Avira Phantom Free VPN Review

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.

Normally we’d 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.

Avira’s minimal logging policy means its jurisdiction isn’t an issue, though.

Even better, Avira states in its privacy policy that although it will comply with data requests from public authorities, it can’t hand over personally-identifiable data as it doesn’t collect any.

We were a little disappointed at how difficult it was to find Avira Phantom’s privacy policy on its website. We eventually located it after a long period of trial and error.

We discovered that Avira VPN only logs a very minimal amount of anonymous connection metadata.

The only information Avira Phantom Free collects is:

• Total amount of bandwidth consumed while connected
• Amount of time a user spends online
• Whether a user’s account is Free or Premium

We really like that Avira Phantom Free doesn’t log or monitor any websites you visit, your true IP address, or the VPN server location you connect to.

In other words, Avira has no way of tracing your online activity back to you.

There is an optional setting which sends your diagnostic data back to Avira to help with product improvements, however, you can switch this off at any time within the VPN app.

Avira Phantom Free is by no means the quickest free VPN we’ve seen.

Connecting to the ‘Nearest location’ server option gave us speeds of just over 50Mbps (on a 100Mbps test line).

A speed percentage loss of 47% may seem a lot, but as far as free VPNs go, it’s not too bad. Avira’s upload speeds were very quick, too, at over 70Mbps.

Avira’s latency isn’t the lowest we’ve seen at just under 20ms, but unless you’re a serious gamer this shouldn’t affect you too much.

Overall, Avira Phantom’s speeds are satisfactory enough for the everyday user. See our review

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.