PureVPN Review

PureVPN logs some data, and it has a checkered history cooperating with law enforcement. To privacy purists, this is enough to dismiss PureVPN.

However, it has since undergone a cleanup act by reducing the amount of data it logs and transferring its jurisdiction to the privacy-friendly British Virgin Islands, where there are no data retention laws.

We asked PureVPN whether keeping data runs the risk of exposing users. PureVPN played down the risk to privacy with the suggestion that your activity is linked to a pool of users, not an individual:

“…we rely on obscurity to reduce the chances of linking a user with a specific activity. Instead, each activity can be linked to a pool of users which gives the users plausible deniability.”

Plausible deniability is not the same as a zero logs guarantee. Compared to a VPN like Private Internet Access, which has had its no logs claims proven after server seizures, PureVPN has some catching up to do.

We appreciate PureVPN’s transparency reports that include stats about intellectual property complaints and legal requests. Reassuringly, at the bottom of each is the notice:

“PureVPN has been unable to comply with these requests as it does not maintain or log any data of its user’s online activity.”

Another substantial improvement was to elect for an “always-on” approach to auditing. This means that KPMG International Limited can conduct a surprise audit of PureVPN out of the blue.

KPMG has already twice performed audits of PureVPN and confirmed that it follows what’s stated in its privacy policy.

However, there are some flaws, as PureVPN clearly states it collects some data, so it’s not the same as saying it’s a “no logs” service.

Furthermore, its transparency reports have not been updated for a year, which should be rectified.

More troubling, we wanted to read these reports for ourselves, but discovered that they haven’t been made public. PureVPN quotes praise from these reports on its website but never links directly to them. This leaves room for doubt in our mind that everything in the report is glowing.

PureVPN has an extensive list of streaming servers listed under ‘Shortcuts’. We loved this in theory, but found that many didn’t work with the listed streaming site.

For example, there is a server shortcut for RaiPlay in Italy, but it didn’t unblock the service when we tried.

There are positives when it comes to UK services; we did find that PureVPN was reliable for watching BBC iPlayer, UK Netflix, and ITVX.

PureVPN offers a reliable way to watch BBC iPlayer outside the UK

We also managed to access Max from our London office, but we had to try a few servers before we found one that worked

To test PureVPN’s impact on our internet speed, we connected to servers in 6 continents and recorded its average speeds. You can examine the results below.

These results failed to impress us. A 19% speed loss connecting to our closest server is well below what we expect from a top service.

To put it in context, based on our data, PureVPN ranks 44th for overall speed performance. This places it in the bottom rung of VPNs we’ve tested.

We don’t expect every VPN to be like Hotspot Shield, which boasts a 2% local speed loss. But in a highly competitive market, PureVPN should be losing no more than 5% on local servers.

Internationally, PureVPN’s speed performance aligns more with what we’d expect, with an average download loss of 20%, which makes more sense considering the long-distances covered.

Light browsing of the web and even some standard definition streaming is fine, but we can’t recommend PureVPN for intensive tasks like multiple downloads or 4K streams.

We can confirm that PureVPN actually encrypts your data. We used Wireshark and found that our data was securely converted into indecipherable text.

PureVPN encrypts your internet traffic effectively.

However, PureVPN doesn’t go beyond the essentials of security. Its apps remain closed-source and hidden from public scrutiny, and there has been no independent audit of its security practices.

PureVPN has a feature called Connect to Fallback, which automatically switches you to another protocol should it struggle to establish a connection.

While this sounds smart, we actually think you should only use WireGuard, and we don’t like the idea of PureVPN dipping in and changing your protocol without you knowing.

The security issue arises when PureVPN tries to get us to switch to lesser protocols like IPSec, which is its automatic protocol. If you switch off ‘Automatic Protocol Selection’ you get a warning from PureVPN about possible connection issues.

PureVPN deters you from using anything other than the inferior IPSec protocol.

Unfortunately, we did encounter issues when not using the automatic protocol. On the iOS app, we couldn’t establish a connection at all unless it was the default IPSec protocol.

We’re worried that, rather than a last resort, PureVPN depends on the Connect to Fallback feature to function.

PureVPN has a kill switch, but we used our kill switch test tool and found that it’s not guaranteed to hide your IP address should your connection fail.

We discovered that when you change server location, your real IP address is exposed. It’s also exposed after you reconnect to the internet following an unexpected disconnection.

A kill switch should be watertight, shielding your IP address at all stages of an unexpected disconnect and reconnect process. VPNs like Mullvad, Mozilla VPN, and PIA all achieve this without issue.

In fairness to PureVPN, it warns you about this when changing servers, but it’s still a flaw to be fixed.

When it comes to servers, PureVPN makes up in quality what it lacks in quantity.

A network size of 68 countries is more than adequate for most, but many VPNs now have servers in 100+ countries, including CyberGhost and Surfshark.

PureVPN’s server count actually used to be twice the size, but it was deliberately halved in order to move away from virtual servers and build physical servers, which provide more stable connections.

At the same time, PureVPN did retain virtual servers in locations where physical infrastructure is hard to implement, such as Afghanistan, Bahrain, and Egypt.

It’s also been investing in 20Gbps servers across its network.

We appreciate that PureVPN has committed itself to offering IP addresses in underrepresented areas like Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and South America.

Given that internet access is frequently restricted in these regions, having nearby VPN servers is particularly crucial.

We found the PureVPN sign-up process more taxing than almost any other VPN.

First, you are presented with 4 different plans based on length of commitment, and each of these plans has 3 versions: Standard, Plus, and Max.

No matter which plan you select, you are then presented with a choice of add-ons, each of which costs an additional sum. There are options for dedicated IP, port forwarding, a dedicated server, residential network, and multi-login.

