CyberGhost Review

CyberGhost logs its users’ connection attempts — and whether those attempts are successful — to manage its service. Since your connection is one of many, it is kept anonymous.

It also stores your username and payment details. This is standard practice and can easily be sidestepped by using an alias email and an anonymous payment method, like cryptocurrency.

Based on these claims alone, CyberGhost doesn’t pose a risk to your online privacy, but we can’t provide a full guarantee until its policy is proven by a court case or server seizure.

That said, the VPN has published transparency reports since 2011 and has never recorded an instance of complying with an information request.

It has also invested in a RAM-only (diskless) server network which means any data is stored virtually and periodically wiped. For us, this is a strong indicator that CyberGhost’s claims are truthful.

Clarifying CyberGhost’s Ownership

Initially founded by a tech entrepreneur in 2011, CyberGhost was eventually purchased by a company called Crossrider in 2017.

This generated some controversy, since Crossrider had a past association with an ad-injector platform. However, Crossrider has since rebranded to Kape Technologies. This was followed by a shift in company focus to privacy and security, and an overhaul of its entire senior management team.

In fact, CyberGhost has actually improved its privacy practices under Kape’s ownership including two Deloitte audits.

Having reviewed CyberGhost for many years, we’ve always been impressed by how many streaming services it can access.

We’re confident it maintains this consistency through its focus on specific platforms. Unlike some other VPNs, which provide streaming-optimized servers for entire countries, CyberGhost goes one step further with servers for individual content platforms.

We used them ourselves to access services like CBC Gem (Canada), Canal+ (France), and NBC (US).

Using its Netflix servers, we unblocked 10 libraries, which included the US, UK, and Canada. While this is more than most VPNs can unblock, it’s still far below ExpressVPN and NordVPN’s totals.

Another trend we’ve noticed is the VPN’s effectiveness at unblocking US and UK streaming services. This includes bypassing BBC iPlayer’s notoriously strict geo-blocks.

We streamed BBC iPlayer on-demand using CyberGhost’s UK servers.

Despite its excellent unblocking capabilities, there’s a fair amount we don’t love about CyberGhost. First of all, it can’t unblock a single DAZN region and it struggles with some major European platforms, like RTÉ (Ireland) or RTVE Play (Spain).

Our user experience while streaming with the VPN also wasn’t great. Its speeds fluctuate, so expect some occasional buffering, and your stream can take ages to load.

What makes this so frustrating is that CyberGhost has the potential to be among the very best streaming VPNs, but these performance and UX issues hold it back.

Based on our results and personal use, we’re confident you won’t notice a difference in internet speed when using a nearby CyberGhost server.

It’s a slightly different story when connecting to servers continents away. A speed loss of 44% while connected to a South Africa server is understandable, but compares poorly to PIA’s 26% decrease over the same distance.

The issue isn’t just the raw numbers themselves, but the instability of the connection over long distances: it wasn’t unusual for our download speed to fluctuate wildly by 10-50Mbps.

This became really annoying when streaming, as our video would start buffering or outright freeze.

The VPN’s apps provide two options for protecting your connection: the WireGuard protocol with ChaCha20 encryption, or OpenVPN with AES-256. Both are highly secure, open-source solutions, backed by industry experts.

We used a packet analyzer (Wireshark) to inspect our traffic while connected to CyberGhost, and to ensure its encryption worked as advertised. The result: CyberGhost encrypted our device’s connection, and left us feeling very reassured.

CyberGhost encrypted our internet connection and displayed it as meaningless symbols.

As part of our testing, we also checked for IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks. We didn’t detect any issues while connected to the VPN, apart from an IP leak when manually changing servers.

Normally, we’d expect the kill switch to fire during a server change to block our internet, but CyberGhost’s kill switch doesn’t work like this. While it does thankfully activate during an unexpected VPN disconnection — the more critical use case — we would like to see the kill switch improved to cover the period between server switching.

That aside, our only other criticism is that CyberGhost isn’t keeping pace with its rivals. We’d love to see open-source apps or post-quantum servers introduced, so that the VPN can take its security up a level.

