage, which can help you avoid problems in countries or environments where VPNs are blocked. The bad news is that it only works with OpenVPN; the good news is that apps will default to this if they can't connect through something else, and there are no other settings to change. You are slightly more likely to sign in now than before.
PureVPN also introduced PureKeep, a password manager that can generate and store strong passwords and then sync them across your devices. It is available as a paid VPN add-on, priced at $0,99 per month for the first term and $4,99 thereafter.
PureVPN Pricing
Pricing starts at €10.95 billed monthly (opens in a new tab) (many top-tier providers charge €10-13 for monthly billing).
The annual plan (opens in a new tab) is good value at €3.24 per month, especially as it covers up to 10 family members. But that's partly due to a one-time discount, and it renews at €4.49.
A special two-year plan (opens in a new tab) is priced at €1.99 per month. It's cheap, but it also renews at €4.49 a month like the annual plan.
It's not on the regular pricing page, but the PureVPN website also offered us a five-year plan (opens in a new tab) for just $1.49 per month. That's undercutting just about everyone, though Ivacy's current five-year price is still better at $1 a month.
Keep in mind that PureVPN often has amazing Black Friday VPN deals, so it's worth heading over to the company's website (opens in a new tab) to check them out.
However, it is not only about the main plans. PureVPN has several optional extras.
Dedicated IP addresses seem like a steal at $2.99 per month for addresses in the US, UK, Singapore, Canada, Germany, Malta, and Australia. Private Internet Access, NordVPN, Astrill and others charge €4-€5, sometimes more.
Port forwarding is an optional extra at €0.99 per month, or you can add a dedicated IP address with port forwarding for €3.49.
There is even DDoS protection, which is useful for gamers. Well, that's €3.99 more per month, but most providers don't offer that at all.
If you're intrigued, there's a 7-day trial of sorts. You have to pay in advance, but only €1, and if you cancel the account before the end of the week, you get that dollar back.
There is support for paying with cryptocurrencies if you are looking for maximum anonymity (although cards and PayPal are also accepted).
If you sign up for a full plan and aren't satisfied, there's a 31-day money-back guarantee, with no dodgy fine print to surprise you. If you're not satisfied, simply email and request a refund.
Privacy and registration
PureVPN's privacy policy (opens in a new tab) gets off to a good start, with a long list of all the data the service doesn't log: "We don't keep any records of your browsing activities, logs, VPN logs, IPs assigned to you, your source IPs, your connection time, your browsing history, the sites you have visited, your outgoing traffic, the content or data you accessed, or the DNS queries you have generated.
The policy also explains that there is a session log: the day you connected to a specific location, your ISP, the duration of the connection, the number of connections you made, and the total bandwidth used. But you can't link your account to any specific Internet action, and it's unlikely to compromise your privacy.
The policy goes on to explain that PureVPN uses "some tools" in its apps to "perform VPN diagnostics and monitor crash reports."
This type of crash report is not uncommon, but we expect it to be optional, and that's not the case here. The message "Send crash data?" does not appear. option in Settings: PureVPN sends it anyway (and if you didn't read the privacy policy, you wouldn't even know it's happening).
No log audit
In 2020, PureVPN announced that it had passed a no-logs audit by KPMG(opens in a new tab), which found that the service does not log a user's source IP address, the VPN IP address assigned to a user, the specific time when a user connects to a VPN server or logs a user's activities through their VPN connection.
PureVPN also says that it has opted for an "always-on" audit policy, which means that KPMG can "initiate an unscheduled privacy audit at any time of the year, without prior notice." Sure enough, in August 2021, the company reported that it had passed a second audit without logging in.
These checks appear to be comprehensive, and PureVPN claims they involve "inspections of our complex infrastructure, server configurations, codebase, technical data logs, and global servers," as well as "interviews with our staff involved in server maintenance and management." from the database". .'
The reports have not been made public, so you cannot verify the details yourself. And they're just trying to check the core no-logs policy, they're not looking for privacy issues in general.
Still, we're not complaining: even with these limitations, there's a lot more peace of mind here than you'll get with most VPNs. Hopefully PureVPN will continue its regular audits and make comprehensive reports available, not just a sentence or two.
windows app
PureVPN's Windows app interface is clean and very simple, mostly blank spaces. A status panel shows the recommended location, and tap the list of locations to see more. There's a big on/off button for logging in and out, and some small icons in the sidebar for other areas of the app (Settings, Help, Account).
The location picker is better than most, with a list of recent locations, a favorites system, and a country lookup list with ping times to help you spot the fastest ones.
Clicking on an arrow to the right of a country expands it to show all cities. It's a familiar idea, but most VPN apps only show this sort of "expand me" indicator when a country has multiple locations. PureVPN does this for all countries, so we regularly waste time expanding a list, only to discover that it only includes one city.
The app displays your current download and upload speeds in a status box. We found that it worked with WireGuard and IKEv2, but not when we switched to OpenVPN - speeds still showed as zero with the latter. The numbers don't matter, but the possibility that the developer "forgot" to fill this in, and PureVPN didn't notice, is more worrisome.
WireGuard connection times were reasonable at 2-4 seconds. OpenVPN could take much longer, sometimes for 30 seconds or more, and while there was a Cancel button, it didn't always work ("Cannot cancel," a tooltip warned, "critical operation in progress").
After finally canceling an OpenVPN connection attempt, the app told us we were connected, even though the device was still using its regular internet connection. This has only happened once, but it still tells us that there's a theoretical chance the app could show it as protected, when it actually isn't, and that should be a concern.
The app has relatively few settings. A kill switch blocks your Internet connection if the VPN fails, and you can choose between TCP/UDP WireGuard, IKEv2, and OpenVPN protocols, and split tunneling lets you choose which apps use the VPN and which don't.
Our kill switch test had mixed results. It worked great with OpenVPN and WireGuard, blocking our...