Ivacy VPN Review

“There is no ethical obligation to reveal who the people behind Ivacy are.”
– Frank, Ivacy Public Relations Manager

Based in Singapore under its parent company PMG Private Limited, Ivacy is particularly evasive about its ownership and operational structure.

After undergoing deeper research into the company’s history, we discovered some secrets around who really owns the VPN service.

In fact, Ivacy is actually operated by a Pakistani organization called Gaditek, which is the same parent company as another VPN we’ve reviewed, PureVPN.

Gaditek was founded by the Gadit family, with Umair Gadit being Gaditek’s current CEO and fellow co-founder Uzair Gadit being the CEO of PureVPN.

After years of rumors online, Ivacy finally admitted to this, although claiming its association with PureVPN is “only minor.”

There’s nothing immediately suspicious about this. Several VPN service providers are owned and run by the same parent company.

But Gaditek’s business practices, alongside its reluctance to openly discuss the ownership structure, means we’re suspicious about using Ivacy VPN.

Firstly, Ivacy doesn’t name its management team anywhere. Ivacy also refused to disclose it to us.

At one point, the Ivacy website did ambiguously name its CEO as ‘Mr. Saad’, but this has since been scrubbed. A spokesperson also let slip in 2018 that the CEO’s name is ‘Saad Khan’.

Currently, we believe Ivacy’s CEO is Muhammad Saad Khan. But you’d never know this either, as he does not mention his affiliation to Ivacy anywhere.

He officially states his position as being ‘Senior Product Marketing Manager at Cloudways’, which is a cloud hosting platform owned by Gaditek.

However, his Quora account has him listed as ‘Growth Marketing Strategist at PureVPN’.

He can also be found replying to VPN-related tweets with recommendations for PureVPN, without ever disclosing that he holds a key stake in its parent business and sister company.

Despite Ivacy’s attempts to distance itself from PureVPN, there is a definite link between the two companies.

Gaditek’s disappointing business practices

On top of the secrecy, and more worringly, Gaditek engages in some unpleasant business practices.

Gaditek owns and runs four VPN review sites, which it uses to artificially rank its VPN products in the top positions without ever disclosing its true ownership.

Also, the company routinely engages in ‘astroturfing,’, creating fake social media accounts to promote its VPN product under the guise of a real person.

Separately, the PR Manager of Digital and Partnerships at Ivacy was caught offering a VPN reviewer a lifetime Ivacy subscription in exchange for more favorable reviews on his review site.

Offering lifetime VPN subscriptions in return for favorable reviews is unforgivable.

Do you want to put your most sensitive data in the hands of a company that refuses to tell you who it is? And whose marketing strategy is to deceive customers into thinking its product is better than it is?

You shouldn’t. For this reason alone, we suggest you think twice about Ivacy.

Ivacy operates under a minimal-logs logging policy – collecting no information that could be used to identify you from your online activity.

This means Ivacy does not collect your connection logs, duration logs, IP address, connection timestamps, or any DNS queries generated by your end.

Here is the information as it appears in Ivacy’s privacy policy:

The only information that Ivacy does gather is your source country, which it claims is to ensure “smooth software functionality.”

Ivacy does not reveal how it determines which country you are connecting from, and could not tell us when we contacted it.

This minimal-logs policy is particularly essential for Ivacy, as it is based in Singapore.

Singapore is a popular but bad location to base a VPN. This is because Singapore has a proven track record of collaborating with the Five-Eyes surveillance network and handing over sensitive information to authorities who request it.

So much so, in fact, that Singapore has regularly been dubbed the ‘sixth-eye’ due to its persistent cooperation with the intelligence alliance.

However, we believe that the minimal logs collected by Ivacy would be of no use to anyone, even a government or police force. This makes the choice of jurisdiction a lot less scary.

Ivacy delivers acceptable download and upload speeds. It’s not the fastest VPN we’ve tested, but it’s not the slowest, either.

Testing connection speeds on nearby servers, we measured a 13% drop in download speed, and a 43% drop in upload speed. These results are good, but certainly not great.

International Speed Test Results

While Ivacy’s short distance speeds are good, the VPN performed considerably worse over far-reaching connections.

Over numerous long distance speed tests, we recorded a 42% download speed drop when connected to a US East Coast VPN server.

To put this speed reduction into perspective, our ExpressVPN speed tests resulted in a mere 17% drop connecting from the UK to a New Jersey server.

Depending on your typical internet speeds, a 42% speed drop can seriously affecting video streaming quality.

Latency remained fairly low with a ping time of 16ms on our local connection. However, this is still to high for lag-less online gaming with a VPN.

Ivacy maintains 64 dedicated streaming servers, with each one designed to gain access to a specific service.

There are streaming-specific servers for popular broadcasters and services like NBC, Amazon Prime, and RaiPlay, but also less common ones like beIN Sports, Hotstar, and FujiTV.

