Hola VPN Review

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.

Hola VPN openly admits to using your IP address and bandwidth.

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 Bright Data.

Bright Data 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.”

In our recent tests, Hola VPN unblocked an impressive number of streaming services including HBO Max, Hulu, Disney+ (US), and Amazon Prime Video.

Hola VPN works with HBO Max.

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, for that matter).

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.

Even when it did work, there were problems. We unblocked Hulu from outside the US, but the main webpage loaded incomplete with several missing images and floating text.

Similarly, we were able to access HBO Max, but we had to click each content title multiple times for it to register our request.

Based on this ‘success’ with Hulu and HBO Max, we thought Hola VPN would unblock US Netflix. Instead, we were prevented from even logging in and were shown German listings in the Google Search results page.

Despite past success, Hola VPN can’t unblock US Netflix.

This demonstrates the issue with using Hola VPN for streaming: you can’t guarantee the IP address you’re assigned will actually be registered to the location you’ve chosen.

It’s much easier, and safer, to sign up to a premium VPN service for streaming. We recommend using ExpressVPN for uninterrupted 4K streaming, or Windscribe if you want a free alternative.

To evaluate Hola VPN’s speed performance, we ran multiple speed tests while connected to Hola users around the world.

We saw an average download speed loss of 6% when connecting to a peer in the same region as us.

While this is very fast, Hola uses a peer-to-per network with limited encryption. This results in faster speeds than some VPN services with stronger security, but entails 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.

On far-away connections, our download speeds fluctuated. We registered an average speed loss of 12% connecting to Germany and a huge decrease of 92% connecting to Brazil.

We connected to a Hola user in Brazil with a slow internet connection.

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.

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

Unsafe Peer-to-Peer Network

The free version of Hola 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, discovered various vulnerabilities within the VPN’s 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, these are proxies, not VPNs, and should be avoided at all costs.

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.

Hola VPN only encrypts traffic on its Windows app.

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:

We experienced an IP leak while reconnecting to the internet.

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:

Hola VPN Free does not have a conventional server network like other VPNs. Instead, it uses a peer-to-peer network to reroute your internet traffic, meaning there are no fixed number of locations you can connect to.

Every time you tell the app to connect, you are being given another real user’s IP address.

Despite this, Hola VPN will not communicate when a location is unavailable due to a lack of online peers.

As a result, our real IP address frequently leaked as we ‘connected’ to non-existent servers. The app continued to indicate that we were connected to a country, despite our IP address remaining unchanged.

Hola VPN displays a server list in its app but it’s made up of other peers.

We’d like to see Hola VPN introduce a proper VPN server network on its free plan or, at the very least, block your connection when no peers are available in a location.

It’s easy to get started with Hola VPN on iOS — the entire process took less than two minutes in our testing. Simply download the app from the app store, accept the prompts, and you’re finished.

For Windows and macOS, the process is slightly more complicated. Clicking on the download button installs both an app and a browser extension. We found this initially confusing as it wasn’t clear which software we should be using.

You’ll also be required to verify your email address during the registration process, which is odd for a free VPN.

Below, we’ve outlined our experience of using the Hola VPN apps in more detail:

Throughout our testing, we were constantly left frustrated by Hola VPN’s various bugs and glitches.

The worst culprit was its macOS app which failed to connect on both our iMac and MacBook.

We also regularly encountered error codes across all of its apps, which prevented us from connecting or editing our settings.

Our Hola VPN app stopped working and the link to its ‘How-to’ guide wouldn’t load.

In each instance, the Hola VPN app would display a link to a troubleshooting guide that would then fail to load.

Put simply, this is a broken VPN that’s not worth wasting your time on.

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 qBittorrent and uTorrent.

Hola VPN crashed our qBittorrent client immediately.

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.

Hola VPN’s device compatibility is hamstrung by its lack of router support or Smart DNS solution. As a result, you can’t use it on any internet-connected devices that don’t support native VPN apps (like Smart TVs or game consoles).

It’s also disappointing to see it still hasn’t added an Android TV app. While this may have been an acceptable omission in the past, Android TVs are becoming increasingly common and need to be accounted for.

Hola also includes browser extensions. Given they were previously removed from the Chrome Store due to malware, and they don’t use encryption, we don’t recommend installing them.

That said, a Hola VPN representative confirmed to us that their extensions aren’t part of the peer-to-peer network, so at the very least your IP address isn’t being used by strangers.

Unhelpful FAQs & Email Support

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.