PureVPN Review

PureVPN is one of the fastest VPN providers out there at the moment. As explained in the intro, it has servers in 140 countries and most countries come with multiple high-speed server configurations too.

We have tested PureVPN manually ourselves and have found only minor decreases in download speeds. We did not detect any issues at all when it comes to streaming or gaming. With PureVPN won’t even be noticing that you are using a VPN.

The only reason we can’t give PureVPN maximum score in this category is because there are some other VPN providers out there that provide somewhat (even if just marginally) better performance.

But PureVPN is certainly among the top VPN providers when it comes to speed.

Locations is where PureVPN truly excels. It has servers in 140 countries and 180 different locations worldwide. It has also more than 750 individual servers online. This makes it one of the top 5 VPN providers in regards to locations and servers.

In North America it has 210 servers.
In Europe it has 349.
Oceania 34.
Asia 120
Central America 8.
South America 26
Africa 36 servers.

In popular locations such as US, UK, Germany, Australia, Canada, France and India you can even choose city level servers.

Unfortunately we can’t recommend PureVPN when it comes to privacy. It appears that it only has PPTP, which is the weakest protocol. It also looks like the industry-standard OpenVPN protocols are not available.

In October 2017 it came to light that the FBI has gained access to an PureVPN user’s real IP address, despite the fact that PureVPN does not share data with the FBI, as it’s located in Hong Kong. For this reason I just can’t seriously recommend it for anyone looking for privacy.

It then turned out that PureVPN is actually logging the real IP addresses of its users, which, first of all, should not happen at all, second, users were not made aware of the fact that their IPs are being recorded.

More so, PureVPN always claimed that it was only recording users’ connection times and bandwidth used and not IP addresses. It obviously came to a massive shock to users when they found out that their real IP addresses are recorded too.

Nevertheless, PureVPN is still excellent if all you do is wanting to have access to blocked content and access public free wifi. It has a killswitch as well as several high-end encryption options which makes it an excellent option for free wifi protection.

This is another category where we’ll have to give PureVPN a highs core. I personally think that the website of PureVPN is one of the best and most modern ones available. It might be just a personal subjective opinion but I genuinely like PureVPNs design the most out of all other VPN providers.

In our opinion it’s mobile app is also really great and very easy to use. Even if you have no idea about VPNs in general you can quickly figure out what you need to do in order to use the app and connect to different locations and serves.

PureVPN also comes with an extremely interesting feature that I personally like a lot, namely the possibility to select the purpose you wish to use the VPN. You can choose between “streaming”, “security/privacy”, “file-sharing”, “dedicated IP” and “internet freedom”.

What this essentially does is to only connect you to the servers that are best-suited for the purpose you have selected. So, for instance if you have selected “streaming”, it will then only show you the servers that are specifically optimized for streaming, namely high-speed servers.

It also has a menu that allows you to adjust and optimize your VPN settings manually in great detail, something that many other VPN providers don’t have at all. You can adjust encryption levels, select which protocols to use and much more.

PureVPN is available on Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS and Android. It has a Chrome and Firefox extension too. Unfortunately it does not have a safari extension.

The biggest problem with PureVPN customer support is that you will have to jump through many hoops before you can actually talk with a real person. The website and app highly encourages you to first try to solve your issues yourself and read all the FAQ and help pages before you can actually talk with a real person.

Once you actually contact someone it’s extremely likely you will receive a standard scripted response that’s just being copy-pasted to you. Only after insisting multiple times will you usually receive a real reply from a real person.

So this is not that good if you are a complete beginner to VPNs and would like help. It you are someone who already knows how VPNs work and how to set up and use, then most likely you will never even have to contact technical support.

Billing support us fortunately very fast and if you have any billing related issues such as wanting a refund you will be taken care of very quickly and professionally.

You can choose between 3 price points at PureVPN, which is monthly, yearly and biannually. The standard prices are $10.95 per month if paid monthly; $4.95 per month is pre-paid for a full year and $2.88 per month if pre-paid for 2 years.
All 3 price plans come with a 7 days money-back guarantee.

We think that this a very good pricing model for what is being provided. If you want to use PureVPN for streaming services then it’s an excellent choice due to the abundance of high-speed servers in a huge number of countries and locations.

If you already know how to use a VPN then you can ignore the “not that great” customer support issue, as you most likely will never have to deal with that. Also, if you only use a VPN to access public wifi and use streaming services then PureVPN is excellent for you and it’s a bit cheaper than some other VPN providers with similar services.