IPVanish VPN Review

To calculate IPVanish’s speed performance, we recorded the speed of the connection between our location and IPVanish VPN servers around the globe.

Below is a table showing IPVanish’s speed test results, in full:

Previously, we recorded average speeds using IPVanish due to its reliance on the slower and older OpenVPN protocol. With the introduction of WireGuard, IPVanish now ranks among the fastest VPNs on the market.

As shown in the table above, IPVanish is consistently fast across all locations with an average international download speed of 88Mbps.

In fact, IPVanish is the only VPN service, other than Hotspot Shield, to record download speeds faster than 80Mbps in every location we test.

You can use the chart below to see how IPVanish’s international speeds compare to other top VPNs:

These results indicate that IPVanish is one of the fastest VPNs available. It’s more than fast enough for HD streaming, web browsing, and torrenting large files.

Low Ping for Online Gaming

While connected to a local IPVanish server, we consistently recorded a ping time of 7ms. This is an excellent result that allows you to play fast-paced online games without any lag.

We didn’t experience any lag while connecting to a nearby US server.

On longer-distance connections, we experienced increased ping times and very occasional periods of lag. However, we were still able to play online with minimal disruption and avoid any sudden disconnections.

Below is a summary of the data that IPVanish logs:

IPVanish does not log any connection or usage data. It does collect your email address and payment method, but this is standard practice for most VPN services.

Its privacy policy states that the VPN also collects “aggregated and anonymous performance data” to improve its overall functionality. This data is completely anonymous and not linked to individual users.

Unlike many VPNs, IPVanish doesn’t enforce any simultaneous connections limit. Therefore, it doesn’t need to log device connections to its network.

IPVanish’s no-logs policy has been verified by an independent audit carried out by Leviathan Security Group in April 2022. The audit confirmed that IPVanish does not log your IP address, browsing activity, or downloads.

For greater transparency, we’d like to see IPVanish include a warrant canary on its website to highlight any DMCA requests it receives.

Similarly, we’d encourage IPVanish to follow Windscribe’s approach of publishing regular transparency reports of its law enforcement requests. This would serve as real life proof that IPVanish does not log any user data.

You can see how IPVanish’s logging policy compares to other top-shelf VPNs in the table below:

IPVanish Is Owned by Ziff Davis

IPVanish is currently owned by New York-based company Ziff Davis. It’s part of a family of VPN products including StrongVPN and Encrypt.me.

Normally a US jurisdiction isn’t great for privacy due to the country’s intrusive data laws and its membership of the Five Eyes alliance.

However, this isn’t relevant to IPVanish, as its no-logs policy means that it wouldn’t have anything to hand over to US authorities.

Therefore, as long as it continues to operate the same logging policy, we’re not overly concerned by the company’s US jurisdiction.

Previous Data-Sharing Incident

In 2016, IPVanish handed user logs to the FBI to aid in a criminal investigation. This was only possible as IPVanish was actively logging this data.

In the seven years since this incident, IPVanish has changed ownership multiple times, improved its logging policy, and verified its practices with an independent audit.

We now consider IPVanish to be a reputable and trustworthy service with a verified no-logs policy.

You can use the list below to see which popular streaming services IPVanish works with:

IPVanish Works with US Netflix & Three Other Regions

IPVanish unblocks American Netflix on all of its US servers. It also worked with the India, Canada, and Turkey libraries in our tests.

We were able to unblock US Netflix with IPVanish.

While it’s impressive IPVanish can access US Netflix, it’s poor compared to the highest-performing Netflix VPNs. For example, Windscribe can access 10 times as many Netflix regions than IPVanish.

Additionally, IPVanish can be slow to load the Netflix website and mobile app. We were able to mitigate this by switching to the WireGuard protocol.

Works with All UK Streaming Platforms Except Netflix

Using IPVanish’s UK servers, we were able to access every major British streaming service. We recorded a 100% success rate unblocking geo-restricted content on BBC iPlayer, ITVX, and All 4.

