VPNBook Review

Here’s everything that VPNBook logs, as far as we could tell from the information available:

You should not trust VPNBook to keep your IP address and browsing history private. We strongly believe that a VPN retaining your true IP address is unacceptable. It’s even worse if the VPN isn’t clear on how long this data is stored for and how it is secured on servers.

VPNBook’s Privacy Policy is extremely short and vague.

This VPN service logs your IP address and are claimed to be deleted after one week. There is no available information about how VPNBook’s servers are protected, or whether they’re leased from a third party.

Unclear Ownership & Lacking Company Transparency

There is no information online relating to VPNBook. It does not disclose who owns the company, the behind it, or how it’s run.

VPNBook does disclose that it is based in Switzerland: ordinarily we’d praise that as an excellent jurisdiction with robust privacy laws, but those laws can only go so far in protecting users when such incredibly revealing personal data is logged by a VPN.

To reiterate: if you concerned about your online privacy and anonymity, then you should not use VPNBook.

Here’s a table showing Free VPN by VPNBook’s speed test results:

As the data above shows, VPNBook slowed our download speeds by 87% on a local connection in the US.

This makes VPNBook one of the slowest free VPNs we’ve ever tested and no way near as good as Windscribe Free and Proton VPN Free.

High Latency

In our recent 2024 speed tests, we recorded ping times of 29ms connected to a local US server. In contrast, Windscribe Free only has ping times around 5ms.

The last time we tested VPNBook with streaming services it didn’t work with a single one. It has since improved to unblock HBO Max, which honestly surprised us. There are plenty of great VPNs that can’t manage that.

VPNBook did unblock HBOMax in our testing, but you shouldn’t rely on it to do so.

However, we still don’t recommend using it to stream HBO Max. In fact connection speeds were so slow on its US UDP server that videos only played in blurry low-resolution.

We couldn’t log into Netflix while connected to that same US server, and every other server location wouldn’t even allow us to load the Netflix website. The lack of a UK VPNBook server also means that we can’t test it for UK-exclusive streaming sites like BBC iPlayer.

Here’s a quick summary of showing how VPNBook performed in our torrenting tests:

VPNBook allows P2P traffic on two servers: Germany and Poland. If you’re using the VPNBook Android application, rather than the OpenVPN app, then you can only torrent on the Germany server.

We tried torrenting on the other servers to see what would happen, but VPNBook simply blocked our download.

Downloading via VPNBook’s Germany server was painfully slow. In fact, VPNBook is the second-slowest torrenting VPN we’ve ever tested.

Any files large enough to require torrenting to download will take hours to complete if you use VPNBook.

Speeds aside, we advise you don’t use VPNBook for torrenting because VPNBook logs your IP address, which could reveal your file-sharing activities.

There’s also no VPN kill switch, which heightens the risk of your IP address being exposed and ruining your anonymity. If VPNBook fails (which it may well do) your real IP address would be exposed to every other torrenter downloading the same file as you, as well as your ISP.

Here’s a table showing the encryption ciphers, connection protocols, and security features available with VPNBook:

VPNBook supports OpenVPN. It’s our preferred VPN protocol – it’s open-source, secure, and pretty fast, too. Coupled with AES-128 or AES-256 ciphers, it’s really safe.

But that’s where the positives end for VPNBook.

Alongside OpenVPN, VPNBook provides PPTP configuration files. While PPTP is easier to install on popular devices, it’s not safe to use.

In fact, PPTP can be hacked in minutes. Sadly it’s not uncommon for poor-quality VPNs to use weak protocols – X-VPN is another popular VPN that uses outdated protocols.

Even if you stick with OpenVPN, VPNBook doesn’t come with a VPN kill switch, which may put your personal details at risk.

Should the VPN disconnect suddenly, your IP address would be exposed to your ISP and any other snooping third parties.

Even when the VPN was properly connected, we experienced DNS leaks during our testing:

DNS leaks mean that all your browser requests are visible to your ISP.

This means that our ISP can still see all of the websites we visited while using the VPN.

VPNBook isn’t a very safe VPN to use. Unlike other VPNs that lack security extras, VPNBook doesn’t have the advantage of being super easy to use and beginner-friendly to make up for it either.

Don’t attempt to use VPNBook to access blocked websites in China, Russia, Iran, the UAE, or anywhere else.

Most importantly, VPNBook doesn’t come with any obfuscation tools to bypass the Great Firewall. OpenVPN is its only secure protocol, and it’s easily identified by national censorship apparatuses like the Great Firewall of China.

Unsurprisingly, we couldn’t unblock any website while using VPNBook on our test server located in Shanghai.

Here are the customer support features that VPNBook offers:

VPNBook’s customer service is awful.

There are a few simple setup guides for popular platforms, but some of them are outdated, leaving you to work out how to set up VPNBook on your own. We always expect a much deeper level of support, but with an unconventional VPN like VPNBook it’s more necessary than ever – IVPN, for example, has dozens of guides to help users.

The website looks dated and is filled with incorrect information about the available servers and streaming compatibility.

The support email inbox sends out automated responses saying “due to the large number of emails we receive every day, we are unable to respond to every email individually.” We’ve never received a response to our inquiries.