StrongVPN Review

The StrongVPN VPN service was launched in 2005 by Strong Technology, LLC. StrongVPN has changed hands a number of times over the years, most recently in 2019 when it was acquired by the public company J2 Global.

StrongVPN Technology and J2 Global operate under the jurisdiction of the USA, which is one of the least privacy-friendly locations in the world.

In August 2020, Strong Technology also acquired ibVPN, a competing VPN company.

The VPN service states that it will comply with valid subpoena requests, but it can’t provide information that it does not have.

That’s because StrongVPN doesn’t collect any customer activity logs so there’s no way of tying down any web activity to an individual user.

StrongVPN has a very strict zero-logs policy in place.

The VPN doesn’t collect or log any traffic or use of its VPN service. This includes even basic connection metadata such as timestamps, chosen server or bandwidth consumed.

Because it collects absolutely no customer data, there is no way any of your web browsing activity can be traced back to you as an individual, which is great news.

StrongVPN’s speeds are more than fast enough for HD streaming, both for same-country connections and longer distance ones. You can expect very quick speeds connecting out to the US from Europe, too.

Download speed without StrongVPN: 93.98Mbps

Download speed with StrongVPN: 84.24Mbps

Our download speed loss when StrongVPN is running: 10%

Latency was rather high though, at 16ms on same-country connections. Considering some VPN  services registered ping times of less than 1ms, keen gamers should take a look at these VPNs.

Upload speeds were very fast too, which is great news for torrenters.

We tested StrongVPN’s average speeds connecting from the UK out to a range of locations around the world:

• USA: 58Mbps (down) & 33Mbps (up)
• Germany: 83Mbps (down) & 76Mbps (up)
• Singapore: 19Mbps (down) & 1Mbps (up)
• Australia: 28Mbps (down) & 7Mbps (up)

Find out more about our VPN speed testing.

StrongVPN’s server network is on the small side, with around 950 servers spread across over 39 countries. We’d like to see StrongVPN serve more countries – ideally 50 or more – with better coverage of Africa and specific countries like New Zealand.

Here are some of the countries you can connect to with StrongVPN:

• Argentina
• Australia
• Brazil
• Canada
• Chile
• Colombia
• Costa Rica
• Cyprus
• Czech Republic
• Estonia
• France
• Germany
• Hong Kong
• India
• Ireland
• Israel
• Italy
• Japan
• Latvia
• Luxembourg
• Malaysia
• Mexico
• Netherlands
• Norway
• Philippines
• Poland
• Portugal
• Romania
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Spain
• Sweden
• Switzerland
• Taiwan
• Turkey
• UK
• US

StrongVPN also operates own its own servers just like its ‘sister’ VPN IPVanish.

Multi-city servers can be found in:

• US (15 cities)
• UK (6)
• Canada (3)
• Australia (2, no Perth)
• Germany (2)
• Brazil (2)

There is good server coverage in Asia with servers located in Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan. South America counts servers in Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. However, the only servers in Africa are located in South Africa.

You can see the complete list of StrongVPN’s servers via the button below, including the VPN protocol available on each server.

On the plus-side, StrongVPN does make a very high number of IP addresses available to its customers – almost 60,000 – which is great to maintain good speeds.

StrongVPN recently started working again with US Netflix on several of its US servers, after weeks of being completely blocked.

There are no dedicated streaming servers, which makes the task more difficult, but you shouldn’t find it too hard to find a server that works.

Streaming BBC iPlayer is a different story. StrongVPN unblocks iPlayer inconsistently, working on some days but not others.

It did work with BBC iPlayer in our most recent tests, though. These VPN services will on the other hand work more reliably with BBC iPlayer.

Torrenting and P2P activity is allowed on all StrongVPN servers.

Download and upload speeds were good, and a strict no-logs policy means all your online activity remains private.

What’s more, StrongVPN also has a VPN kill switch and we didn’t detect any IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks in our latest round of testing (more on this below).

StrongVPN is still a fairly good option to bypass aggressive web blocks in highly censored countries like China, Iran, Turkey and the UAE.

The additional obfuscation tools you get with StrongVPN are very useful to evade online censorship. It further scrambles your VPN connection, making it very hard to detect.

Keep in mind that the StrongVPN website is blocked in China, and possibly in other high censorship countries too, so we recommend you download and set up StrongVPN before you travel there.

If you are able to access the website, StrongVPN gives useful advice about connecting in China:

StrongVPN is a safe VPN service, but it isn’t the most secure VPN provider we’ve reviewed.

On one hand, it has a VPN kill switch which prevents your true IP address from being exposed, it uses AES-256 encryption, and it operates its own DNS servers, meaning none of your web traffic will be routed through third-party servers.

We were also pleased to detect no DNS or IP leaks in our latest tests.

So, why is it not the most secure VPN?

Mainly because the very secure and fast OpenVPN protocol isn’t available on all servers – in fact, the vast majority of StrongVPN’s servers use the vastly outdated and insecure PPTP protocol.

StrongVPN also supports Wireguard on all its apps – a alternative to OpenVPN which is looking more and more likely to become the fastest option.

StrongVPN has recently updated its set of custom apps to make them far more accessible to inexperienced VPN users. The main screen is very stripped back, displaying only essential connection details.

A limited range of settings can be found behind the cog icon along the top of the app, however these are very basic.

The mobile apps are also very good; simple and effective with a big button in the middle of the screen, but lack some security features, such as a kill switch.

Sadly, StrongVPN no longer offers any browser extensions. If you’re looking for a VPN with browser extensions, check out our ExpressVPN review, our top VPN choice for Chrome and Firefox.

Live chat is available 24/7, but most of the time we just ended up talking to a sales agent who copied and pasted answers from the FAQs section.

This was a little disappointing, but whenever they couldn’t solve our problems they did forward our details on to the tech team, who were always quick to respond.

The official StrongVPN website provides a great range of setup manuals for many different devices, including video tutorials and screenshots.

For basic instructions, the FAQ section should do the job, but for anything beyond simple help you’ll have to contact their customer support team.

StrongVPN accepts the majority of standard payment options including most major credit and debit cards, PayPal and Alipay.

It’s disappointing to see no option to pay in cryptocurrencies, however.

The VPN service also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee, in place of a true VPN free trial.

This is for customers who are “less than 100% satisfied with the StrongVPN service.” There are no hidden restrictions or data caps during the 30-day refund period.

StrongVPN is a good VPN that is fast, unblocks many popular streaming platforms, and is great for torrenting. StrongDNS also allows users to use the VPN service with AppleTV and gaming consoles.

We also like that StrongVPN operates a no-logs policy, and it allows up to 12 simultaneous connections, which is very generous. Some of its privacy features need to be improved, and the server network isn’t as extensive as it needs to be to compete with bigger VPN services.

Nevertheless, StrongVPN is still a good VPN that does the basics right, and which we recommend to novice VPN users.

Additional research by Liam Mullally