Free VPN by FreeVPN.org Review

Here’s a table summarizing the information that Free VPN by FreeVPN.org logs:

A good VPN retains as few user logs as possible, and explains in great detail how it attains this within its logging policy. FreeVPN.org claims to log absolutely nothing about you whatsoever, but provides zero proof or explanation as to how.

The image below isn’t just a summary of its privacy policy — it’s virtually the entire thing:

FreeVPN.org’s logging policy hasn’t been updated since August 2019.

Unfortunately there’s no way for us to know whether or not this statement is true. FreeVPN.org has never been audited, and it discloses no information about the people or company behind the service.

Our past research was able to unearth some basic information about the people running FreeVPN.org. We know that it was, and presumably still is, based in California, US — one of the most hostile jurisdictions a VPN can be based in.

The company we once found to be responsible for FreeVPN.org, ActMobile Inc., has scrubbed most of its presence from the internet, and is listed as ‘permanently closed’ on Google.

It’s evidence like this that makes us uncertain if FreeVPN.org will be around for much longer.

November 2021 Data Leak

On 1 November 2021, a database containing 300 million records of VPN user data was posted to an online hacker forum. The hackers behind it claimed the database belonged to ActMobile, the parent company of FreeVPN.org.

As we discussed above, FreeVPN.org claims to retain no user data. But the leaked database contains every user’s full name, IP address, and password. This appears to confirm our skepticism about the VPN’s vague logging policy.

In response, ActMobile stated that the accusation is false, as it “[does] not maintain databases.”

Despite its denial, the evidence strongly suggests that the leaked database belongs to ActMobile.

This alone is enough for us to strongly recommend you avoid FreeVPN by FreeVPN.org under all circumstances.

Here’s a table showing Free VPN by FreeVPN.org’s speed test results:

FreeVPN.org is consistently slow in all locations we measured it from, over multiple tests.

FreeVPN.org’s latency is also poor across the board. When connected to a nearby server, we recorded a ping of 97ms. Our worst latency measurements occurred when connected to Japan, which reached 250ms.

Slow speeds like this are commonplace while using FreeVPN.org.

These numbers pretty much eliminate the option of playing online mobile games while the VPN is connected.

Our test results don’t indicate any sort of throttling on FreeVPN.org’s behalf — just the usual signs of a bad free VPN performing poorly. It’s not alone: other free VPNs like SkyVPN and VPN 360 are just as slow.

There are much faster free VPNs than FreeVPN.org available that we strongly recommend you use instead. For instance, in our TunnelBear speed tests, the free VPN recorded a speed loss of less than 5%.

You can see the encryption ciphers, connection protocols, and additional security features used by FreeVPN.org in the table below:

The FreeVPN.org app features no advanced security features, not even a kill switch. While it’s normal for free VPNs to not offer lots of extra features, we consider things like the kill switch absolutely vital and a bare minimum for any VPN, free or otherwise.

The VPN protocol and encryption being used are, on the surface, a mystery. Neither FreeVPN.org’s website nor app mention or explain a single thing about the protocols and ciphers it uses for encrypting your device’s traffic.

Since FreeVPN.org doesn’t monitor its email we weren’t able to find anything out from the company directly, either.

We were forced to use Wireshark, a packet sniffing tool, for a deep-dive into FreeVPN.org’s encryption to work out exactly how its app works. We found out that FreeVPN.org uses TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.2, only the second most up-to-date version of the SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) VPN protocol.

Wireshark proves that, while FreeVPN.org does indeed encrypt traffic, it only uses TLSv1.2.

This is the same protocol as Microsoft uses for its corporate networking, and can be considered generally secure.

That said, it is not the most recent version of the protocol, or the most secure. TLS 1.3 has performance improvements over 1.2, while also reducing the risk of successful attacks.

The app only allows you access to the VPN for fixed amounts of time, and this results in a significant security flaw. Once your time has run out, the VPN connection simply cuts out without warning, completely exposing your data.

With all that said: we found no DNS or IP leaks, which is a good result.

Despite that positive outcome, it is vital that FreeVPN by FreeVPN.org upgrades its security suite. To not use a more established, recognized protocol like OpenVPN, IKEv2, or WireGuard in 2023 is totally unacceptable. It also needs to do a better job of communicating how it operates to provide you with peace of mind while using it.

In the table below, we list the streaming platforms that FreeVPN.org currently unblocks:

Like so many free VPNs, FreeVPN.org does not work to unblock streaming sites. It’s honest, if nothing else: it makes it quite clear that you need to pay for a premium subscription in order to access its streaming servers.

While we only tested the free product when writing this review, we’d be surprised if FreeVPN.org’s paid version actually worked consistently with streaming sites.

It’s something that even the very best premium VPNs can struggle with — even quality services like Astrill and Mullvad failed most of our streaming tests.

Trying to unblock most streaming services without paying for FreeVPN.org is futile.

However, we were pleasantly surprised to see FreeVPN.org work with BBC iPlayer when connected to its London server.

There aren’t many trusty free VPNs for streaming, but the best one by far is PrivadoVPN Free. It’s the only 100% free VPN to unblock US Netflix in our testing.

FreeVPN by FreeVPN.org does not disclose its approach or attitude towards torrenting anywhere in its apps or on its website. We reached out to the company to learn more, but never received a response.

However, as torrenting works while the VPN is running, we have no choice but to believe that FreeVPN.org takes an open stance on it.

Despite P2P activity being permitted, we strongly believe that you should not use FreeVPN.org for torrenting. In our testing it averaged an awful download bitrate of 1.8MiB/s — but that’s the least of its worries.

FreeVPN.org may have downloaded very slowly with uTorrent, but we couldn’t even get the torrent to start when using some other clients.

In addition to its terrible speeds, FreeVPN.org is simply not trustworthy enough to keep torrent data private.

It’s a company with terrible communication and no public presence, a sparse and unverified logging policy, weak encryption, and it’s based in a US jurisdiction.

If you do like to torrent on Android (FreeVPN.org has an iPhone app, but you can’t torrent on iOS) then Windscribe Free is a much safer, faster choice.

We’ve seen little evidence that Free VPN by FreeVPN.org will work in censored regions, although when we spoke to the app’s developer it claimed to have users in China.

Only very well designed VPNs with dedicated obfuscation technology can work in censored regions – you could give FreeVPN.org a try, but we wouldn’t count on it working or it being safe to use.

This is a VPN that can’t even promise you an IP address from the country you’ve selected. We see little chance that it would be able to trick sophisticated web censorship like China’s firewall.

If are looking for a VPN for a censored region then you’ll need a much better one – take a look at our best VPNs for China, the UAE or Turkey to get an idea of the options available.

There is a minimum set of standards we expect a VPN to meet when offering support for its users, and FreeVPN.org fails all of them.

It’s understandable that a free VPN would not offer support of the caliber of, say, a top-rated provider like ExpressVPN, but it’s vital that it provides at least something — particularly when the product suffers from so many issues.

At the time of testing, FreeVPN.org’s FAQs page was broken.

There’s no live chat support, no user forum, no knowledge base, and no functioning query form. Email is the only way to seek help from FreeVPN.org, both in and out of the app, and in all our years reviewing it we’ve never received a response.

It’s extremely frustrating trying to use a VPN with so many flaws and not being able to flag errors or issues anywhere — it gives off the impression that FreeVPN.org simply doesn’t care about its apps or its users.