All of IPVanish’s UK servers can access BBC iPlayer.

In each instance, the stream loaded quickly in our browser and we were able to watch without any buffering. This was the case for both on-demand and live content.

IPVanish Consistently Unblocks Hulu

Our recent tests confirm that IPVanish is a great choice for Hulu. Using IPVanish, we were able to stream Hulu from outside the US on all of our devices.

IPVanish lets you watch Hulu exclusives from outside the US.

Out of the 10 US servers we tested, only one IP address was blocked. This is an excellent result and indicates that IPVanish is a reliable choice for unblocking Hulu.

IPVanish Doesn’t Unblock All Streaming Platforms

We also tested IPVanish with HBO Max and didn’t have any success. The same was true of Amazon Prime Video and Hotstar India.

Overall, there are far better VPNs available for streaming. Compared to these, IPVanish works less often, streams in lower quality, and is compatible with fewer streaming devices.

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

We tested IPVanish by connecting to one of its nearby servers and downloading a torrent test file. In each instance, we were able to open the file in the qBittorent client and complete the download without interruption.

IPVanish kept our real IP address hidden while torrenting.

IPvanish recorded an average bitrate of 9.9MiB/s — an excellent result. In fact, IPVanish is the joint third fastest VPN for torrenting that we’ve tested.

P2P traffic is permitted on all of its servers which is ideal for minimizing congestion and maintaining fast speeds.

Plus, IPVanish owns and manages its entire server network. First-party server ownership is great for user anonymity as it prevents any third-parties from accessing your torrenting activity. Importantly, the VPN doesn’t log usage data, either.

It also has a reliable VPN kill switch to prevent IP leaks following an unexpected VPN disconnection. It’s not enabled by default, though.

We’d like to see IPVanish introduce port forwarding support to further optimize its P2P speeds and close the gap on the top torrenting VPNs.

IPVanish Has a SOCKS5 Proxy

The VPN also offers its own SOCKS5 proxy. This masks your IP address while torrenting by routing your P2P traffic through a remote proxy service.

Although this is generally faster than using a VPN, it won’t encrypt your internet traffic.

You can configure the SOCKS5 proxy directly in your torrent client, without the need of additional software. This process can be overly technical, though.

You can see the full list of VPN protocols, encryption ciphers, and technical features IPVanish offers in the table below:

IPVanish Is Safe to Use on All Platforms

IPVanish encrypts your traffic using industry-standard encryption methods. You can choose between AES-256 and ChaCha20 encryption ciphers, which are both considered virtually unbreakable.

All of IPVanish’s applications use the WireGuard VPN protocol by default. This is an open-sourced VPN protocol which you can trust to keep your data secure.

To verify this, we inspected our web traffic while connected to an IPVanish VPN server. We carried out this test using Wireshark, a free and open-source packet inspection tool.

IPVanish encrypted the data packets leaving our device.

We found no unencrypted TCP or UDP traffic, and no HTTP or DNS traffic traveling in plain text. Every data packet we inspected displayed an incoherent series of symbols.

In other words, IPVanish works exactly as intended. When it runs, it fully encrypts the traffic leaving the device. We trust the VPN to hide web activity from ISPs or protect data transfers on public WiFi networks.

Minor Kill Switch Fault on macOS

IPVanish’s kill switch prevents any internet traffic from leaving your device when the VPN is not connected.

To verify this, we used our kill switch testing tool. This tool detects any IP address leaks following a drop in internet connection and a change in VPN server location.

We were only able to conduct this test on macOS by switching to the OpenVPN protocol. IPVanish’s kill switch isn’t available on macOS if you connect using the default WireGuard protocol.

We can confirm that IPVanish’s kill switch successfully blocked our network traffic on its Windows app. However, its macOS kill switch failed to prevent our IP address from leaking during a VPN server change.

