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.

There is no WireGuard, which is a newer protocol that we like to see alongside OpenVPN. This speaks to ZoogVPN’s basic level of security investment.

The iOS app runs exclusively on IKEv2/IPSec, which 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 or 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:

We test from the UK. You can see that ZoogVPN is effectively hiding our IP address.

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

ZoogVPN gets the basics of security right, so it’s safe to use. But it’s not offering anything unique or advanced for experienced VPN users.

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.

Here are our local speed test results in full:

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.

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

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

But they don’t always work; we managed to unlock Amazon Prime Video, BBC iPlayer, Disney+, and ITV Hub. We failed to get access to any Netflix library, including the US one.

You can easily find out which servers are intended to 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 has P2P servers optimized for torrenting, but only on some of its VPN servers.

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

We picked up a fast average bitrate when using these servers – 9.6 MiB/s.

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.

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.