Avira Phantom Free VPN Review

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

As you can see, Avira VPN logs sensitive data, including your original IP address. This is the one thing a VPN should definitely not log.

It also stores aggregated data on your bandwidth usage and information about your device.

This isn’t good enough and we recommend that you don’t use Avira Free if you want to protect your privacy.

Is Avira Trustworthy?

Avira launched Avira Phantom VPN in 2016, but the company itself has been around since 2006.

Even before then, Avira’s antivirus software was developed back in 1986 by its predecessor, H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH, so the company has been around for a long time.

Avira currently has its headquarters “by the shores of Lake Constance” in Tettnang, Germany, but it also has offices in China, the Netherlands, Romania, and the US.

We advise steering clear of VPN services based in Germany. It’s part of the 14 Eyes data-sharing alliance, and is also subject to EU data retention laws.

We tested Avira’s free VPN on our 100Mbps baseline internet to see how it affected our speeds. Here are the results in full:

As the data shows, Avira Phantom Free is slow, especially compared to most other VPNs.

A speed percentage loss of 47% on local New York connections is considerable, more than we’d expect from a quality VPN.

Connecting into Canada we picked up hugely reduced speeds of 20Mbps. and in Australia 2Mbps. There are much faster free VPNs available, like Windscribe Free.

The free version of Avira Phantom isn’t brilliant for streaming, however we were able to access US Netflix and the UK’s All4.

We consider that to be the most important streaming library. That does appear to be the limit of its abilities, though, as it wouldn’t work with the Germany, Japan, or France libraries.

This only works on mobile, though, as on Windows and macOS it isn’t possible to select the US server.

There are no clear rules on torrenting with Avira Free, and there’s actually no mention of it on the website.

When we tried using the VPN to torrent, though, it worked really well. It only narrowly misses out on being one of our best free VPNs for torrenting.

We tested Avira Phantom on qBittorrent

The main drawback is the 500MB / 1GB data cap, which is only enough to download one or two files a month.

There’s also no kill switch though, meaning there’s a risk your IP address could be exposed during use.

The free version of Avira Phantom is not a good VPN service for users in China, and it looks like that has unfortunately been the case for quite some time now.

One user took to Avira’s customer forums to let others know that they’d tested Avira Phantom with various ISPs such as China Mobile and China Unicom, and the VPN wouldn’t work while connected to any of them.

This is most likely due to the fact that Avira uses OpenVPN, which is very easily detected and blocked by government censors, and it has no additional obfuscation tools to hide your VPN connection in any way.

Take a look at our Best VPN Services for China for a comprehensive overview if you’re planning on connecting out from that country.

As a bare minimum we’d expect to see a VPN kill switch, but Avira Phantom Free doesn’t even provide one of these. This means that if the VPN connection were to drop without you noticing, your true physical location could be exposed.

One very good feature of Avira Phantom Free is that it operates its own VPN servers, and there’s also built-in protection against DNS leaks, which we found to be 100% effective in our latest tests.

The results we saw while connected to Avira Phantom’s free UK server

If you’re looking for loads of configurable settings to fiddle with, Avira Phantom isn’t for you, but it does a decent job at protecting you online – we really would insist on seeing a kill switch in the future, though. iOS users should also note that the iPhone and iPad app uses IKEv2 rather than OpenVPN.

Avira Phantom’s free users are currently unable to access any personalized customer support. This means users with free VPN accounts can’t email or call Avira support agents unless they upgrade to premium subscriptions, which we unfortunately see all too often from free VPN services.

Avira Free users are only able to access the FAQs and ‘Educational Videos’ on the website – thankfully, these are fairly comprehensive and should cover most problems.

You’re also able to view questions and answers on the user forums, although these aren’t updated very frequently.