Astrill Review

While IP logging normally sounds the death knell for a VPN’s reputation, Astrill mitigates this by permanently deleting this metadata immediately upon disconnection.

The VPN service claims it tracks IPs to regulate simultaneous connections — a poor excuse when competitors like ExpressVPN and PrivateVPN do the same without logging your IP address.

The VPN also collects your last 20 connection records to help with troubleshooting; this includes: connection time, connection duration, country, device type, and Astrill client version number. While not personally identifiable, this contradicts their “no-logs” claims.

To clear a few things up, it’d be helpful to see the VPN’s claims publicly proven by a real-world event, like a court case. Obviously, Astrill has no control over whether this happens or not, but in the meantime, we’d like to see regular transparency reports, a warrant canary, or a third-party audit.

It’s not all bad, though: the VPN uses a RAM-only server network, which makes it difficult for anyone to log your activity data. This works by running the servers on volatile memory, instead of physical hardware, which wipes your data upon every reboot.

We were also impressed by its support for anonymous payment methods, including cryptocurrencies Bitcoin and Monero.

This isn’t as watertight as Mullvad VPN’s approach of allowing customers to send cash to its office, but it’s still impressive.

Astrill VPN Is Owned by Veloxee Corp

Astrill VPN is currently under the ownership of a corporate entity called Veloxee Corp.

The subsidiary company, Astrill Systems Corp., was built and continues to be run by a team of cryptographers, programmers, and networking engineers.

The company isn’t particularly transparent, but it has serious security credentials: there’s never been a server breach, security leak, or controversy surrounding the company.

While Astrill takes itself seriously as an anti-censorship tool, it comes at the cost of its streaming capabilities. There’s no mention of streaming across the entirety of its provider’s website and it doesn’t have a Smart DNS proxy.

If this is understandably a deal-breaker, then consider using Surfshark. It’s a streaming powerhouse and much cheaper than Astrill — otherwise, read on.

Back to Astrill, it came as a complete surprise to us when it unblocked the US Netflix library on its first attempt. Combined with its strong long-distance speeds, this makes it a viable (but expensive) option for streaming US Netflix from overseas.

We recommend using one of Astrill’s “10G” server locations for streaming.

The VPN won’t work with any other Netflix region, by design. When we asked its support team why we kept getting US Netflix on its Australian servers, we were told that Netflix is not supported on them and so the traffic is automatically redirected towards the US.

This applies every time you want to access any other library that isn’t the US.

Interestingly, Astrill consistently unblocked Hulu, Peacock, and Paramount+ on all of its US servers. In each instance, our video loaded without any buffering and no discernible change in video quality.

Using its London server location, we streamed BBC iPlayer, Channel 4, and ITVX, but with frequent bouts of blurriness. ITVX, in particular, took a few minutes to load and was too blurry to watch on our iPhone.

Astrill unblocks BBC iPlayer, but the video quality regularly depreciates.

We suspect this is down to our testing location being further away from the UK than the US.

For every other streaming service that we test, Astrill was hit-and-miss, with more misses than hits. Sometimes it worked to unblock a streaming service on its third or fourth attempt, but most of the time it was simply unable to do so.

Astrill slowed our normal internet speeds by 7% when connected to a nearby server, which means it’s marginally slower than many of the top VPN services we’ve tested. However, its speeds are rarely too slow, and they do not fluctuate unpredictably.

When connecting to countries farther away, Astrill is consistent and quite fast compared to other VPNs of a similar size. It’s unlikely you’ll notice an impact on your day-to-day browsing, but some tasks (like gaming or 4K streaming) may suffer. You can see how Astrill compares to faster rivals below.

One strange quirk we noticed from our testing is that an average speed of 95Mbps when connecting to a server in Canada is actually faster than what we logged when connecting to a nearby server in New York, US.

Alongside the open-sourced protocols OpenVPN and WireGuard, Astrill adds two proprietary options: StealthVPN and OpenWeb.

StealthVPN is the VPN’s flagship protocol that wraps your encrypted traffic in an extra layer of obfuscation, which is why it bypasses firewalls so effectively. Meanwhile, OpenWeb is a TCP-based protocol that only tunnels browser traffic, in return for faster speeds.

All four protocols use robust and trusted encryption ciphers in the form of AES-256 (OpenVPN, StealthVPN, and OpenWeb) and ChaCha20 (WireGuard). Using Wireshark, a data packet analyzer, we tested all four configurations and detected no leaks whatsoever.

Astrill successfully encrypted our internet traffic.

We also tested its kill switch, which worked to keep our real IP hidden during a sudden VPN disconnection.

But there’s a catch: it doesn’t activate when you manually switch servers, leaving your IP address exposed.

Windows users have a fix: App Guard, Astrill’s enhanced kill switch. It lets you block specific apps from connecting to the internet during any VPN disruption, and it runs even when the desktop app is closed. We recommend enabling it by default.

Although Astrill’s mobile apps lack a visible App Guard or kill switch toggle, a VPN kill switch operates automatically in the background.

Our custom-built testing tool confirms that Astrill includes a functional kill switch on mobile.

No Audit or Open-Source Code

There’s one thing we can’t overlook: Astrill has never commissioned an independent security audit, and both StealthVPN and OpenWeb remain closed source. You’re being asked to trust a proprietary protocol you can’t verify, which is a harder sell when VPNs like ExpressVPN and Mullvad have made independent audits routine.

We’re not saying Astrill is insecure. The company’s development team is led by cryptographers, and there has never been a documented breach or security incident in 15+ years of operation. But “trust us” isn’t the same as “here’s the proof.”

An audit would eliminate all doubt.

