EDIT: i use mullvad since this post, haven’t been disappointed yet, nearly never had issues aside the odd bug where the killswitch got stuck if i left it on while putting my pc in sleep mode.
Bit of a disclaimer, this is my first vpn i ever subscribed for, currently on year 4 of the 5 year plan and i’m currently looking for an alternative.
I’m not paid, i paid the subscription with my own money and have been using it nearly daily and this review is fully based on personal experience.
The short summary:
Score: 2/5 not worth it for p2p related stuff.
-Not located in a 5/9/14 eye member state, but it is located in Hong Kong which many of you may know by now went through some changes…
-5 device limit, kinda on the short side IMO.
-Geo unlocking content for netflix works good, at the moment of writing this review i tested it to make sure the new version at least still did that well, have not tried it with disney+, hulu etc. as i have no account for those.
-p2p is a horrible experience, insane low speeds especially after the first year as if they intentionally throttle it, especially is a thing the moment i run qbit.
-Keeps reconnecting every 5
-20 minutes and sometimes even crashes after updating to v8.
-split tunneling doesn’t always work, seems to work fine with chrome when i check my IP, qbittorrent just went on my actual IP even though i told PureVPN to tunnel it.
-After their latest update the UI became too basic, their last UI allowed you to switch modes and protocols, the current one only supports IKEv2, UCP and TCP and no choice in modes.
-5 year plan costed me $69 in 2017, currently on year 4.
-captchas on google when doing basic searches, you decide if this is a con as personally i never cared enough.
-Support is meh, not the best, contacted them once about an issue and they replied within 24h, but issue wasn’t solved until a later update(took 2 months).
-You will occasionally get emails about promotions, sales and “gifts”.
Cannot recommend it if you like to download an ISO for a linux distro or other large files but if you need it to geo unlock content it might be worth it if they fix their current stability issues.
The long version explaining my experience in more detail:
In 2017 a friend recommended PureVPN to me, i bought their 5 year subscription for $69, not sure what it was in euros as the receipt only shows the dollar price.
First year it worked pretty damn well, speeds were great with minimal drop, back then my speed (without vpn) was 14ms, 252mb/s D, 15~ U, and while using it i lost about 10-20% speed depending on configuration and gained little ping (16ms best, 46ms at worst) if i connected to barbados, my own country the netherlands, and countries close to mine, but got 150~ ping for USA servers and japan past 200 ping.
Now here is where it starts to get frustrating for me in the second, third and fourth year.
At first i had issues with the kill switch not working in 2018, got fixed later, but then the android app broke for me and didn’t work until last year(yes, wouldn’t work for literally over a year), no matter what it wouldn’t connect and again, the new and latest version works like a charm tho, kudos for that.
I had no DMCA letters, neither from my ISP, pretty comforting i must say, but i feel like they throttle p2p hard, my download goes from 28mb peak without vpn to below 1mb most of the time and back in v7 on good days 4mb peak, but then as they stopped supporting v7 of their application it just wont get past 1-2mb/s DL speed.
So if you plan on using it for p2p file transfer, give this one a very hard pass.
If you want to use it purely to unlock region locked content, might wanna give it a try as i didn’t have issues even in v8 of their software.
connected to japan and watched a region exclusive show with not much buffering and acceptable quality for 260+ms if you don’t have expectations for 4k or hardly even 1080p.shows in america play fine, europe no problem, quite what you would expect and does this well in my opinion, again, i only ever tested this with netflix since i don’t have the need for the other services.
Conclusion:
Don’t get me wrong, i’m not a cyber security expert and you really need to do research on this yourself so i skip this part, i just never had a DMCA or letter from my ISP in general and it’s not a member state of the 5/9/14 eye boogaloo, but i’d argue to generally be cautious since Hong Kong changed a little the recent year.
This review is more around ease of use, reliability and general experience while using the software.
I don’t like their latest simplistic UI, it reconnects too often and crashed a few times within a single day and the hard rate limit from the moment qbit starts, which delivers inconsistent, slow speeds, is suspicious af and kinda slams the final nail in the coffin for me, so considering how i don’t even want to sit out the last year i cannot not recommend it.
That being said i see a lot of positive posts and reviews about surfshark(from my idea overall an ok experience), mullvad(more for p2p than geo unlocking).
And WeVPN is one i noticed in the comments in this sub but dunno much about yet, so i will dig around a bit the coming days to see which of these 3 i will replace PureVPN with.
By all means if you can recommend one for geo unlocking and especially p2p file sharing, while not being in a 5/9/14 eye member state, please let me know because like i said i kinda don’t want to sit out my last year with PureVPN.
EDIT: fixed typos
. They suddenly popped into prominence a couple of years ago, and suddenly got famous, and I’m not convinced it’s all “organic”. I don’t trust Nord, but I trust Nord more than Surfshark. Some entity with a lot of pull, might have set it up, but it’s just speculation. And this coming from me, who knows about Kape and it’s origins lol.