Avira Phantom VPN Review

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 (see our review), Kaspersky VPN(read more here) 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 (read our review), acquired Avira.

Avira Phantom logs the bare minimum of connection metadata in order to ensure the service operates as well as it possibly can. Annoyingly, however, there is no link to the privacy policy on the homepage of Avira’s website.

We eventually found it after some digging. The only information Avira Phantom collects is:

• Total amount of bandwidth consumed
• Amount of time a user is online
• Whether the account is Free or Premium

Avira Phantom VPN does not log or monitor your browsing activity, IP address, or the VPN server you connect to, meaning there’s no way of it tracking your online activity back to you.

You can also choose to send Avira your diagnostic data to help with product improvements, however this is totally optional and can be switched off in the settings menu of the VPN app.

Despite some inconsistent results, Avira is still more than quick enough for most everyday users, even if you’re planning on using the VPN on multiple devices at the same time.

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)

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 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 it’s 1GB data cap will hold you back significantly.

Avira Phantom VPN doesn’t work in China and in 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.