Due to its censorship focus, Astrill’s server network prioritizes access over breadth. This is reflected in its high density of server locations surrounding China (e.g. Hong Kong, Japan, and Taiwan), instead of adding more locations to the Americas or Africa.

By sticking to physical, bare-metal servers for maximum security, the VPN avoids the “virtual server” shortcuts used by competitors. You won’t find 100+ countries here, but the servers you connect to are less likely to be compromised and risk exposing your online identity in a heavily censored country.

The raw numbers don’t lie, though: Astrill has servers in 69 fewer countries than Proton VPN and 34 fewer than PIA. Both of these VPNs also have the necessary security measures to mitigate any risk attached to using virtual servers, so there’s no trade-off.

Having said that, Astrill offers more city-level choice than almost any VPN we review. For instance, if you are looking for a US IP address you can connect to 26 different cities across 24 states.

This is incredibly useful if you need to bypass highly localized geo-restrictions, like state-level news broadcasts or regional sports blackouts.

Astrill has separate designs for its desktop and mobile apps, with the latter opting for a more minimal and beginner-friendly interface. Following an ‘app redesign contest‘ in 2019, Astrill hasn’t updated its GUI across any of its apps for several years now.

We’ve detailed our user experience with each app in the sections that follow:

Astrill VPN is an excellent VPN for torrenting, combining fast speeds with P2P-optimized servers, port forwarding customization, an effective kill switch, and robust security.

We tested Astrill’s torrenting capabilities on qBittorrent.

Seeders, copyright trolls, trackers, or ISPs won’t be able to see your identity or activity thanks to its AES-256 encryption.

You also won’t experience a leak or accidental exposure of your IP address due to Astrill’s DNS leak blocking feature and a reliable kill switch.

However, we don’t recommend that you torrent with the OpenWeb protocol. You should only use Astrill’s P2P-supported protocols: OpenVPN and WireGuard.

Fast P2P Speeds & Port Forwarding Support

Our testing revealed that Astrill is actually the fastest VPN for torrenting, with an exceptional average bitrate of 10.0MiB/s. This is faster than industry-leading VPN services like ExpressVPN and Surfshark.

Astrill’s excellent speeds are partly enabled by its support for automatic and manual port forwarding. This is enabled in the settings menu, but it will only work with servers that are marked with a star (these are highly-secure servers that are optimized for torrenting).

There’s also a port forward test tool found in the help menu, which allows you to check specific TCP ports. This feature is rare among even top VPN services, like NordVPN and IPVanish.

Astrill works well with torrenting clients like BitTorrent, qBittorrent, and uTorrent. You can configure UDP port forwarding in these clients and enable UDP traffic flow over a secure tunnel.

Astrill functions in a similar way across each platform, but not every feature is available on each app. Below is a summary of the differences between each Astrill VPN app:

Astrill’s isn’t renowned for its device compatibility, so it isn’t surprising to see such a low simultaneous connection limit. Most paid-for VPNs opt for 10 devices (like ExpressVPN) or unlimited connections (like IPVanish).

To make matters worse, you can’t easily install Astrill on a router to bypass this strict limit. The VPN only supports manual installation, which is substantially harder than using a router app or buying one pre-flashed.

We’re also disappointed by the lack of a dedicated Fire TV Stick app. This isn’t surprising, though, given Astrill’s disinterest in providing a service for entertainment needs. Instead, you’ll have to manually install an .apk file to use the VPN on your Fire TV stick.

Advanced Features Vary by Subscription

Astrill has more additional technical features than most VPN services, but their availability depends on your pricing plan.

You’ll need to purchase Astrill VIP to access the full suite of Astrill’s advanced features, which costs $10.00 a month extra.

Here’s a summary of how Astrill and Astrill VIP’s technical features differ:

In addition to either plan, you can purchase a dedicated VPN IP address for an extra fee of $5.00 per month. This is a VPN IP address that only you can connect to and use. This allows for secure remote access and complete agency over your IP address.

Unlike other VPN services, Astrill automatically forwards ports to your dedicated IP, so all VOIP and P2P applications will work without additional configuration.

Astrill VPN Reliably Works in China

In the video below, we use Astrill to unblock censored websites in China:

Without a doubt, Astrill is the number one VPN for China and other highly-censored countries thanks to its self-developed anti-censorship tools.

In our experience, StealthVPN works best for bypassing firewalls to access blocked websites in China. Annoyingly, it isn’t available on iOS, so we recommend installing ExpressVPN on your iPhone or iPad if you plan to use either.

Astrill has another feature called Smart Mode, a specialized split tunneling tool available only on the OpenWeb protocol, and only in China.

Smart Mode uses regional IP addresses to evade censors, while secretly tunneling and unblocking international platforms. We used it ourselves to access messaging apps, like WhatsApp, and streaming services, like YouTube.

While StealthVPN is better for accessing the Global internet, and Smart Mode for browsing on local sites within China, both work well for bypassing internet shutdowns.

In tandem with these features, Astrill offers specially-optimized SuperCharged servers, sometimes called China-optimized servers.

These are designed to maximize speeds and lower latency for users in China. There are also nearby servers in Hong Kong, Japan, and South Korea, which means you can evade censorship and retain optimal speeds at the same time.

Here’s how Astrill’s reliability in China compares with other top VPNs:

Clunky Split Tunneling Implementation

As is typical of Astrill VPN, its split tunneling is highly advanced but poorly implemented.

Split tunneling is a common VPN feature that lets you control which apps enter or do not enter the VPN tunnel. Some VPNs, like PIA, let you go further and customize the connection rules by apps, IP addresses, and websites.

Astrill provides the same level of granularity, but divides it into two separate features: app filter and site filter.

Though a small nitpick, we’d prefer to see these two features combined into one tool for convenience.

Astrill’s split tunneling functionality is divided between two separate tools.