We had to spend a lot of time figuring out what exactly these features offer us, and whether they were worth adding at all.

What’s worse, we can name lots of VPNs that include worthwhile features like port forwarding multi-login as part of a standard VPN package.

For example, PIA and Surfshark allow you to log in to as many devices as you want. To connect to more than 10 devices with PureVPN, you need to pay at least $1.49 extra per month – and it’s still not unlimited.

If you choose the most expensive PureVPN plan and add each available feature, the checkout sum comes to a whopping $70.00 per month.

PureVPN can only be relying on people’s ignorance when charging such sums.

Using the Standard plan, we were frustrated by the number of prompts asking us to upgrade to a more expensive subscription or buy additional features.

These features are visible in the app interface even though we decided against them at checkout.

For example, ‘Remove My Data’, ‘Password Manager’, and ‘Discover More’ take up valuable space in the menu and pollutes the interface with unnecessary noise. Similarly, there are prompts to get ‘Teams’, ‘PureKeep’, a residential network, and more.

Most of these flashy features are not necessary to a VPN, and this level of promotion made us feel PureVPN was eager to get more money from us, which is not a reassuring feeling from a VPN.

Having said that, the apps have been substantially improved since they were redesigned in December 2023. They are now easy-to-use, modern, and consistent in design across devices.

We were particularly fond of the ability to filter server types with easy toggles, listed as V, P2P, QR, and PF. The acronyms seem mysterious, but there are helpful explainers if you hover over each.

We also liked the Connection Details on the home screen that forefront’s information about what protocol you’re using, if the kill switch is on, and other information that is usually hidden in the settings menu.

PureVPN works well most of the time. However, after leaving it on for a few hours, our internet stopped working and this was only resolved when we reconnected to the VPN server.

It’s a small gripe and easy to fix, but VPNs like ExpressVPN can stay on all the time without you ever realizing it.

Another small but irritating thing was that every time we disconnected from a server, PureVPN launched a pop-up asking if the service is working for us. If you click ‘No’ it just asks again when you cease another connection.

There are a number of ways to customize your PureVPN experience, including toggles for ‘Auto-connect after wake’, ‘Auto-connect after launch’, ‘Prevent auto sleep’, and ‘Start on launch’. We didn’t feel the urge to use any of them, but it does have the security benefit of ensuring you never use the internet with a VPN connected.

We’re not comfortable recommending PureVPN if you regularly download torrent files.

It includes P2P servers, but it only covers around 50% of the network. As a result, some regions can’t torrent on local connections.

For example, if you live in the southern parts of Africa, your nearest torrenting server is Angola – thousands of miles away.

In addition, PureVPN’s torrenting speed is an average-at-best result of 8.1MiB/s. For contrast, our favorite VPN for torrenting, IPVanish, records an average bitrate of 9.9MiB/s.

Most worryingly, PureVPN’s imperfect privacy policy, controversial history, and faulty kill switch are risks to your anonymity.

To make matters worse, port forwarding is not included in the Standard plan, meaning torrenters looking for faster speeds are unable to find it.

There are no oversights in PureVPN’s app suite: every major device is covered.

You can install PureVPN on router, covering all devices connected to your home WiFi. The DD-WRT router applet is perhaps the most impressive offering. Very few VPNs have dedicated apps for routers. It’s also got a Linux GUI.

Once installed, you can access a GUI from your router’s login page that allows you to choose servers and enable various extra features. Alongside this are installation guides for many other routers.

However, we tried to set up PureVPN on our test Linksys router and found the process difficult. The guide screenshots were out of date and support was poor in assisting us.

PureVPN comes with a 10-device allowance, meaning that you can use PureVPN on 10 different devices at the same time. This is a very generous amount for one subscription cost, although not quite as generous as VPNs that have no device-limit, like IPVanish.

PureVPN’s Amazon Fire TV Stick is not the best one we’ve come across, but it’s still a good choice if you want to unblock the geo-restricted content.

It’s easy to navigate and lets you connect to your chosen server in just a few clicks.

There’s also a Kodi add-on, which isn’t common among VPN services. PureVPN might not be the best choice for Kodi, however, due to its imperfect logging policy.

Unfortunately there’s no Smart DNS available. VPNs like NordVPN are making streaming US content extremely easy with excellent Smart DNS tools, but PureVPN is lagging behind.

The ability to install PureVPN on a router means you can use it when gaming. The ping times were consistently low on our speed tests (6ms on IKEv2 and OpenVPN), meaning there’s less chance of lag, too.

PureVPN’s extensions are quite useful, and even come with some advanced features, like WebRTC Leak protection.

Most impressive is the GPS spoofer. These are rare to find and are usually exclusive to Android devices, as with Windscribe and Surfshark. It’s great to see PureVPN has one available for browsers.

We tested the GPS spoofer to see if our detected location matched our chosen server using a GPS coordinator. We were pleased to see that it worked, as you can see below.

PureVPN’s GPS spoofer worked to match our geolocation to our chosen server location.

PureVPN could develop extensions for Safari and Opera, and it’s important to remember that these are proxies and not VPNs, meaning they change your IP, but they don’t encrypt your device traffic.

Most of PureVPN’s additional features require additional payment, like dedicated IP, and many features we like to see aren’t available at all, like Double VPN.

Don’t expect it to work against censorship either. We tested it on our own Shanghai server and found that PureVPN was quickly detected by the Great Firewall.

We also have a complaint about how difficult it is to get customer support. Its live chat is maintained by bots and we waited 6 hours for a reply to our email from a human.

We were happy that split tunneling is included without extra charge; we used it to route select websites and apps outside the VPN encryption.

A tracker blocker is also included, but our tests showed that it only blocks 25% of ads and trackers. You need not use it when uBlock Origin blocks 99%.