Avira Phantom VPN Review

We examined Avira Phantom VPN’s logging policy in detail. Here’s what it logs:

As you can see above, despite claims otherwise, Avira Phantom VPN logs your IP address, which caps its privacy rating at 0.1/10. It also logs your device information and individual bandwidth usage.

Your IP address should never be logged by a VPN because it removes your anonymity, defeating the purpose of using a VPN.

Despite what some VPNs say, none of this data collection is necessary to maintain a VPN service. For example, Private Internet Access scores 9.7/10 in our privacy assessment because it logs almost nothing and has proven it in court cases.

We suggest that you don’t use Avira Phantom VPN if you want to protect your privacy.

Where Is Avira Phantom VPN Based?

Avira is a security software company founded in 2006. However, its predecessor company, H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH, has been around since 1986. The company is chiefly known for its antivirus software.

Avira’s headquarters are in Tettnang, Germany. It also has offices in China, the Netherlands, Romania, and the US.

Germany is not a good location to base a VPN service for these reasons:

• It falls under EU data retention laws
• It is part of the 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance

Along with Avira’s intrusive logging policy, and the fact that the company explicitly states it will comply with data requests from authorities, this is cause for concern.

Avira Belongs to a Larger Corporate Structure

In December 2020, US-based company, NortonLifeLock Inc., bought Avira. This purchase did not change Avira’s policy of logging user data. In fact, NortonLifeLock’s VPN, Norton Secure VPN, also logs IP addresses.

NortonLifeLock belongs to the larger Fortune 500 company, Gen Digital. This company owns AVG, which runs AVG Secure VPN; Avast, which runs Avast SecureLine VPN; and Privax Ltd., which runs HMA (HideMyAss). All of these VPNs score averagely in our overall VPN assessments, chiefly because they all log unnecessary data.

We tested both the paid and free versions of Avira Phantom VPN on a number of popular streaming platforms. Here are the results:

As you can see, both versions of Avira Phantom VPN fail to access any major streaming site, except Channel 4 on the paid version and YouTube. This is a very poor streaming performance – the best VPNs for streaming unblock all of these streaming services and more.

We tested Avira Phantom VPN’s speeds on our 100Mbps baseline internet to see how it affected our speeds. Here is a table showing Avira Phantom VPN Pro’s results in full:

We experienced minimal download speed loss when using Avira VPN Pro – a loss of only 7% compared to our internet speeds without a VPN.

Latency was also impressive: a ping time of only 6ms when connected to the VPN’s New York server.

Understandably, Avira VPN gets slower the further away you connect, but its long-distance speeds remain impressively fast. For example, connecting to London from the US we picked up download speeds of 96Mbps, despite 3,500 miles of physical distance.

Though fast, Avira VPN’s international speeds can’t compete with the absolute fastest VPNs. For example, we lost 49% of our normal speed connecting to Australia, while ExpressVPN only lost 17% on the same distance.

You can use the bar chart below to compare Avira Phantom VPN’s average local and international speeds with some of the best performing VPNs available:

Avira Phantom VPN Free Is Slower

As you’d expect from the free version, Avira Phantom Free is much slower than the paid service.

A speed loss of 47% on a local New York server is more than we expect from a quality VPN, free or otherwise. Its ping is also a lot higher, at 19ms.

You can see a full breakdown of Avira Phantom VPN’s security suite below, including its protocols, encryption ciphers and advanced features:

Safe Encryption & Security Protocols

Avira Phantom VPN may not have a good logging policy, but it uses secure technology to encrypt your data. The AES-256 cipher is used for both free and Pro versions, which is the best available encryption cipher.

We used a packet-sniffing tool to check that Avira Phantom was actually encrypting our data. We found that all incoming and outgoing traffic was indeed encrypted, making it indecipherable.

OpenVPN is Avira’s default connection protocol across all apps, which is a good choice. Its Android app has a toggle option for WireGuard, too – which is even more advanced than OpenVPN.

