Avira Phantom Free Review

Avira Phantom’s free plan is a secure choice for VPN newbies who want to use a VPN for general browsing – anything more than that and you’ll struggle due to the 1GB monthly data cap.

The popular security brand’s VPN offers a decent level of privacy but isn’t ideal for torrenting or performing other privacy-sensitive tasks as it lacks some essential security features such as a VPN kill switch.

We’d like to clarify that this review refers to the free version of Avira Phantom – you can read our review of Avira Phantom premium here.

Local performance peaked at an unimpressive 31Mbps up and 39Mbps down in the Netherlands (we test from the UK). Connecting out to the US East Coast was decent at 24Mbps up and 43Mbps down, but more distant connections, such as Europe to Australia, struggled to reach an almost unusable 2Mbps up and down.

We found latency to be lower than what we’ve seen from other free services. Same-country connections were as low as 7ms, which will be snappy enough for most but might cause enough lag to frustrate gamers.

Beware that connection times are fairly slow on the desktop apps, and the fact that there’s no kill switch feature means your IP address could still be exposed while the app connects to a new server.

To read about our speed testing methodologies, please read How We Review VPNs.

Avira Phantom offers the same 25 countries to its free users as it does to its premium ones. This is a very good number of locations for a free VPN service.

We were pleasantly surprised by the choice of 12 US cities, offering coast-to-coast VPN coverage. This is great for those who want to pinpoint their location for improved performance in the country, but unfortunately, city-level servers aren’t available in any other locations.

Like many providers, the majority of servers are located in Europe and North America, but Avira does offer users in other regions some choice. Australia, Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Singapore cover the Asia-Pacific and those located in South or Central America can connect to Brazil or Mexico respectively.

There are no servers locations in Africa.

Avira Phantom offers custom apps for four popular platforms: Microsoft Windows, MacOS, Android, and iOS.

You can use it on an any amount of devices simultaneously, but due to a lack of manual workarounds, you are limited to the above platforms. It’s not even compatible with routers, which means it’s no-go for those looking to protect their streaming devices or games consoles.

We were pleasantly surprised to find that Avira Phantom offers a browser extension for Google Chrome. Unlike many other VPN services, free or premium, Avira’s extension uses full VPN encryption, rather than a less secure proxy connection.

While it only offers a handful of popular server locations for free users, there’s not a data cap in sight. This is great news for heavy browser users who want a lightweight alternative to the desktop app. However, we recommend using it alongside the main apps to protect any non-browser-related activity too.

If you’re a streaming fan, Avira Phantom’s free plan is not for you.

It doesn’t work very well with Netflix, and the 1GB data cap will severely restrict how many shows you can watch anyway – don’t expect to stream for more than half an hour in HD. We also found BBC iPlayer to be blocked.

The stingy data cap and lack of advanced security features also make the free plan a bad choice for torrenters – there are much better free VPNs for torrenting and P2P activity.

The free version of Avira Phantom VPN offers strong encryption but lacks the extra features required for the highest levels of privacy. There is no explicit mention of which VPN protocol is used for each app, but Avira told us it’s OpenVPN for all except iOS (and MacOS when downloaded from the App Store), which uses IKEv2.

OpenVPN is our preferred protocol as it offers the best balance between performance and privacy. Encryption is via ‘unbreakable’ cipher AES-256.

We were also pleased to find that Avira uses first-party DNS servers and includes DNS leak protection for free users – we didn’t experience any leaks during our tests. These features ensure that your traffic won’t be routed through any less secure third-party servers, which is a huge privacy plus.

Unfortunately, the free apps lack the all-important VPN kill switch. This feature is designed to block internet traffic in the case of a VPN connection drop, preventing your IP address from being exposed to your ISP and other third parties.

If you will be using a VPN to access privacy-sensitive data, we’d recommend opting for a provider that offers a full suite of security features such as Private Internet Access.

Due to the recent crackdowns on VPN providers in China, we can’t recommend Avira Phantom VPN to anyone who wants to connect out from the country.

The Great Firewall can detect and block OpenVPN traffic, so the fact that Avira doesn’t offer any obfuscation tools means that it most likely won’t get past the censors. There are far more reliable options out there, such as those included in our dedicated roundup.

Avira Phantom VPN has a minimal logs policy but it took some digging to find this out as there is no direct link to the VPN-specific privacy policy from the website. Instead, we had to do a thorough search to find the page, which hasn’t been updated since January 2017.

The policy clearly states the Avira doesn’t track:

• The websites you visit or any of your online activities
• The virtual locations you use
• Your originating IP address

It does collect the following information:

• Diagnostic data (e.g. if bugs were encountered) – you can opt out of sending this data within the apps
• Whether you are a free or a paid user
• The amount of data you use while connected

Within Avira’s general privacy policy it also states that its billing system tells it when a user was online, but there is no indication as to whether a detailed timestamp is collected or for how long. In fact, there is no information given about how long any of the collected information is stored for, as this ‘depends on legal requirements’.

Nevertheless, we are satisfied that none of the collected data can be used to personally identify users.

Avira is incorporated in Germany, which falls under EU data retention laws and is part of the 14 Eyes international intelligence-sharing alliance. This is a potential red flag, and Avira’s general privacy policy states that it is willing to disclose personal data to public authorities if it’s a ‘legal obligation’.

However, the fact that it doesn’t collect any personally-identifiable data is reassuring. If the authorities were to come knocking, Avira wouldn’t be able to hand over information it doesn’t have.

Avira Phantom offers simple, one-click solutions for VPN beginners, but will likely fail to satisfy more experienced users due to a lack of configurable options. The apps include a big on/off button and show you how much data you’ve used so you can easily keep track. Once the data limit is up, the app gives you five minutes before it cuts the VPN connection, which is a useful privacy backup.

You can find the server locations by clicking the link next to ‘Virtual Location’ below the connect button. These are listed in alphabetical order, and there’s also a search function within the desktop apps to make it even easier to find the right one. Next to each location it tells you the expected ping time, but we’d rather it showed download speeds for a better indication of performance.

The settings can be found behind the cog symbol in the top right but these are incredibly minimal. We’d suggest turning off ‘Send diagnostic data’ for privacy reasons, but that’s about all you can do within this menu. The kill switch feature is visible but blocked as it’s a premium feature. Avira offers a good connect-and-forget solution for beginners, but it’s definitely not for those who want to tweak loads of settings.

Avira Phantom fails to offer free users a sufficient level of support. The online knowledge base is threadbare, including some very basic FAQs and a community forum where many questions are left unanswered. If you have a more technical issue, you probably won’t find answers on the website.

We were even more disappointed to discover that tech support is limited to paying customers. This means that you’ll be left in the dark if you have a query that can’t be answered by Avira’s very limited online resources. Even for a free service, we’d expect at least an email address, but Avira fails to provide one.

Avira Phantom VPN is a basic and secure free VPN that’s best suited to beginners who mainly want to browse the web. Speeds are nothing special, but fast enough for streaming in HD on one device. The real issue comes with the 1GB monthly data cap, which severely restricts what you can do online.

Avira Phantom offers a decent level of privacy, with a minimal logging policy and solid encryption. First-party DNS servers and DNS leak protection are a welcome bonus, but the lack of a VPN kill switch is concerning and may be an issue for those wanting to access privacy-sensitive data.

There are user-friendly custom apps available for four popular platforms, but it’s not possible to manually install the VPN on any other devices, including routers. Customer support is practically non-existent for free users. Avira Phantom’s free plan is good enough for accessing emails and browsing the web, but it’s not a great choice for anything else.