Since we’ve been using CyberGhost we’ve seen its server network gradually expand, now covering 100 countries.

Though the vast majority of its servers are concentrated in North America, Europe, and Asia, the VPN has made significant headway in Oceania — namely, across Australia and New Zealand.

CyberGhost’s server list, as shown in its Mac app.

CyberGhost lets you connect to specific cities in 10 locations, most notably in the US, UK, and Canada. The US locations are especially useful if you want to stream live sport events affected by regional blackouts.

Our only critique is the lack of city-level choice in Asia or Africa. In comparison, Proton VPN lets you choose between Abuja or Lagos in Nigeria, or Johor Bahru or Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia.

CyberGhost’s interface isn’t pushing any boundaries, but its simplicity works in its favor. Power users and beginners alike will have no problem using it.

Its apps feature a gray background with a midnight blue power button, which turns yellow once connected. There’s nothing wrong with this color palette from a functional standpoint — you can tell when the VPN is active — but it looks dull compared to its rivals.

For a detailed analysis of how CyberGhost looks and feels on each platform, you can expand the sections below.

In terms of anonymity, CyberGhost is good for torrenting. Its privacy policy shields you against copyright trolls and there’s a kill switch to stop your real IP ever being accidentally exposed.

But its speeds are an issue. Despite the vast majority of its server network being optimized for P2P file sharing, we recorded an average bitrate of only 3.9MiB/s — a 61% speed loss.

We had to wait over an hour for larger downloads.

For context, the best VPNs for torrenting lose less than 10%, such as PIA, which has an average bitrate of 9.6MiB/s.

We could feel this when torrenting on a local server; it took us 81 minutes to download a 20GB file. Without a VPN it took us 32 minutes. Using PIA it took us 33 minutes, only adding 1 minute.

Nor can you try to improve your torrenting speed with port forwarding. CyberGhost does not offer it, citing privacy reasons.

We were surprised by CyberGhost’s ungenerous device allowance. Once you go over the limit you’ll be asked to log out one device, otherwise you can’t use the VPN.

Given most VPNs are increasingly offering unlimited simultaneous connections, this policy feels quite dated from CyberGhost.

Another area for improvement, albeit less crucial, is its lack of a dedicated router app. While the VPN supports manual installation, an actual app (like ExpressVPN’s) is much easier to use and set up.

In contrast, CyberGhost’s Smart DNS is a standout feature. Unlike most Smart DNS proxies that only provide access to the US, CyberGhost offers proxies for five locations: the US, UK, Japan, Germany, and the Netherlands. This makes it so easy to stream on devices that don’t natively support VPN apps, such as Smart TVs or game consoles.

CyberGhost lets you customize your VPN connection using its Smart Rules feature. You can use it to decide when your VPN connects, what it connects to, and which apps its protects.

This includes split tunneling functionality, specifically the option to exclude specific websites from entering the VPN tunnel and forcing the VPN to always connect when opening designated apps.

For example, we excluded Amazon from our connection to ensure we always had access to our local version when shopping.

You can find CyberGhost’s split tunneling feature within its app settings.

For an additional fee, you can add a dedicated IP to your VPN. This is a fixed IP address that only you, and you alone, can access.

Its main benefits include avoiding CAPTCHAs and ensuring secure access to a remote server, but its tends to be worse for streaming.

Unlike NordVPN, which links your dedicated IP to your account, CyberGhost randomly generates a token to active your IP. This process is completely anonymous and ensures that no paper trial exists between yourself and your online activity.

Dedicated IP is available on CyberGhost’s desktop and mobile apps.

NoSpy servers are unique to CyberGhost. They are essentially first-class servers, reserved in a private data center for those happy to pay more — exclusive and, according to CyberGhost, a lot safer. They use top-shelf hardware, dedicated uplinks, and come with more bandwidth.

Although not clearly stated on their website, NoSpy servers are only available on its 6-month and 2-year plans. We don’t like this model, as all fee-paying customers should get access to the full suite of features.

This is particularly annoying given Proton VPN’s Secure Core servers, a similar concept, are available on every pricing plan.