Avira Phantom Review

Avira VPN’s latency was surprisingly low, making it a solid choice for keen gamers – we recorded around 4ms latency connecting to its UK server (we test from London). Good same-country upload speeds mean it’s not too bad for torrenting either.

Avira isn’t the most reliable VPN service we’ve seen – we still experienced very few connection drops and speeds did vary more between tests.

Connecting out to various worldwide locations from the UK, these are the average speeds we experienced:

• USA: 19Mbps (download) & 32Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 64Mbps (download) & 33Mbps (upload)
• Singapore: 11Mbps (download) & 10Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 9Mbps (download) & 11Mbps (upload)

Check out our speed testing methodology to find out more about the ins-and-outs of our manual speed tests.

Avira VPN has a limited server network covering only 34 countries.

We were also unable to find out exactly how many individual servers and IP addresses Avira maintains. We asked Avira for more information, but they refused to disclose any specific details. This likely means the overall number of servers and IP addresses is small, which can lead to slower speeds at busy times.

Avira VPN’s server coverage is best in Europe, which accounts for 24 of its total locations. There’s four server locations in Asia (Hong Kong, India, Japan, and Singapore), but only one in South America (Chile), and none at all in Africa.

The only two countries with city-level choice are Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) and the US. US-based users can choose from Avira Phantom servers in 12 different cities, including:

• Atlanta
• Chicago
• Dallas
• Las Vegas
• Los Angeles
• Miami
• New York City
• Newark
• Phoenix
• San Francisco
• Seattle
• Washington DC

It’s quite refreshing to see this much city-specific choice in a small server network, however we would have traded this to see Avira Phantom serve a wider range of countries.

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

It hasn’t been possible to stream Netflix through any of Avira’s US-based locations for a while now, and as there are no optimized streaming servers, it’s a case of waiting to see if any of these will begin working with the service again.

It’s the same story with BBC iPlayer, which Avira Phantom’s sole UK server has never been able to unblock ever since we first tested Avira VPN months and months ago.

But, there are still a handful of VPNs that work reliably with BBC iPlayer if this is a dealbreaker for you.

It’s difficult to know whether or not Avira Phantom is a good choice for torrenting as there’s no information about P2P activity on its website.

It seems to depend on the laws of the country in which the VPN server is located.

Avira’s minimal logging policy and VPN kill switch are plus points for P2P activity, though.

Until Avira provides a list of P2P-friendly servers, we suggest you use one of these VPNs for torrenting instead.

Judging by comments on its online forums, it looks like Avira Phantom VPN isn’t working in China and hasn’t been an effective solution in the country for quite some time now.

Not only does Avira not have any additional obfuscation tools to hide your VPN connection, the apps also use the OpenVPN protocol, which is very easy for censors to detect and block, especially given China’s unrelenting crackdown on VPN providers.

We also can’t recommend Avira Phantom for other high-censorship countries, such as Turkey or Iran, due to its lack of advanced privacy features. Its very limited VPN server network means you are likely to suffer from slow speeds, too.

Even though Avira Phantom doesn’t provide the same amount of advanced privacy settings as some of our top-tier VPN services, it will still keep you safe online.

All of Avira Phantom’s custom VPN apps run on OpenVPN, the most secure connection protocol, apart from iOS devices, which use the (still very secure) IKEv2. Encryption on all of Avira’s apps is via ‘unhackable’ cipher AES-256.

Avira Phantom’s VPN kill switch is a useful feature, as it protects your IP address should the VPN connection drop for any reason. Avira also operates its own DNS servers rather than renting them from third parties, and protects you against DNS leaks, too.

If you’re looking for a ton of configurable settings, you’ll be better off looking at a VPN service like TorGuard or Astrill, but everyday users should find their needs met by Avira Phantom.

Avira Phantom is a very simple one-button VPN that’s almost identical on both desktop and mobile. Avira’s main screen only displays an on/off button and your current virtual location – we would like to see some more connection information here.

Avira really falls down when it comes to advanced features – or rather its lack of them.

Aside from a VPN kill switch and the option to automatically secure untrusted WiFi networks, there are no advanced settings at all, putting Avira well behind its rivals in terms of configurable options.

The Avira Phantom apps also lack any protocol options, and even fails to inform you what protocol you are using. If we didn’t know that Phantom was based on OpenVPN, which Avira confirmed to us, we wouldn’t feel very confident in its security.

If you’re looking for a VPN with uncluttered and accessible software, Avira is a great choice. However if you like having lots of advanced features to choose from, you’re better off looking elsewhere.

Unfortunately, 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.

Avira 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.