X-VPN Review

X-VPN is owned by Free Connected Limited, which was incorporated in July 2017 and is based in Hong Kong.

The Free Connected Limited website states that Free Connected Limited believes in “equal and fair access” to an internet “built on privacy, security, and transparency.”

From a data retention point of view, Hong Kong is a privacy-friendly VPN jurisdiction. It’s not part of the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance either.

However, our free VPN ownership investigation revealed that X-VPN does have links to mainland China, which is a privacy concern.

Jin Li, the company’s director, and Chengdu Zhuozhuo Technology Co, the sole shareholder, are based in the Sichuan province of China.

X-VPN also says it will not disclose your information “unless in response to law enforcement requests when the Service is being used contrary to these Terms and applicable laws.”

We’ll now review X-VPN’s logging policy to see how much of a privacy concern this is.

X-VPN’s logging policy is clear and transparent but it does collect quite a lot of user data including:

• Chosen VPN server
• VPN connection timestamp (date and time)
• Choice of VPN protocol
• Network type
• Server CPU load and bandwidth

These logs are stored for 96 hours before being erased and are collected for troubleshooting and VPN service optimization.

When you open the app, X-VPN also logs:

• Device information
• App version
• Data usage
• City-level location

This information is used to help X-VPN with product development, and can be deleted upon request.

X-VPN also collects anonymous aggregated data of the sites visited via its servers, however none of these can be attributed to a specific user.

Most importantly X-VPN doesn’t store user IP addresses.

This logging policy should satisfy most users, but read our Private Internet Access review for a top-rated no-logs VPN.

Before reading these results you should know that X-VPN doesn’t use standard VPN protocols like OpenVPN, which we usually use for our tests.

Because of that it’s not fair to compare speeds like-for-like with other VPNs we’ve reviewed.

X-VPN employs a proprietary protocol named ‘Protocol-X’, but confusingly this isn’t the terminology used within the VPN apps, where you’ll find protocols labeled ‘Protocol A’ through to ‘Protocol I’.

For these speed tests we used protocol H, which claims to provide the highest level of security and the fastest speeds of all the protocols on offer.

Despite selecting the fastest protocol available X-VPN’s speeds were fairly mediocre.

The VPN performed well with speedy downloads and low ping times when we connected to nearby servers, losing about 15% of our normal internet download speeds. However, it was slow on longer distance connections, such as the UK to the US and beyond.

If you don’t want to connect into foreign countries then you shouldn’t notice much of a difference to your internet speeds when using X-VPN.

The situation is much worse over long distances, though:

• USA: 22Mbps (download) & 5Mbps (upload)
• Netherlands: 81Mbps (download) & 44Mbps (upload)
• Singapore: 29Mbps (download) & 4Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 12Mbps (download) & 2Mbps (upload)

As long as you connect to servers close to your physical location, X-VPN should be fast enough for most online activities including 4K streaming, torrenting, and gaming.

X-VPN comes with servers optimized for streaming popular services like Netflix and BBC iPlayer.

Just select one of the servers from the ‘Streaming’ tab within the app and you’ll be able to watch all your favorite shows immediately.

It’s very surprising that X-VPN is still able to stream US Netflix and BBC iPlayer, especially the latter. Many VPN services struggle to access the BBC’s video platform.

In addition to the US library, we were also able to unlock Netflix in the UK, Spain, and Brazil through their respective dedicated servers.

Other services like Disney+, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and HBO Max were no problem at all for X-VPN, all unlocked with ease.

X-VPN may have added a kill switch to its apps, which is incredibly important for private torrenting, it’s still a poor torrenting VPN.

Another issue is that there’s no mention of torrenting anywhere on X-VPN’s website or privacy policy. In the past, live chat support agents have told us that torrenting is only permitted on some servers, but not told us which. When we asked most recently we didn’t get a response at all.

Getting a VPN to work consistently in China is perhaps the greatest challenge any service faces.

Even being able to bypass the Great Firewall just once is impressive, but doing it with consistency over long periods of time is the true test. If X-VPN can keep up this level of reliability over six months to a year then its score will certainly increase.

While using protocols B, D, E, and F on a Windows PC we were able to access blocked sites like YouTube and Wikipedia from our Chinese test server with no issues.

X-VPN uses proprietary protocols rather than the standard ones – these are labeled from A to I and, according to X-VPN’s website, vary in speed and security levels.

While X-VPN claims its proprietary technology is better than the standard protocols, there’s no way to know this for sure because the company doesn’t publish any technical details about it.

Until we know more details about the technology, we’d rather stick with VPN services that use standard protocols like OpenVPN, which is open-source and has been through thorough testing.

For all we know one of these protocols might even be OpenVPN, but there’s no way to find out.

Here’s what X-VPN has to say about its proprietary protocol, named ‘X’:

According to X-VPN’s website, the service uses AES-256 cipher to encrypt traffic at least, which is considered very secure.

It has also recently introduced a kill switch on Windows, MacOS, iOS, and Android, which is extremely important and long-overdue.

On Android there’s a split tunneling feature called Application Control, which allows you to choose which apps go through the VPN tunnel, but that’s it for configurable options.

Even then, there’s a pop-up warning Windows users that the application control may lead to connection issues.

On the plus side, the main VPN apps didn’t leak during our IP, DNS, and WebRTC leak tests:

However, we found something stranger than a normal data leak. When connecting to the US, X-VPN gave us a French IP address multiple times. And when connecting to Germany it gave us a US IP address.

This happened repeatedly until we dived deeper into the server menu and chose a specific city-level server to connect to.

And as mentioned earlier, the Chrome extension doesn’t protect against WebRTC leaks.

X-VPN live chat support is not at all reliable.

We were told that live chat is available Monday to Saturday but even within those days we were left waiting hours for a response.

When an agent did eventually answer they lacked technical knowledge and asked us to send an email with our questions for the manager.

It took a couple of days for the manager to reply, and they still didn’t answer all of our questions.

X-VPN’s online resources are nothing special, either.

There are a few basic setup articles and some general FAQs, but it lacks troubleshooting and technical resources.

There seems to be quite a lot of information on the website that conflicts with what customer support told us, too. While it has clearly been updated recently (and is a big improvement on what it used to be) it still has a long way to go.