TunnelBear Free Review

TunnelBear was independently founded in 2011, but is now owned by McAfee, an American security software giant based in California.

TunnelBear itself is located in Toronto, Canada. This means 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.

But does any of that actually matter?

We aren’t at all concerned by it, as TunnelBear Free doesn’t collect any information that could trace your online activity back to you.

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

TunnelBear Free is pretty close to zero-logs, collecting very minimal data, including bandwidth used, lifetime connections and whether you’ve connected in the last month.

The following basic connection metadata is stored and used for TunnelBear customer support:

• Your OS version
• The version of the TunnelBear app you use
• Total bandwidth used this month
• Whether or not you’ve connected in the last month

So, TunnelBear does log some data, but this is not personally identifiable and is used for troubleshooting purposes to monitor data caps on the free plan. In other words: it’s safe. 

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 annual audit of its methodology and a transparency report and makes this available for the public to read.

Download speed without TunnelBear Free: 95Mbps

Download speed with TunnelBear Free: 52Mbps

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

TunnelBear Free’s speed was surprisingly good – almost as fast as the premium service. It allows for buffer-free streaming and multiple file downloads. 

But, TunnelBear Free’s performance is limited to a 500MB monthly data cap. This made testing it very time-consuming, as we kept reaching our bandwidth limit and had to create four different accounts. 

Local latency was also one of the lowest we’ve seen from a free VPN – just 8ms in London (where we’re based). Although, keen gamers may want to consider alternatives that offer even lower ping times, such as one of our top picks, IPVanish. 

For a free VPN service, TunnelBear Free’s server network is a decent size: there are 23 countries available. The popular locations are covered, and there are a few located in Asia and one in South America, but none in Africa. If you live far away from the servers you may suffer poor VPN performance. 

TunnelBear Free has no city-level VPN server choice, but this is also the case with the premium service.

TunnelBear Free is absolutely no good for streaming.

It doesn’t work for Netflix or BBC iPlayer, and the stingy 500MB monthly data cap means that you cannot watch more than half an hour of HD video content anyway.

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.

But is TunnelBear Free good for torrenting? We can confirm that TunnelBear Free is a safe VPN that allows torrenting in all locations.

However, you’re not going to be able to upload or download much content without running out of data. This is a shame considering the great local server speeds and the robust privacy policy.

TunnelBear Free has a VPN kill switch which should help keep you secure while torrenting, which is good, while its logging policy means your activities are kept private.

If you’re looking to torrent with a VPN, it’s best to visit our best free VPNs for torrenting here.

China’s harsh restrictions on VPN providers means that TunnelBear Free won’t work within the country.

TunnelBear Free does offer additional obfuscation tools to help bypass the Great Firewall (GhostBear mode), but it isn’t guaranteed to work 100% of the time. Some complain that it doesn’t work at all.

If you need a VPN for China that definitely works, consult our guide to the Best VPN for China.

Still, TunnelBear Free remains a decent option for other high-censorship countries, like Turkey and the UAE, thanks to the GhostBear protocol designed to disguise your connection to a VPN.

The data cap, again, is an issue, but it will do the job if you need to quickly access a few government-blocked sites.

 

Is TunnelBear Free safe? Well, it provides the same level of privacy as its paid service, which is great. 

OpenVPN and IKEv2 are the VPN protocols used for the Windows and iOS, and OpenVPN is exclusively used for MacOS and Android. OpenVPN is our preferred protocol for its balance of performance and privacy but IKEv2 is very secure, too. 

On top of that, TunnelBear Free’s encryption is via top cipher AES-256.

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

If you like bears, you’ll love TunnelBear’s design. All you have to do is click on a server location on an interactive world map and wait for the bear to tunnel through the earth and pop out in your chosen server location. Its apps are really simple to install and use.

You can keep track of your bandwidth usage, which is a nice touch too. The downside of TunnelBear Free’s apps is that you don’t receive a pop-up when you’ve exceeded your limit. That means if you don’t have Vigilant Mode mode on, your true IP address will be exposed without you knowing.

It’s refreshing to see a free VPN offering advanced settings. Still, swiping around TunnelBear’s world map to find a server location can get boring after you’ve already done it a few times.

TunnelBear’s customer support for free users is up there with some of the best we’ve seen from a complimentary service.

The online resources are put together well and make an effort to ensure accessibility for beginners. 

However, as VPN customer support goes, TunnelBear is quite basic and doesn’t offer much to experienced users who want detailed answers.

There’s also no TunnelBear live chat, only the help of Support Bears 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.