Hola Free VPN Review

Here’s a summary of all the data Hola VPN logs:

Hola VPN collects more data than the vast majority of VPNs we’ve reviewed. This includes your IP address and browsing activity, which can be used to easily identify you.

If you subscribe to Hola VPN through a social media account, Hola has access to even more of your personal information. This includes your home address, birth date, profile picture, and any publicly available information on your account.

Hola VPN’s logging policy is one of the worst we’ve seen. Your personal data is at risk every time you use Hola VPN.

Hola VPN Uses Your Personal Bandwidth & IP Address

Despite its name, Hola VPN is actually a peer-to-peer proxy service that uses peer-to-peer caching for quick access to blocked content.

To bypass geo-blocked websites, Hola VPN routes your internet traffic through other users’ IP addresses in non-blocked regions.

Each user functions as a ‘peer’ or ‘node’, in a similar way to how the Tor network works.

At the same time, your own IP address can be used by other Hola VPN users for whatever they wish. This includes accessing unlawful content, which would be tied to your online identity.

Free users also share their ‘idle resources’ (WiFi and cellular data) with the network, to save Hola VPN money.

This allows Hola VPN to sell your bandwidth to other users.

Troubling Ownership & Privacy-Unfriendly Jurisdiction

Hola VPN was founded by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman under the company name Hola Networks Limited.

Hola Networks Limited provides a free consumer ‘VPN’ service, as well as a premium subscription and corporate service called Luminati.

Luminati uses free users’ bandwidth, which is charged per gigabyte, without reimbursing the free user. This practice has sparked criticism among cybersecurity professionals.

Hola VPN is based in Israel, which isn’t an official member of the Five Eyes (or Nine or 14 Eyes) intelligence-sharing alliance, but it collaborates with it.

Coupled with Hola VPN’s intrusive logging practices, it’s highly likely that Hola VPN will hand over user data if requested.

In fact its privacy policy seems to confirm this, stating that it will “comply with law, regulation, subpoena or court order.” It will also hand over your personal information if it has “good reason to believe that it is necessary to.”

To evaluate Hola VPN’s speed performance, we tested the speed of the connection between our location and other Hola users around the world.

You can use the table below to see a breakdown of Hola VPN’s speed test results:

We saw average download speeds decrease from 100Mbps to 93Mbps when connecting to a peer in the same region as us.

This is a speed loss of just 7%, which is very fast, especially for a free service.

However, Hola uses a peer-to-peer network with limited encryption. This results in faster speeds than some VPN services with stronger security, but considerably more risk.

Plus, the node you’re connecting to can also affect your connection speeds. If the peer you route your traffic through has poor internet speeds, yours may suffer too.

Inconsistent over Longer-Distances

On far-away connections, Hola VPN’s download speeds decrease slightly. We registered an average download speed loss of 12% connecting to Germany and 19% connecting to Japan.

These are great results for a free VPN but compare poorly against paid services.

Hola VPN’s upload speeds decline substantially on international connections. We experienced an average upload speed loss of 90% connecting to the US West Coast and 69% connecting to Australia.

The discrepancy between Hola VPN’s download and upload speeds demonstrates the inconsistencies of a peer-to-peer network.

As such, it’s likely your speeds will fluctuate if you connect to a peer outside of your local region.

We recommend referring to our list of the fastest VPNs for a complete breakdown of the quickest and safest VPNs available.

Below is a list of popular streaming platforms that Hola VPN Free works with:

In our latest tests, Hola VPN was able to unblock an impressive number of streaming services including US Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.

Normally this would be an excellent result for a free VPN service, but due to Hola VPN’s unsafe peer-to-peer network, history of malware, and intrusive logging policy, we can’t recommend it for streaming.

The risk to your online privacy, safety, and security is not worth installing Hola VPN for watching geo-restricted content (or anything at all).

Moreover, the nature of Hola VPN as a peer-to-peer service means we can’t guarantee Hola VPN will work for you, or if it will continue to work in our tests.

It’s also worth noting that Hola VPN failed to unblock a single streaming platform in our previous testing.

It’s much easier, and safer, to sign up to a premium VPN service for streaming. We’d recommend using ExpressVPN for uninterrupted 4K streaming, its bespoke Smart DNS tool, and access to every major streaming service.

If you want a free alternative, we recommend downloading Windscribe Free. It can reliably unblock 6 international Netflix libraries, HBO Max, and BBC iPlayer.

Unblocks US Netflix, but Poor Video Quality

During our testing, Hola VPN was able to access US Netflix. However, the video loaded in poor quality and remained at that level throughout testing.

We also experienced constant buffering for a 25 minute video.

Slow Load Times Unblocking Hulu

We were also able to access Hulu with Hola VPN but we experienced extensive loading times. The main Hulu webpage loaded incomplete, with several missing images and floating text.

If watching Hulu is a priority for you, we recommend using ExpressVPN. It’s 16 US city VPN servers, fast connection speeds, secure encryption makes it the best VPN for bypassing Hulu blocks.

Struggles to Unblock HBO Max

Using Hola VPN, we couldn’t get past the login page for HBO Max.

We suspect that Hola assigned us a peer in a region where HBO Max is blocked, preventing us from accessing the streaming site.

This demonstrates the issue with using Hola VPN for streaming. Aside from its privacy and security risks, you can’t guarantee the IP address you’re assigned will actually be registered to the location you’ve chosen.