We only detected a minor issue with IPVanish’s macOS kill switch.

Thankfully, its macOS kill switch did hide our IP address following a sudden VPN disconnection, which is the more important test.

It’s still safe to use IPVanish on macOS, but we recommend you completely shut down your online activity before switching VPN servers as your internet traffic will not be encrypted in the intermediary period.

Sadly, this fault is not unique to IPVanish — ExpressVPN and PrivateVPN experience similar issues with their macOS kill switches.

We hope to see IPVanish address this in a future update.

IPVanish Owns Its Entire Server Network

IPVanish owns and manages its entire server network, including its DNS servers.

Owning your entire server network reduces the risk of server security issues. IPVanish does not lease any of their servers from third-parties, which means it has full control over how your data is handled.

However, unlike ExpressVPN’s servers, IPVanish’s are not diskless, meaning they do store information on physical hard drives.

While RAM-based servers are safer for anonymity, very few VPN services currently offer this solution — take a look at ExpressVPN if it’s a feature you really want.

IPVanish Doesn’t Leak IP or DNS Data

We tested IPVanish’s apps for leaks and can confirm that it does not leak IP or DNS data.

We tested IPVanish with our leak detection tool.

This is due to its in-built DNS and IPv6 leak protection, as well as its first-party ownership of its server network.

Threat Protection Requires Improvement

Threat Protection is a security feature that blocks ads, trackers, and malicious websites as long as you’re connected to IPVanish. We tested its effectiveness using an objective ad blocker checker:

IPVanish only blocks 35% of ads and trackers compared to PIA MACE’s 95%.

As shown above, Threat Protection only blocks 35% of ads and trackers. This is a poor result especially as IPVanish failed to block the vast majority of social trackers, such as those from TikTok and Facebook.

If you want a VPN that blocks ads, then we recommend PIA or CyberGhost. Both VPNs were able to block over 90% of ads and trackers.

While we were disappointed by Threat Protection’s performance, we appreciate that IPVanish has made the feature available on all of its VPN apps. This is rare from a VPN service and is something we’d like to see adopted across the industry.

Extra Technical Features We’d Like to See

IPVanish includes all the standard features you’d expect from a reputable VPN service, but lacks the additional technical features of the very best VPNs. We’ve listed the most important ones we’d like to see IPVanish implement moving forward:

Most of these features are advanced and not essential for a VPN service to have, however as one of the best VPNs we’ve reviewed, we expect IPVanish to include them.

IPVanish does not work in China and other highly-censored countries.

We test IPVanish weekly on our Shanghai server and we have never seen it work. Each time we opened the VPN app it failed to connect to a server location.

Its obfuscation tool, called “Scramble VPN traffic,” simply can’t bypass China’s Great Firewall.

IPVanish might work in restricted countries with less sophisticated web censorship. As a top-rated VPN, we find it likely that IPVanish works in Russia, Iran, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

If you need a VPN to beat Chinese censorship, there are far more reliable VPNs with bespoke obfuscation technology. Our top choice, Astrill VPN, has a 100% success rate in bypassing the Great Firewall of China using its proprietary protocols.

You can reach IPVanish’s customer support team in the following ways:

The fastest way to get support is via live chat, which you can reach from the top-right of the website. Live chat agents are helpful, and always respond quickly. The round-the-clock email support is also excellent, with prompt and well-written responses.

IPVanish recently added an automated chatbot to its customer support.

Equally, the website features many detailed tutorials on using IPVanish on various platforms. For example, there are 12 guides just for using the VPN on Windows.

The online FAQ section is also good for straightforward solutions to common issues.

There’s telephone support, too, which is offered by a small number of top VPNs. It’s available from 9am to 5pm CST, Monday to Friday.

One minor criticism is the poorly sized images on IPVanish’s setup guides. They’re often too large, which makes it difficult to read the instructions.