We’d like to see a kill switch added to all of Avira Phantom’s apps. Currently, the kill switch is only available to paid users on Windows. This is a big security flaw for Apple and Android users.

First-Party DNS Servers & No Leaks

Avira Phantom VPN owns and operates its own DNS servers. That means Avira handles all the online requests you make when connected to the VPN, without resorting to rented third-party hosts. This is an excellent privacy and security feature.

We used our in-house leak test tool to check for any data leaks when using Avira’s VPN servers. We’re happy to report that we recorded no IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks:

No Advanced Features or Customization

Avira Phantom’s lack of customization is a problem. You have no control over its security suite, including the option to switch between protocols.

We’d like to see manual protocol selection enabled across all of Avira VPN’s apps. Currently, Android and iOS are the only devices that allows it.

VPNs like Hide.me and Astrill VPN score much higher in our security assessment because they allow a greater degree of control, making it better suited to advanced users.

These VPNs also have a lot more technical features compared to Avira Phantom VPN, which has almost none. The only feature is a malicious site and content blocker that you can toggle on or off.

Advanced VPNs have features like Double VPN, IP rotation, open-source apps, and GPS spoofers. We’d also like to see an effective VPN ad blocker.

Here’s a quick summary of showing how Windscribe performed in our torrenting tests:

Torrenting Attribute	Avira Phantom Pro Pro	Avira Phantom Free
Average Download Bitrate	9.8	9.5
No. of P2P Servers	35	35
Logging Policy	Intrusive Logging	Intrusive Logging
Kill Switch	Windows Only	No
Port Forwarding	No	No

We tested both the free and Pro versions of Avira Phantom VPN by connecting to a nearby server and downloading a 1GB torrent test file on qBittorrent. We performed this test three times to garner an average result.

We were impressed by Avira Phantom VPN’s average torrent bitrate speed. At 9.8, it’s actually one of the fastest bitrates we’ve seen out of 65 VPNs.

Despite its speed, we caution against using Avira Phantom VPN to torrent on iOS, macOS, or Android due to the absence of a kill switch on these platforms. Kill switches guarantee that your real IP address won’t accidentally leak when file sharing.

Furthermore, Avira Phantom VPN’s logging policy is highly intrusive and it’s willing to share data. This means that P2P file sharers could get into trouble if they accidentally download any copyrighted material.

Avira Phantom Free also has a fast bitrate, but it suffers the same anonymity issues. The kill switch isn’t available on the free version and it’s also restricted by a 500MB per month data cap, which may not even be enough to download a single file, depending on what you’re torrenting.

For a truly safe free VPN for torrenting, we recommend Windscribe Free instead.

We tested Avira Phantom VPN on our own server in Shanghai, China. We wanted to see whether it works to unblock restricted websites within the country. Unfortunately it does not: Avira Phantom was easily detected by Chinese censors.

This is likely due to the fact that Avira Phantom has no obfuscation technology to hide the fact that your traffic is going through a VPN tunnel. Furthermore, OpenVPN is a protocol easily detected and blocked by government censors.

There are reports of Avira VPN working in countries with less sophisticated censorship, but there are lots of reliable VPNs that get around the Great Firewall of China and are guaranteed to work in countries like Russia, Iran, and the UAE.

Avira Phantom VPN’s customer support is limited and frustrating to access. It mostly consists of a poorly designed website with barely useful FAQs and a mostly inactive community section.

There is also a poorly functioning chatbot that links you to support articles, most of which are unhelpful. The chatbot continuously prompts you to get a premium account for more support. Even once we purchased a premium account, we still found the support still to be lacking.

We eventually found an email address in the paid support section, but it took a while to get a response. We sent an email on 28 September at 12:35 and received a response on 5 October at 13:5 – a wait time of five working days.

To make matters worse, the response failed to answer our questions and said it is being taken care of by “senior technicians.” The more helpful follow-up email arrived on 13 October – 11 working days after our initial enquiry.

We thought that, as a paying subscriber, we might have access to a human chat support agent, like with most top-performing VPNs. This was not the case.