Here’s a summary of how Hola VPN performed in our latest torrenting tests:

Torrenting Attribute	Result
Average Download Bitrate	N/A
No. of P2P Servers	N/A
Logging Policy	Intrusive Logging
Kill Switch	Faulty
Port Forwarding	No

On its website’s FAQs, Hola VPN openly states:

“The use of torrent apps on our network is not allowed, and we are blocking torrents traffic.”

As a result, Hola VPN is incompatible with all popular torrent clients, including qBittorent and uTorrent.

Even if Hola VPN did permit torrenting, we’d recommend avoiding it at all costs.

Hola VPN fails to provide basic privacy and security features — all of which are torrenting essentials. This includes VPN encryption, modern tunneling protocols, and a kill switch.

Using Hola VPN, your real IP address would be visible to everyone while torrenting, including your ISP and law enforcement.

Moreover, Hola VPN logs and stores your web activity. This means any copyrighted content you torrent, even accidentally, can be passed over to the authorities.

If torrenting is a priority for you then consider subscribing to Private Internet Access. It uses secure WireGuard and ChaCha20 encryption to keep your real IP address and web activity hidden.

We use a real test server in Shanghai to test every VPN’s ability to unblock websites in China. Over the past year, Hola VPN has failed to connect every single time.

In our most recent test, the Hola VPN app won’t even open properly for us — it just shows us this error message:

We suspect this is due to Hola VPN using a peer-to-peer network, without any encryption, instead of a true VPN server network.

Additionally, Hola doesn’t support any VPN obfuscation tools to assist in bypassing censorship. Obfuscation can range from specialized servers to stealth protocols, all of which Hola VPN lacks.

Even if Hola VPN could bypass censorship, it is too dangerous to use in a censored country. It logs far too much of your data and fails to encrypt your internet traffic, putting you at risk.

We’d recommend using Astrill VPN for China or other censored regions. It’s secure, safe, and has a 100% success rate in our China tests.

You can see the limited VPN protocols, encryption ciphers, and extra technical features that Hola Free VPN has in the table below:

Unsafe Peer-to-Peer Network

Hola Free VPN routes your internet traffic through other users’ devices to spoof your IP address and bypass website blocks.

In turn, other users can use your IP address as they please. This is dangerous as your IP address can be used for criminal activity, which would be tied to your identity and home address.

A website named Adios, Hola!, created by security researchers, states that Hola is “harmful to the internet as a whole, and to its users in particular” and labels it a “poorly secured botnet” with “serious consequences.”

The researchers at Adios, Hola! discovered various vulnerabilities within the Hola VPN architecture, one of which reportedly allowed anyone to execute programs on your computer.

According to the website, Hola fixed some of the vulnerabilities, but others still remain.

An example of this happened in 2015, when 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan claimed that his website had been DDoS attacked by users exploiting the Hola network. This was later confirmed by Hola VPN co-founder Vilenski.

Hola VPN is also vulnerable to IP address leaks and has facilitated data scraping, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.

Hola VPN Lacks Basic Security Features

Hola VPN’s mobile apps use the outdated and insecure PPTP and provide no encryption. Your internet traffic is left unencrypted and encased in an easily hacked tunneling protocol.

Put simply, it’s not safe to use Hola VPN on mobile.

On Windows, Hola VPN defaults to the IKEv2/IPSec protocol, but its website states that the app may switch to PPTP to overcome specific geo-blocks.

We also found a drop-down menu for different encryption ciphers, with AES-256 listed as the default.

We verified this using Wireshark: a packet-sniffing tool. All of our data packets displayed incoherent symbols encased by the IKEv2/IPSec protocol, rendering our browsing activity private.

Although this is an improvement on its mobile apps, the IKEv2/IPSec protocol is closed-source and has known security vulnerabilities.

We’d like to see Hola VPN introduce secure and open-sourced tunneling protocols such as OpenVPN or WireGuard. This would improve trust and ensure that your personal data remains private.

We couldn’t test the macOS app as it blocked our internet access. However, we find it unlikely that it uses proper encryption or tunneling protocols, as we couldn’t locate either within its settings menu.

Faulty Kill Switch With Limited Availability

Only Hola VPN’s Windows app comes equipped with a VPN kill switch. Hola users on mobile and macOS are left unprotected in the event of a VPN disconnection.

We ran the Windows kill switch through our in-house kill switch testing tool and found that it leaked our real IP address, too:

Technical Features We’d Like to See Added

Hola VPN fails to include basic technical features that we expect all VPN services to have. Here’s a summary of the most important ones it’s missing:

You can reach Hola VPN’s customer support in the following ways:

Hola VPN’s customer support consists of a ticket system via email and a help center full of FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and setup instructions.

We found the written support varied in quality: its setup guides offer useful information, but its general FAQs function more as a disclaimer for Hola’s unsavory business practices.

All of its guides are littered with typos and awkwardly phrased sentences, making them difficult to read.

It isn’t immediately obvious where the support hub is located on the website, either.

We found the email support team to be initially unhelpful, with most of our queries redirected to the help center. However, continued correspondence led to us getting some useful and informed responses.

This is a massive improvement from our previous experience with Hola VPN, where most of our testing team’s queries were ignored.

To improve further, we’d like to see Hola VPN introduce live chat support to facilitate faster responses and more in-depth correspondence.

The top VPN services, such as NordVPN and CyberGhost, implement 24/7 live chat support for immediate solutions at all times.