PIA VPN Review

All PIA collects is your email address and payment details at sign-up, which is standard and kept separate from your online activity. If you’re uncomfortable with this, you can use an anonymous payment method, like Bitcoin, and an alias email.

Its no-logs claim has been verified on multiple occasions: the VPN had no data to hand over to the FBI during a 2016 court case and the Russian government was unable to extract any user data after seizing a PIA server in the same year.

If this isn’t enough for you, its logging policy has been audited by Deloitte and its server network is entirely RAM-only, the latter periodically wipes your activity data.

PIA’s Privacy Policy confirms it doesn’t collect your browsing history, IP address, or connection timestamps.

Setting the Record Straight on PIA’s Ownership

PIA was acquired by Kape Technologies in November 2019, a move that garnered some controversy due to Kape’s past association with an ad-injector platform.

Thankfully, the platform was shut down in 2016 and the company rebranded from Crossrider to Kape Technologies, overhauling its management team and adopting a new ethos centred on digital privacy.

Under Kape’s ownership, PIA’s privacy and overall quality has massively improved. It has commissioned multiple independent audits, implemented quarterly transparency reports, and seen increases in download speeds.

Despite providing streaming-optimized servers in 11 countries, the VPN isn’t great for overseas streaming. This was most obvious in our Netflix testing, where PIA unblocked 11 fewer libraries than NordVPN and 12 fewer than ExpressVPN.

Similarly, Private Internet Access failed to stream foreign-language favorites like RaiPlay and international versions of DAZN.

We don’t recommend Private Internet Access for overseas content.

For UK platforms, it fared slightly better. The VPN worked with every UK streaming service, aside from Disney+ and Sky Go, as long as we connected to a streaming-optimized server.

It would be much better if PIA made its entire server network optimized for streaming, like ExpressVPN does, instead of having two separate server lists. It feels completely unnecessary and isn’t at all obvious to new users.

Closer to home, PIA excelled at unblocking geo-locked US platforms. We discovered that all of its servers worked for US streaming, but its streaming-optimized servers had the highest success rate.

We had no issues accessing US Netflix with PIA.

On the rare occasion we were blocked from a site, we switched between PIA’s servers across all 50 states until one worked — usually on the second attempt.

When connected to a nearby PIA server, our download speed decreased by just 4% on average. This is an incredible result that ensures you can stream, video-call, and game online with smooth, buffer-free performance.

While our internet speed slowed down on longer-distance connections, it was still very fast. For example, connecting to the other side of the world in Sydney caused our download speed to decrease by just 18%.

To contextualise this, we’ve compared PIA’s local and international speeds to its closest rivals below:

As shown above, PIA matches and outperforms plenty of household names. Our only real criticism stems from years of speed testng: PIA lacks consistency. There can be big swings in performance from month-to-month, which holds it back – but only slightly.

PIA Has Ping Times Low Enough for Smooth Gaming

You can leave PIA connected while gaming and you shouldn’t notice any difference to your gameplay — not just when connected to a nearby server, but also if you’re connected to a server in another country.

We could play on a shared Minecraft server with PIA running and it didn’t affect our gameplay at all.

The VPN increased our ping to 6ms when connected to a server in the same city as us — totally unnoticeable versus a ping of 4ms with no VPN on at all.

If you like to play games like World of Warcraft or Battlefield 6 on servers in a different region to your own, PIA is still a great choice: it only raised our ping to 6ms when we were connected to the UK (3,500 miles away).

PIA lets you choose between OpenVPN with AES-256 encryption or WireGuard with ChaCha20. Both are secure and reliable configurations, as we confirmed for ourselves using a network analyzer.

That said, we noticed that the VPN defaults to the less secure AES-128 cipher, so we suggest you switch to AES-256 in your settings, or just swap to WireGuard.

The VPN encrypted our web traffic, only displaying incoherent symbols.

We also tested the VPN for IP, WebRTC, and DNS leaks and detected no vulnerabilities whatsoever. This is in no small part thanks to PIA’s built-in leak protection for IPv4, IPv6, and DNS.

As if that wasn’t enough, the VPN is also one of a handful of services to provide an advanced kill switch. Unlike a standard kill switch, which cuts your internet following a sudden VPN disconnect, an advanced one won’t let your device reconnect even if the VPN app is shut down.

Now we’ve covered the essentials, we can move on to where PIA really stands out: its extra security features. The VPN owns and operates private DNS servers, meaning no third parties get to see which websites you visit — it’s all handled by PIA from start to finish.

You can customize your VPN connection down to its minute details.

Unlike almost every other VPN, PIA lets you customize your encryption. For example, you can edit the port number used. We don’t recommend beginners do this, but power users will get a lot of utility from it.

Two other ‘nice-to-haves’ are its open-sourced apps and bug bounty program for spotting security defects. Again, this demonstrates how above and beyond PIA is willing to go to protect your data.

While we have very little to criticise, we’d like to see PIA implement colocated servers across its network. This means the VPN service directly owns its VPN servers and has sole access to them, sharply reducing third-party interference. At the time of writing, PIA only provides colocated servers in 9 countries, which is around 10% of its total coverage.

