ZoogVPN Review

ZoogVPN was founded in May 2013 by “a bunch of networking geeks and techies.” Their names are George Agal, Alex Ovan, and Sam Jones. We couldn’t find any information about them online, though.

The VPN service is owned by Zoog Services IKE, which is now based in Greece following its incorporation in the Isle of Man, a self-governing British Crown Dependency (and frequent tax haven).

Zoog Services provides an address on its website, which isn’t as common in the VPN industry as we’d like it to be.

Greece isn’t part of the 14-Eyes international intelligence-sharing alliance. This is a positive, but it is a member of the EU, which still engages in data sharing between member states.

In order to find out what that means for you, let’s take a look at ZoogVPN’s privacy policy.

If you had any concerns regarding ZoogVPN’s Greek jurisdiction – don’t. This VPN is strictly no-logs.

The only thing that Zoog does collect, aside from your email address, is aggregated information about the total upload and download data transferred on its servers. This is used to maintain the VPN service.

None of this information is shared with any other company or party, save for customer emails in cases where they’re required to verify payment (for example with PayPal or your credit card provider).

Even more reassuringly, ZoogVPN also publishes a regular warrant canary, which currently states that company has received:

• 0 – National Security letters
• 0 – Gag orders
• 0 – Warrants or subpoenas from a government organization

So far so good.

Next we’ll see if ZoogVPN’s speeds are as pleasing as its approach to privacy.

ZoogVPN doesn’t provide any additional features when it comes to security, but it does include the bare essentials. It supports OpenVPN by default – one of the most secure connection protocols available. Traffic is encrypted with AES-256, a cipher considered uncrackable.

Our tests detected no IP, DNS, or WebRTC leaks, and the VPN kill switch works as intended. Overall, ZoogVPN is a safe and secure VPN service that will effectively encrypt your browsing data and hide your IP address.

As well as OpenVPN, there’s also IKEv2/IPSec, L2TP/IPSec, and PPTP protocols available. The first two are fine but we absolutely don’t recommend PPTP, as it’s very insecure.

The iOS app runs exclusively on IKEv2/IPSec, a fairly new VPN protocol that is fast, safe, and particularly useful for mobile devices that dip in and out of WiFi and 4G.

ZoogVPN doesn’t have any advanced options, like split tunneling and Double VPN, but it does have a VPN kill switch for Windows and Mac, which is responsible for preventing personal data leaks should the VPN connection drop suddenly.

ZoogVPN also passed our tests for IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks:

As you can see, ZoogVPN relies on third-party DNS servers, which isn’t ideal. That said, OpenDNS is secure enough.

Overall, ZoogVPN provides basic security. It offers industry-standard encryption, OpenVPN, a functional kill switch and effective leak protection. This will protect your privacy on public WiFi networks, but if you’re looking for extensive security, we recommend looking elswhere.

ZoogVPN’s speeds didn’t disappoint – the VPN performed fantastically, both over short-distance connections and further afield.

Uploads and downloads were consistently quick enough for HD streaming and smooth torrenting when we connected to nearby VPN servers.

Download speed without ZoogVPN: 96.06Mbps
Download speed with ZoogVPN: 84.35Mbps
Our download speed loss when ZoogVPN is running: 12%

Ping times were a little less impressive, but shouldn’t affect the vast majority of users. For a lesser-known product, ZoogVPN’s speeds are very, very good.

Here’s a quick look at how well ZoogVPN performed internationally:

USA: 59Mbps (download) & 73Mbps (upload)
Germany: 74Mbps (download) & 94Mpbs (upload)
Japan: 23Mbps (download) & 22Mbps (upload)
Australia: 33Mbps (download) & 31Mbps (upload)

These speeds will enable you to stream, torrent and browse to your heart’s content.

ZoogVPN’s server network is underwhelming at just under 50 physical servers located in 25 countries. The best VPNs have hundreds, if not thousands, of servers.

To make matters worse, we experienced quite a lot of server connection failures during our tests, further narrowing the choice of available locations.

The vast majority of ZoogVPN’s servers are situated in Europe and North America, but there are a handful in Asia-Pacific too.

If you live in South America there’s just one server in Chile, and for those in Africa the only server on the continent is located in South Africa.

ZoogVPN’s website claims that there are “thousands” of shared IP addresses available to users, which should go some way to reducing server congestion.

As is expected for such a small VPN server network, ZoogVPN doesn’t provide city-level servers in many countries, but there are two options in Germany and eight in the US.