Using Ivacy VPN, we were able to access 11 Netflix regions, including the American library. We also unblocked Disney+ on multiple US servers.

Furthermore, Ivacy’s UK servers worked easily with BBC iPlayer. This is impressive, as many VPNs struggle to bypass BBC iPlayer’s tough geo-blocks.

Streaming speeds were a little disappointing, however. As our speed tests revealed, Ivacy’s connections slow down heavily connecting overseas.

The results of Ivacy’s speed issues is that while we unblocked several streaming platforms, the picture quality wasn’t always in high definition.

In addition to allowing P2P traffic on its entire server network, Ivacy also has a selection of ‘Secure Download’ servers.

It’s not 100% clear what makes these servers different. The Ivacy app and website state that they use ‘real-time threat detection’ to provide ‘advanced server level virus and malware protection’.

In our P2P tests, Ivacy’s file-sharing speeds on nearby servers were fast and stable.

Not to mention that Ivacy provides a kill switch, but only on Windows and Android. As such, we recommend Mac and iOS users avoid using Ivacy for torrenting.

Ivacy allows port forwarding

Port forwarding is a very useful feature for torrenters, as it can increase the speed of your upload and download traffic through BitTorrent.

Ivacy offers port forwarding, but as a paid extra. At only $1.00 per month more, though, you may want to consider it if you’re a prolific torrenter.

Why we don’t recommend Ivacy for torrenting

Despite the positive findings above, we don’t recommend using Ivacy VPN for torrenting.

The company’s lack of transparency makes us hesitant to trust a VPN service with sensitive download data.

Rather than take risks torrenting with Ivacy, we identified much more trustworthy VPNs suitable for secure torrenting in our P2P tests.

Ivacy has a bespoke app just for use in China, called Ivacy Prime. This is tied to your regular Ivacy subscription, so you don’t need to two separate subscriptions.

The Prime app is only available on Windows and Android, and it only supports the OpenVPN protocol.

Frustratingly, there is no documentation relating to Ivacy Prime on the Ivacy web page, despite big differences between it and the regular Ivacy app.

Also, the Ivacy Prime app does not have a kill switch. This means that if your connection drops for any reason, your true IP address will be revealed.

The choice of modes has also been stripped back to just ‘Smart Connect’, ‘Streaming’, and ‘Social Sites.’

The ‘Social Sites’ section is the most meaningful addition of the Prime app. In our tests, it unblocked Facebook, Spotify, and YouTube.

The usual fare of streaming services, like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, have their own dedicated servers. There is a notable addition of YouTube TV, but BBC iPlayer is absent, however.

Ivacy is a solid VPN choice when it comes to encryption and security.

On the Windows app you get a choice of VPN protocols, including OpenVPN and IKEv2 – two of the fastest and safest protocols available.

However, when we first reviewed Ivacy only a small number of its server locations were able to use OpenVPN. We asked a support representative if that had changed recently, and they sent us a list of all OpenVPN-enabled locations.

There are now 38 VPN server locations which support OpenVPN. This is the majority, but it still misses out a large number of servers.

Confusingly, the Windows app doesn’t tell you which servers don’t support OpenVPN. It won’t stop you from connecting to any servers with OpenVPN selected as your preferred protocol, so presumably it automatically changes you to a different protocol – but we don’t know which.

macOS doesn’t have a protocol selection. A chat agent confirmed to us that Ivacy on macOS uses IKEv2 by default.

When using Ivacy VPN all your data is encrypted through the virtually unhackable AES-256 cipher.

Ivacy provides users with a VPN kill switch, DNS, and IPv6 leak protection – all of which work to prevent your true IP address from being exposed in case of an unexpected connection drop.

Our tests found Ivacy to be fully protected from any DNS or IP leaks, too. Ivacy can be relied upon to successfully hide your true IP address.

But be warned – the internet kill switch is only available on Windows and Android. This means iOS and Mac users miss out on a kill switch, which is a huge downside.

The inclusion of split tunneling is a welcome feature. This allows you to safeguard your web traffic while maintaining compatibility with devices on your network, like your printer or streaming device.

But again, split tunneling is only available on Windows and Android.

Apple users are essentially given a second-rate Ivacy product – if you own a Mac, iPhone, or both, then there’s not much reason for you to choose Ivacy.

Despite being always available, Ivacy’s customer support is not as good as we’d like.

Ivacy’s 24/7 live chat feature is great if you’re in a hurry, but falls flat most of the time.

However, Ivacy makes up for this with a decent knowledge base which should answer the majority of your questions.

The support section on the website is where you’ll find FAQs, troubleshooting advice, and manual setup guides for lots of devices.

With more technical questions, we were directed to Ivacy’s email support team. Disappointingly, they were not the fastest repliers and were often unable to adequately answer our questions.

More frustratingly, Ivacy’s customer support team outright refused to answer some of the questions we had.

For instance, Ivacy refused to tell us how it determines the source country of its users, and ignored all correspondence regarding the company’s ownership structure.