We’d also like to see the VPN follow ExpressVPN’s and NordVPN’s lead by implementing post-quantum protection. This would safeguard the VPN against quantum decryption which is far more effective at cracking traditional encryption methods.

The majority of PIA’s servers are in Europe and North America, though its global spread is impressive.

PIA’s US server coverage is matched only by ExpressVPN.

But what really stood out for us is its complete coverage of the US. There is a VPN server located in each US state, which allows you to get an American VPN IP address and bypass geo-restrictions even at a regional level. Only ExpressVPN can offer comparable US coverage.

You can see how Private Internet Access’ server network compares to other VPN services in the table below:

As you can see, PIA has the best distribution of servers across its network of any VPN we review. The end result is a massively reduced risk of server congestion, ensuring you get the fastest possible network speeds.

All of PIA’s apps are compact and stylish, featuring a simple dark-gray background with white text and green and orange highlights to indicate connection status. We found this very easy to read, and we didn’t notice any eye strain when testing, even when switching to its lighter background.

You can explore how the user experience of each app differs, below:

Out of the 61 VPN services we’ve tested, PIA performs best for file-sharing. Its slowdown in P2P speed is so negligible that we almost forgot we were using a VPN — even for 20GB+ downloads.

For example, it took us 4 minutes and 40 seconds on our WiFi to torrent the complete works of William Shakespeare, which increased to just 5 minutes when connected to a PIA server.

We downloaded multiple test files without any issues.

Our user experience was pretty flawless, too. Since torrenting is permitted on all PIA servers and protocols, you can simply connect to your nearest server and start downloading. This is so much easier than having to select a P2P-optimized first, as is the case with NordVPN and Proton VPN.

MACE, the VPN service’s built-in ad blocker, can also help block any trackers or malware you come across in the process.

On top of this, the VPN’s port forwarding feature lets you increase the number of torrenting peers you can communicate with, drastically improving upload speeds.

Although, it’s important to note that the VPN uses dynamic port forwarding, meaning your port number changes each time you connect. As a result, you must manually add your port number to your torrent client in each instance, otherwise your real IP may leak.

The VPN service provides browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox that secure your traffic using Squid HTTPS. Many VPNs, like PrivateVPN and IPVanish, overlook browser extensions so we’re glad to see this isn’t the case with PIA.

That said, your options are quite limited if you want to use PIA on a device that doesn’t support VPN software. Its Smart DNS proxy is one option, but its inability to work with any streaming services renders it fairly useless.

Alternatively, you can install the VPN on DD-WRT, Merlin, Pfsense, and OpenWRT/LEDE routers. But it only supports manual installation which is slow, difficult, and limits you to a single server location. We don’t recommend doing this (and neither does PIA itself).

MACE Blocks All Ads

We can’t praise PIA’s ad and tracker blocker enough. MACE is available on all PIA apps (except iOS), and it blocked 100% of ads and 83% of trackers in our test.

It’s also included in all PIA subscriptions, at no extra cost.

It takes just one click to activate PIA MACE.

PIA’s Shadowsocks Beats Censorship

We regularly test PIA’s ability to bypass online censorship by remotely connecting to our test server in Shaghai. Once connected, we use the VPN to try and unblock websites inside China.

Over the past three months, the VPN has recorded an uptime of 50% in China. That’s not quite reliable enough to rank it among the leading anti-censorship VPNs, but it sits just outside the top five.

To bypass the Great Firewall with PIA, use the OpenVPN protocol and enable the Shadowsocks proxy within the app’s settings.

You can also watch the video below for a walkthrough on how to do this:

Customizable Split Tunneling for Power Users

Aside from iOS, all of PIA’s apps include split tunneling. This feature lets you designate specific apps for the VPN tunnel and includes the option of ‘inverse split tunneling’ if you want to select apps for exclusion instead.

We tailored PIA’s split tunneling to suit our setup.

PIA is also unique in that it allows you to designate traffic for the VPN tunnel not just by app, which is common among VPNs, but also by IP address — similar to what AirVPN does.

This level of customization and user-friendliness is unmatched.

Multi-hop Uses an Encrypted Proxy Server

PIA lets you route your traffic through a VPN server and a proxy to create a multi-hop connection.

While we’d prefer a second VPN server, a proxy IP address has the added benefit of hiding the fact that you’re using a VPN. This can be useful if you need to obfuscate your VPN connection from local or national censorship.

You can choose between a Shadowsocks or SOCKS5 proxy as the additional ‘hop’. Your connection is encrypted throughout, ensuring your personal data remains secure.

For a more conventional double VPN setup, we suggest using IPVanish. It encrypts your connection with two VPN servers and lets you choose both locations.

Dedicated IP Isn’t Great for Streaming

PIA also offers dedicated IP addresses. These IP addresses are unique to you and remain the same every time you connect.

Disappointingly, they cost an extra $5.00 per month and don’t work with any streaming services.

Instead, PIA’s dedicated IP feature is meant for accessing sites that use an allowlist. For example, to access online banking or a remote server.

With such limited use cases, we recommend you avoid this feature unless you have a specific reason for using it.