Avira Phantom VPN Review

Avira VPN logs your IP address, the amount of bandwidth you use, and details about your device.

None of this is necessary to maintain a VPN service and we advise against using Avira Phantom if you want to protect your online privacy.

Who Is Behind Avira?

Avira was founded in 2006, but its anti-virus software was developed back in 1986 by its predecessor, H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH. Avira launched Avira Phantom VPN in 2016.

It isn’t the only security software company to create a VPN product: McAfee, Kaspersky VPN and other antivirus services have launched their own VPNs.

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

Germany isn’t the ideal jurisdiction for a VPN service. It falls under EU data retention laws and is also part of the 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance. However, Avira Phantom’s very minimal logging policy means this isn’t too much of a concern.

Avira also states in its privacy policy that it will comply with data requests from public authorities, but it can’t hand over any personally-identifiable information as it doesn’t store any.

In December 2020 NortonLifeLock, which operates Norton VPN, acquired Avira.

We tested Avira Phantom VPN’s speeds on servers in six continents, assessing impact that the VPN has on our 100Mbps internet connection. Here are the full results:

As you can see, Avira Phantom is fast on local connections, but it’s long-distances speeds are slower than we reasonably expect.

For example, we lost 49% of our normal speed connecting to Australia. ExpressVPN, on the other hand, only lost 17% on on the same distance.

To put these speed results in more context, you can use the bar chart below to compare Avira’s average local and international speeds with some of the best VPNs on the market, like ExpressVPN and Hotspot Shield:

Good Ping Score

Avira VPN’s latency was surprisingly low, making it a solid choice for keen gamers — we recorded a 6ms latency connecting to a local New York server. Fast same-country upload speeds mean it’s not too bad for torrenting either.

Avira isn’t the fastest VPN we’ve tested, but it’s speeds are the most reliable VPN service we’ve seen — we still experienced very few connection drops and speeds did vary more between tests.

If you’re looking for quick, one-click access to major streaming services, Avira Phantom isn’t the right VPN for you.

The VPN service seems to only be capable of streaming the US Netflix library, and then only from iOS and Android devices (this works in the free mobile apps too). It’s a big one, and we’re glad that it can at least do that, but we want to see more.

Unfortunately Avira’s sole UK VPN server has never unblocked BBC iPlayer, either.

Avira Phantom VPN Pro is a decent choice for torrenting and P2P file sharing.

While Avira’s website confirms that its VPN can be used for torrenting, there’s no additional information about this.

Nevertheless, Avira’s minimal logging policy, decent same-country speeds, and its VPN kill switch are good features for anonymous P2P activity.

Avira VPN supports P2P traffic on all of its servers.

Avira has done well in our torrenting benchmark tests, too, but it isn’t the fastest available. For a faster and more secure file-sharing experience, use one of these VPNs for torrenting, instead.

Avira Free on the other hand is by far the fastest free VPN we’ve tested for torrenting, although its 500MB data cap will hold you back significantly.

Avira Phantom VPN doesn’t work to bypass censorship in China and most other highly-censored countries.

We also can’t recommend Avira Phantom for use in Turkey, Russia, the UAE or Iran.

The service doesn’t have any obfuscation tools to hide your VPN connection. Also, the apps use the OpenVPN protocol, which is very easy for censors to detect and block.

Although Avira Phantom doesn’t have as many advanced privacy settings as other top-tier services, it will keep you safe online.

All the native VPN software runs on OpenVPN, the most secure connection protocol, apart from the iOS app, which uses IKEv2. Encryption is ensured via the ‘unhackable’ cipher AES-256.

The VPN kill switch is a very useful feature, as it protects your IP address in the event of a sudden VPN connection drop.

The VPN service also operates its own DNS servers rather than renting them from third parties, and protects you against DNS leaks, too.

Results from browserleaks.com when connected to one of Avira’s US servers

If you still want more advanced settings to play with, head over to our IPVanish VPN review.

Sadly, Avira Phantom limits personalized customer support to paying users only, meaning free users or potential customers won’t be able to take advantage.

Thankfully email responses were quick and professional, although clearly it’s company policy not to reveal too many details about Avira’s VPN server network.

The knowledge base on Avira’s website is pretty limited, with the main feature being a list of a few simple FAQs.

However we have to admit that when a product is this simple, there’s a limit to the amount of resources that can be created.

The company has recently introduced a handful of video tutorials to the site, which are very helpful and informative.

The ‘chat bot’ is another recent addition by Avira, but all it ever seemed to do was redirect us to the FAQs or prompt us to leave a message for the customer support team.