IPVanish review

IPVanish is a VPN provider registered in the United States, and it currently ranks second in our list of the best VPN services. The service is bound to satisfy your every VPN requirement, be it support for geo-restricted websites and P2P services or bulletproof privacy. IPVanish's top qualities include superior speeds and connection consistency, as well as support for 10 devices at the same time. If the fact that the provider is under the US jurisdiction doesn’t bother you much, it offers quite a lot to justify its not-so-low price. Let's take a closer look at this VPN service's different features.

IPVanish plans and pricing

IPVanish has three pricing plans to choose from. As ever, the most expensive one is the 1-month option that costs $10. The second-best is the 3-month plan, at $8.99 per month, while the best-value option is the 1-year subscription that is billed $6.49 monthly.

One of the downsides to IPVanish is the fact that it only has a 7-day moneyback guarantee, which may not be enough to test out the service's full potential. Payment options are quite limited too, with only major credit cards and PayPal accepted.

Although IPVanish is not the cheapest VPN provider on the market, it occasionally offers special discounts and promo codes. We monitor these closely, so you'll always see the best deals available in our price widgets. 

IPVanish features

Proudly boasting with a high number of shared IPs (over 40,000), IPVanish lists quite a few exceptional features. First of all, it is one of the top-tier VPNs, which means it claims ownership and management of all of its servers, over 1,300 of them in 75+ locations. Theoretically, being in charge of the complete infrastructure should provide better speeds than those by VPN providers who use third-party hosting providers or infrastructure.

Second, its industry-standard kill switch, which terminates all internet traffic in case your VPN connection is interrupted, is accompanied by a Block LAN traffic feature on IPVanish Windows client. You can turn on this option if you want to terminate all LAN traffic in case of a sudden VPN failure. As for Android and FireOS devices, the LAN blocking feature is automatically on unless you switch it off.

IPVanish Android and FireOS apps also have a split tunneling feature that enables you to choose which apps you would prefer to go through the VPN tunnel and which you want to leave on your regular internet connection.

One of IPVanish’s best qualities is that it supports simultaneous connection on up to 10 devices. And if that's not enough for you, you can always install the service on a router, provided you have one that supports it.

Privacy and logging

IPVanish delivers top-notch privacy through the strong 256-bit AES encryption and connection protocols including OpenVPN (TCP and UDP), IKEv2, and L2TP/IPSec. Additionally, it has a SOCKS5 proxy which masks the originating IP address with an IPVanish shared IP address before your traffic reaches its destination.

The Windows client also has a protection against DNS leaks, when those requests to transform an address or URL into an IP address are somehow directed through someone else’s DNS server, exposing information like websites you visited. IPVanish has mechanisms in place that prevent such things from happening to your device, like assigning 198.18.0.1 and 198.18.0.2 as the primary and secondary DNS IPs. The provider also protects you from IPv6 leaks by using IPv4 exclusively.

IPVanish has a strict no-logging policy, stating it doesn’t collect, monitor, or log any traffic or use of its service, "under any circumstances, on any platform". The information they may collect is statistics related to app crashes. Although the website offers strong assurances that it doesn’t store or sell any information that can be used to trace your real identity, a past incident has shaken the public’s trust.

Namely, IPVanish disclosed some data to the US Homeland Security as part of a child abuse investigation, which led to the identification of a specific user, raising serious question marks over the truthfulness of company’s no-logging claims. The company has changed ownership since, and the new owners offer guarantees that your private information is not stored or shared.

Performance

One of the qualities IPVanish should be most proud of is its supreme performance, in terms of connection success, connection times and download speeds. Some latency may occur if you’re trying to connect to certain servers outside of the US, but otherwise we noted superb consistency and outstanding speeds.

Netflix

For accessing services that are usually, for various reasons, not accessible to users outside of certain regions, IPVanish is a great choice. The provider is particularly favourable for watching Netflix US – it offers the best performance of all the VPN services we tested, probably because it has the largest number of servers in the US.

You can also reach many other fully or partially geo-blocked services and websites including NBC Sports, Spotify, Crunchyroll, HBO, Facebook, Kodi, and more.

Torrents

Torrenting is also one of the services you will have no issues with. The provider supports sharing of large files on virtually all VPN servers, with no usage limitations or low download speeds.

Client setup

IPVanish can be installed on all major platforms and routers, as well as supporting the manual installation of OpenVPN on less popular platforms like Kali Linux, Ubuntu, Roku, Apple TV, Chromecast, and so on.

The installation is user-friendly and intuitive for Windows, iOS, Android, FireOS, Linux, Windows Phone, and Chromebook. However, if you’re a beginner and need help installing the service on routers and other devices, make sure to consult IPVanish’s Help Center.

Support

When it comes to customer support, IPVanish provides a great service. There are multiple ways you can find answers to any questions you might have, including a large FAQ and support section, as well as professional human staff available 24/7 via live chat or email.