Avira Review

As you can see above, despite claims otherwise, Avira Phantom VPN logs your IP address, which caps its privacy rating at 0.1/10. It also logs your device information and individual bandwidth usage.

Your IP address should never be logged by a VPN because it removes your anonymity, defeating the purpose of using a VPN.

Despite what some VPNs say, none of this data collection is necessary to maintain a VPN service. For example, Private Internet Access scores 9.7/10 in our privacy assessment because it logs almost nothing and has proven it in court cases.

We suggest that you don’t use Avira Phantom VPN if you want to protect your privacy.

Where Is Avira Phantom VPN Based?

Avira is a security software company founded in 2006. However, its predecessor company, H+BEDV Datentechnik GmbH, has been around since 1986. The company is chiefly known for its antivirus software.

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

Germany is not a good location to base a VPN service for these reasons:

• It falls under EU data retention laws
• It is part of the 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance

Along with Avira’s intrusive logging policy, and the fact that the company explicitly states it will comply with data requests from authorities, this is cause for concern.

Avira Belongs to a Larger Corporate Structure

In December 2020, US-based company, NortonLifeLock Inc., bought Avira. This purchase did not change Avira’s policy of logging user data. In fact, NortonLifeLock’s VPN, Norton Secure VPN, also logs IP addresses.

NortonLifeLock belongs to the larger Fortune 500 company, Gen Digital. This company owns AVG, which runs AVG Secure VPN; Avast, which runs Avast SecureLine VPN; and Privax Ltd., which runs HMA (HideMyAss). All of these VPNs score averagely in our overall VPN assessments, chiefly because they all log unnecessary data.

As you can see, both versions of Avira Phantom VPN fail to access any major streaming site.

This is a very poor streaming performance – the best VPNs for streaming unblock all of these streaming services and more.

We tested Avira Phantom VPN’s speeds on our 100Mbps baseline internet to see how it affected our speeds. Here is a table showing Avira Phantom VPN Pro’s results in full:

We experienced minimal download speed loss when using Avira VPN Pro – a loss of only 7% compared to our internet speeds without a VPN.

Latency was also impressive: a ping time of only 6ms when connected to the VPN’s New York server.

Understandably, Avira VPN gets slower the further away you connect, but its long-distance speeds remain impressively fast. For example, connecting to London from the US we picked up download speeds of 96Mbps, despite 3,500 miles of physical distance.

Though fast, Avira VPN’s international speeds can’t compete with the absolute fastest VPNs. For example, we lost 49% of our normal speed connecting to Australia, while ExpressVPN only lost 17% on the same distance.

You can use the bar chart below to compare Avira Phantom VPN’s average local and international speeds with some of the best performing VPNs available:

Avira Phantom VPN Free Is Slower

As you’d expect from the free version, Avira Phantom Free is much slower than the paid service.

A speed loss of 47% on a local New York server is more than we expect from a quality VPN, free or otherwise. Its ping is also a lot higher, at 19ms.

Safe Encryption & Security Protocols

Avira Phantom VPN may not have a good logging policy, but it uses secure technology to encrypt your data. The AES-256 cipher is used for both free and Pro versions, which is the best available encryption cipher.

We used a packet-sniffing tool to check that Avira Phantom was actually encrypting our data. We found that all incoming and outgoing traffic was indeed encrypted, making it indecipherable.

OpenVPN is Avira’s default connection protocol across all apps, which is a good choice. Its Android app has a toggle option for WireGuard, too – which is even more advanced than OpenVPN.

We’d like to see a kill switch added to all of Avira Phantom’s apps. Currently, the kill switch is only available to paid users on Windows. This is a big security flaw for Apple and Android users.

First-Party DNS Servers & No Leaks

Avira Phantom VPN owns and operates its own DNS servers. That means Avira handles all the online requests you make when connected to the VPN, without resorting to rented third-party hosts. This is an excellent privacy and security feature.

We used our in-house leak test tool to check for any data leaks when using Avira’s VPN servers. We’re happy to report that we recorded no IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks:

We found no IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks when testing Avira Phantom VPN.

Avira Phantom VPN has servers in 35 countries. This is a medium-to-small size server network. For context, VPNs like Surfshark offer 100 countries.

There is heavy emphasis on Europe and the US. Over 70% of Avira Phantom VPN’s countries are in Europe. We would like to see more scope in Avira Phantom VPN’s server network.

You can only select servers at the city-level for Australia (Perth & Sydney), the UK (London & Manchester), and the US (12 cities).

Avira Phantom VPN has 35 countries on its network.

Disappointingly, we asked Avira Phantom how many individual servers it maintains and it refused to answer.

Furthermore, we’d like to see Avira Phantom grant the user the power to select different types of servers, including Static IP addresses and residential IP addresses.

Free Version Restricted to Single Server on Desktop

On desktop, Avira Phantom Free’s servers are restricted to your nearest location only. For example, if you’re in the US you can only connect to a server in the US.

However, on mobile the free version has the same number of servers as the paid version. For a free VPN, this is quite a lot – more than many of the best free VPNs. We hope Avira makes this consistent across platforms.

