IPVanish VPN Review: A Jack-of-All-Trades
IPVanish is one of the most complete VPN services we've tested. As its name implies, it lets you disappear online and surf anonymously. Its performance is good, if not top-notch; its software is easy to use; and it never dropped a connection on us. We can recommend IPVanish, but our Editors' Choice, Private Internet Access, offers even better performance at half the price.
Costs and What's Covered
IPVanish's list price is daunting, at nearly $12 per month, but like NordVPN and PureVPN, the company offers heavy discounts (in this case, nearly half off) for paying for a year up front. As of this writing, even the monthly rate was discounted to $10 per month.
There's no free trial, but IPVanish has a seven-day money-back guarantee if you don't like the service. You can pay with a credit card, PayPal or Bitcoin and other services.
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The service supports up to five simultaneous users, which means you can share the account with family members or friends. There are no limits on data or bandwidth usage.
IPVanish has client software for PCs, Macs, Android devices, iPhones, iPads and Amazon Fire TVs. Other platforms — such as Linux machines, Chromebooks, Windows Phones or Kodi — can be set up to use the IPVanish VPN service without client software, or with OpenVPN software, if their platforms support it.
Wi-Fi routers that can use the DD-WRT open-source firmware can be turned into VPN routers using IPVanish. Full instructions can be found on IPVanish's setup page.
Features and Interface
IPVanish lets you choose from about 850 VPN servers in 60 countries, ranging from Albania to Vietnam. You can also let the software choose the most efficient server connection. Dig into the settings, and IPVanish lets you automatically start the service when you boot your computer.
IPVanish's Android (pictured below) and iOS apps show your current IP address and the server you're connected to, as well as how long you've been online and how much data has flowed back and forth. But IPVanish VPN lacks the ability to block ads — a feature that's becoming common among VPN services.
Privacy Protections
To sign up for IPVanish, all you need is a valid email account. Unless you're paying with a credit card, you don't have to provide your real name.
The company promises that it doesn't log user activity, and hence will have nothing to show authorities who come looking for information. But privacy fanatics should know that IPVanish is based in the United States, and thus subject to search warrants and National Security Letters.
Like most commercial VPN services, IPVanish encrypts data transmissions using the AES-256 protocol where possible, but some platforms (Windows Phone, Chromebook) are limited to AES-128, which is functionally just as secure.
IPVanish's client software also has a "kill switch" option that will shut off all of a system's internet activity if the connection to the VPN server is lost. That should stop some would-be snoopers.
Performance
Over a month of testing, IPVanish had one of the lowest average latency results — the delay in connecting to a website — among the VPN services we tested. At 21.8 milliseconds, its latency was about half that of Avira's Phantom VPN, and one-quarter that of PureVPN.
But latency can vary naturally over time, even without a VPN being used. In that respect, IPVanish's 106-percent increase over the non-VPN latency at a given moment puts it behind ExpressVPN, which saw a latency increase of only 76 percent. Both were far behind Private Internet Access, whose 3-percent latency increase was barely perceptible.
The IPVanish network delivered data to our system at an average rate of 41.2 Mbps (megabits per second). That's a decline of 28 percent from the non-VPN download rate of 56.9 Mbps. That was slow enough to put IPVanish in fourth place behind the free Opera browser VPN, which had a rate drop of 14 percent; Private Internet Access, which dropped off 22 percent; and CyberGhost, which suffered a 23-percent drop.
IPVanish was able to upload data at an average rate of 17.9 Mbps — a drop of only 1.2 Mbps, or 6.3 percent, from the non-VPN upload rate.
IPVanish took 12 minutes and 18 seconds to download a 428MB video file. (It took only 2:59 to download the file without a VPN activated.) That's a decrease of about 300 percent, putting it about in the middle of the pack. By contrast, Private Internet Access zipped through the download in 4 minutes and 25 seconds. Throughout our testing, IPVanish never dropped a connection or needed to reconnect.
Fortunately, this occurs only when you open the mobile app or desktop application. When we clicked to connect to a remote server, it took an average of 9.5 seconds, which is slightly slower than average. My advice is to keep the app loaded to avoid the preliminaries.
Setup and Customer Support
It took about 3 minutes to set up the IPVanish client on a PC or a Mac, and there's a tutorial for first-timers. Although the interface is dark and ominous-looking, it offers access to feedback and configuration details, and lets you resize the windows.
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IPVanish's Android and iOS apps each take about a minute to install and set up. Customer support is by email only.
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