Astrill was launched in 2009, and operates out of the Seychelles, which is an area with no data retention laws. Their big claim to ‘fame’ is that you can go from not having a VPN at all, to having their VPN up and running in under three minutes.
Their website is well organized, easy to use, and pleasing to the eye. This is clearly a VPN provider taking the industry seriously and investing in itself to benefit its users. They have also worked hard to make sure that their VPN works on Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, and Linux devices.
With all of this going for it, they still stumble when it comes to their privacy policy, customer support response time, a dated-looking client, higher pricing, and limiting of device connections. They’re by no means a bad provider, but we feel that there are better options to choose from on our Top 10 list.
Astrill VPN has built their VPN client to include some of the most important features, including:
These are the types of features you want to see from a high-quality VPN. We were also impressed by their use of OpenWeb and StealthVPN as proprietary protocols. Their VPN sharing feature is also unique, and we can’t seem to recall another VPN which offers it.
Astrill VPN has servers in 64 different countries, and 115 different cities. These are pretty impressive numbers, and will surely help users unblock geo-restricted content with ease.
What isn’t impressive, however, is their claim of only having 150+ servers in total. That means that many of these cities have only one or two servers maximum, while the most high-quality will have four or five per city.
Their list of countries includes:
What’s really impressive is that they claim that all of these servers are on either 1Gigabit or 10Gigabit lines. Those are more than decent speeds for most web browsing activities.
You can read about Astrill making great claims regarding the speed of their VPN service, so much so that they put together this cocky graphic:
We get what they’re trying to say here, but the bald eagle is far from being the fastest bird, just as they are far from being the fastest VPN. Independent testing has found them to be as fast as many other VPNs we’ve tested, not setting them apart good or bad.
Users have not complained often about connection issues. A reliable connection is important, even with their kill switch, to keep you safe from accidents. We’re glad to see Astrill VPN deliver in this regard.
Considering the fact that they are, at best, a slightly above average VPN provider, you wouldn’t be able to tell that from their pricing as they’re definitely on the expensive side. The cheapest VPN providers of quality typically charge under $3/month on their best plan, while Astrill’s best price is $8.22/month. Here’s a breakdown:
They also offer some add-on services:
For the amount you’re spending on a standard package, we feel that the “VIP” option is pretty bad. You should be getting a premium service for $8.33 per month on its own, not have to pay another $10 per month on top of that to get prioritized speed.
Astrill has worked hard to help customers solve their own problems with excellent learning materials built. This includes:
They also have email and live chat. We tested the live chat and found it to be slightly less than attentive:
It’s likely a copy/paste scenario most of the time, so we’d advise using their email support for complicated troubleshooting.
Our final overview is that their support is about average. We wish we felt a bit more of a personal connection during the live chat as we weren’t sure if it was a bot or not.
Astrill maintains a no-logging policy on their VPN connections. Given their location in the Seychelles, they have absolutely no law pushing them to do so. After digging deeper into their privacy policy we found that they do collect data through cookies:
We found this wording disturbing at the least, and unusual at best. This could mean that they are using your data for ad targeting.
Further in their privacy policy they state:
Which is nice to read, but we’re still not sold on their privacy being up to par with the best VPNs for no-logging policies.
We understand that Astrill is a very popular VPN provider. They have a great website with eye-catching graphics, a slick interface which gives people a lot of information, and a decent social media presence. We feel that these are all things which cover up the fact that they are too expensive for a VPN of a mid-grade quality.
If they appeal to you because of a certain feature, that’s quite understandable. Their multi-hop VPN, and Onion over VPN features are both hard to find and useful. We just have issues recommending them when there are providers with much better privacy policies in our top VPN providers list.
Our ratings for astrill vpn review are based on our professional experience and extensive tests with VPN providers between April 2014 – July 2014, taking into account user feedback and reviews we receive. As a friendly disclosure, some VPN providers do compensate us for customers we refer them, but this in no way effects their ranking on our website, nor our reviews.
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