Avira Phantom VPN is stripped-back and relatively simple to look at. This is in part because there are almost zero customization choices. But we like that the apps are mostly consistent across desktop and mobile devices.

Regardless of which platform you’re on, Avira Phantom is composed of a home screen with an on/off button, a list of VPN server locations, and a minimal settings menu.

All of Avira Phantom’s apps offer a light and dark mode, as well as an option to launch at system start. Beyond that, there’s little to its customisation options. Selecting support or account details sends you directly to Avira’s badly-designed website.

As part of the overall user experience, we disliked using the Avira website, which is overly complicated. For example, we found it difficult to find the VPN’s monthly subscription options, making us feel coerced into a more expensive longer-term contract.

Here’s a summary of our experience using Avira Phantom’s apps for different devices:

Desktop & Laptop (Windows & macOS)

What bothered us most when testing Avira Phantom VPN on desktop was the frequency of bugs. Sometimes the VPN just did not work to establish a connection. Take a look at the short video below to see what we experienced:

To make matters worse, even when it did manage to connect (usually on the pro version), after we disconnected again our internet stopped working entirely. We had to connect to another VPN to re-establish our internet.

There are also some non-intuitive aspects to the app. For example, if you type ‘United States’ into the server search bar, no results turn up. You have to type ‘US’ specifically.

However, this logic does not extend to the UK; typing in ‘UK’ brings up no results. Instead, you have to type in ‘United Kingdom’. Small things like this show an absence of attention to detail.

We do like that the macOS app can be undocked and moved around your desktop — this is a nice touch when so many VPN apps for macOS cannot be dragged around.

When it comes to the user experience for the desktop apps specifically, there is lots of room for improvement.

Mobile (Android & iOS)

Similar to its desktop apps, Avira’s mobile apps are made up of three separate windows: the main home screen with the connect button, a settings menu, and the server locations list. Simplicity can be good, but this is arguably too little.

On Android specifically, Avira Phantom Free has an option to ‘Enable WireGuard’. There’s also a send diagnostic data option and auto connect. This is not available on iOS.

Thankfully, prompts to purchase a pro account are subtler than most free VPNs, making for a mostly unintrusive free VPN experience. We also experienced less connection issues using the mobile version.

We tested both the free and Pro versions of Avira Phantom VPN by connecting to a nearby server and downloading a 1GB torrent test file on qBittorrent. We performed this test three times to garner an average result.

We tested Avira Phantom VPN Pro & Free on the torrent client, qBittorrent.

We were impressed by Avira Phantom VPN’s average torrent bitrate speed. At 9.8MiB/s, it’s actually one of the fastest bitrates we’ve seen out of 61 VPNs.

Despite its speed, we caution against using Avira Phantom VPN to torrent on macOS or Android due to the absence of a kill switch on these platforms. Kill switches guarantee that your real IP address won’t accidentally leak when file sharing.

Furthermore, Avira Phantom VPN’s logging policy is highly intrusive and it’s willing to share data. This means that P2P file sharers could get into trouble if they accidentally download any copyrighted material.

Avira Phantom Free also has a fast bitrate, but it suffers the same anonymity issues. The kill switch isn’t available on the free version and it’s also restricted by a 500MB per month data cap, which may not even be enough to download a single file, depending on what you’re torrenting.

For a truly safe free VPN for torrenting, we recommend Windscribe Free instead.

This level of device compatibility is the bare minimum we expect from a paid VPN service.

Unfortunately, Avira Phantom isn’t available on any other platform. It has no Fire TV Stick or Android TV app, and you cannot use it as a VPN for Linux.

It also isn’t possible to install the VPN on your router, so you cannot use it on Apple TV or games consoles. There is no Smart DNS to easily spoof your region, either.

The good news is that Avira Phantom has no simultaneous connection limit. You can install and use the Pro or free version of its apps on as many devices as you wish.

Browser Extensions

Unfortunately, there is no Firefox add-on yet.

The Chrome extension is very easy and quick to install, and you can use it to get a new IP address instantly. Like with the free version of the app, you are limited to the nearest VPN server only.

Avira Phantom VPN has a free browser extension for Chrome but not Firefox.

It’s also not just a proxy like many browser extensions on offer from VPN providers. It’s a genuine VPN that encrypts your data via AES-256.

No Advanced Features or Customization

Avira Phantom’s lack of customization is a problem. You have no control over its security suite, including the option to switch between protocols.

We’d like to see manual protocol selection enabled across all of Avira VPN’s apps. Currently, Android and iOS are the only devices that allow it.

VPNs like Hide.me and Astrill VPN offer much more flexibility for advanced users.

Avira Phantom VPN Pro’s security settings menu – it has barely any technical features.

Avira’s only additional feature is a malicious site blocker, which might be useful for some users. However, we didn’t find this helpful, as it’s useless for those who only visit reputable websites.

Advanced VPNs have features like Double VPN, IP rotation, open-source apps, and a GPS spoofer. We’d also like to see an effective VPN ad blocker.