If you need more server choice then you’ll find plenty on our list of the top five VPNs for 2021.

ZoogVPN provides a bunch of streaming-friendly servers in several locations – they’re clearly marked with a play button symbol.

They unlock a variety of streaming services including Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Disney+ – all of which we found worked during our tests.

You can easily find out which servers work with your favorite streaming service on ZoogVPN’s network status page.

As for the video quality, ZoogVPN’s speeds are more than good enough for HD streaming with little buffering.

ZoogVPN allows torrenting and P2P traffic, but only on some of its VPN servers.

These P2P-friendly servers are clearly marked within the app’s server locations list, and span 16 countries including Canada, the US, and a handful of servers in Europe and Asia-Pacific.

ZoogVPN’s no-logs policy will be attractive for torrenting fans. So will the VPN kill switch, which prevents your IP address from being exposed to peers and your ISP should the VPN connection drop.

It’s hard to say for sure whether ZoogVPN can be used to consistently bypass internet censors in China. But we find it unlikely.

That said, the Windows and Android VPN apps do have ZoogVPN Shadowing – an extra obfuscation tool designed to make VPN traffic look like normal internet traffic in order to help you beat censorship blocks.

It’s a promising sign, and will almost certainly do the trick in slightly less heavily censored countries like Russia and the UAE, but it’s a fairly recent development and we can’t be sure that it works reliably in China yet.

For now, we recommend you use an effective anti-censorship VPN service like ExpressVPN.

ZoogVPN’s apps will be immediately familiar to anyone who’s ever used a VPN before, and intuitive to anyone who hasn’t.

After a quick and easy setup, the ZoogVPN app displays a big central connect button and a server list sorted in alphabetical order.

There’s not many options to play around with – just a choice of protocol and a kill switch toggle.

This is reasonable enough. But when you experience frequent connection failures ZoogVPN’s ease of use score plummets. On several occasions, we waited a long time for the VPN to connect only for it to fail altogether.

If you’re planning on using a VPN frequently, ZoogVPN might become frustrating quite quickly.

While only available intermittently, ZoogVPN’s live chat support is useful for quick answers to simple questions.

For more technical questions we were told to contact ‘Level 2 Support’ via email.

We waited several hours for a response, but replies were helpful when they eventually came.

There’s a basic FAQ section on the ZoogVPN website, along with setup wizards for numerous platforms, but the online resources are far from comprehensive.

ZoogVPN accepts the standard payment methods including credit and debit cards, PayPal, and Bitcoin.

It also accepts payments via Paymentwall, which lets you use various international methods such as AliPay.

ZoogVPN offers a seven-day money-back guarantee for users that paid with credit/debit cards or PayPal, but it comes with some terms.

1. You aren’t eligible for a full refund if you’ve used more than 2GB of data, but ZoogVPN may offer a partial refund at its discretion.
2. You may only receive a partial refund if “only some of the desired services are not availalbe [sic].”
3. Even if you do qualify for a refund you’ll be subject to a 5% admin fee.

There’s a free version of ZoogVPN available, too, but we would strongly recommend you opt for the premium version. The free version of ZoogVPN limits you to 10GB of data and three VPN server locations. It’s limited but it’s safe.

ZoogVPN has one of the best free services

ZoogVPN has a completely free VPN service. You can sign-up easily with no payment details required. ZoogVPN Free gives you access to three server locations: the US (Washington), UK (London), and the Netherlands (Amsterdam).

The service is limited to 11GB of data per month. While this is restrictive, it’s actually one of the most generous data allowances around. Only the no-limit ProtonVPN Free is better. Other restrictions include a one-device limit and inferior 128-bit encryption instead of AES-256.

You can stream with ZoogVPN Free. It works to unblock US Netflix. With 11GB you’ll be able to watch around 10 hours of content. Its Amsterdam server is also P2P-optimized, which means secure torrenting, too.

Most importantly, ZoogVPN Free is safe. Its security package is almost identical to the premium version (OpenVPN protocol is available) and is subject to the same zero-logs privacy policy. There’s no speed throttling or annoying pop-up ads, either.

If you want a simple, free VPN to browse safely with no strings attached, ZoogVPN is definitely worth checking out.

ZoogVPN is promising in some areas – it’s fast and private, and it unblocks US Netflix. But it falls down when it comes to stability. It often fails to connect to certain servers, which quickly becomes very frustrating.

ZoogVPN’s affordable price is undoubtedly attractive, but there are plenty of other VPN services around that offer much higher levels of quality for around the same monthly cost.

 

Additional research by David Hughes