TunnelBear Free Review

Download speed without TunnelBear Free: 95Mbps

Download speed with TunnelBear Free: 52Mbps

Our download speed loss when TunnelBear Free is running: 46%

Testing TunnelBear Free’s performance was very time-consuming thanks to the highly limiting 500MB monthly data cap. We had to create four different accounts to test the speeds in nine different countries as we kept reaching our bandwidth limit.

Disregarding that, the performance was surprisingly good – almost as quick as the premium service, allowing for buffer-free streaming and multiple file downloads.

Local latency was also one of the lowest we’ve seen from a free provider, just 8ms in London. Uploads were also pretty promising, but less consistent, across the board. Keen gamers may want to consider alternatives that offer even lower ping times, such as one of our top picks, IPVanish.

TunnelBear Free is absolutely no good for streaming or torrenting. Not only were we not able to stream content from either Netflix or BBC iPlayer, the stingy 500MB monthly data cap means that you won’t be able to watch more than half an hour of HD video content.

If you’re looking for quick, easy access to popular streaming sites, you’re most likely going to have to consider a paid provider – our top pick is ExpressVPN.

TunnelBear Free permits torrenting in all locations. Unfortunately, you’re not going to be able to upload or download much content without running out of data, which is a real shame considering the great local server speeds and robust privacy policy.

Looking to torrent with a VPN? See our best VPNs for torrenting here.

Ever since China started imposing harsher restrictions on VPN providers, we can’t recommend the free version of TunnelBear for use there.

The software does offer additional obfuscation tools to help you bypass the Great Firewall (GhostBear mode), it isn’t guaranteed to work 100% of the time, with some complaining that it won’t work at all.

Still, this is a decent option for high-censorship countries, thanks for its proprietary GhostBear protocol designed to disguise your connection to a VPN. The data cap is an issue but it’ll do the job if you just need to quickly access a few government-blocked sites.

TunnelBear is available on your usual platforms and possible to use with Linux with some manual configuration. There are no manual workarounds for any other platforms, including routers.

You can use the TunnelBear Free app on up to five devices at once, but we wouldn’t advise it considering the 500MB data cap.

TunnelBear Free provides the same level of privacy as its paid service, which is great. OpenVPN is also the default protocol, balancing security and performance. And encryption is is via top cipher AES-256.

We also really like ‘VigilantBear’, TunnelBear Free’s version of a VPN kill switch. Our tests also confirmed protection against DNS leaks.

TunnelBear’s logging policy is applicable to its premium and free users, and it’s one of the clearest policies we’ve seen so far.

TunnelBear Free is pretty close to zero-logs, collecting only basic connection metadata including bandwidth used, lifetime connections and whether you’ve connected in the last month. These are not personally identifiable and are used for troubleshooting purposes to monitor data caps on the free plan.

TunnelBear was also recently featured in a report conducted by the CDT (Center for Democracy & Technology) on Signals of Trustworthy VPNs. It states that each VPN server features full disk encryption, malware scans, and intrusion protection techniques, designed to protect user privacy as much as possible. It also releases an audit of its methodology on an annual basis and makes this available for the public to read.

TunnelBear’s headquarters are in Toronto, Canada, meaning it’s subject to intrusive surveillance laws and intelligence-sharing agreements with countries like the US and UK. The policy states that it will comply with Canadian law enforcement agencies if supplied subpoenas, warrants, or other legal documents.

However, this isn’t too much of a concern as it doesn’t collect any information that could trace your online activity back to you.

TunnelBear’s customer support for free users is up there with some of the best we’ve seen from any complimentary service. The online resources are well put together and make an effort to ensure an accessibility for beginners. However, it’s all quite basic and doesn’t offer much to experienced users who want detailed answers.

There’s noTunnelBear live chat, only customer support via email. We submitted a form and received a response 24 hours later, which is later than we’d like but it answered the question fine. You have to create an account in order to contact support, which is no good for those who have questions before they sign up.