PureVPN Review 2025: Very Global but Deeply Flawed

Global Coverage

This is where PureVPN really shines! Alongside your typical democracies, the list includes servers in countries like Russia, China, and even Afghanistan. This is very unusual for a large VPN and potentially great news for expats trying to access their home streaming services, online banking and other sites from abroad. Researchers, students and journalists will also be impressed. Those niches may be relatively small, but clearly PureVPN recognizes the importance of global reach.

65+ countries that will leave you saying: huh? You can get servers over there!? Did this involve a meeting with the Taliban? Of course there are a few notable omissions like Iran, but I still have to give them 10 stars for even considering some of these places.

Specialized Servers

You can select a server that supports some set of these extra features:

• Quantum Resistance: Best possible title for one of those new Star Wars films? This claims to secure your connection with future-proof cryptography.
• Port Forwarding: allows direct connection to your device from the public Internet. You better know what you’re doing!
• P2P: Not available in all countries. Allows torrent traffic. Possibly better for some multiplayer games, blockchains, etc.
• Obfuscation: Not visible as a separate option in the mobile apps, and what they provide hardly counts as obfuscation anyways (see below).
• Proxy: Only appears on Android, offers less protection but even greater speed. No information on the protocol used, but probably a good choice for streaming.

There are no SOCKS proxy options for power users looking to set up split tunneling on desktop. For example, this would allow you to only use the VPN for torrent traffic on your PC while activities like browsing work normally without a VPN.

Residential IPs

As an expensive add on, PureVPN can also direct your traffic through “residential” servers which makes it hard to detect that you’re using a VPN. While I haven’t tried this, it may be the only way to access services that are getting very good at blocking VPNs, as we’ll see later.

Server Speed & Reliability

Switching between servers in different regions for a few days, I didn’t notice any unexpected problems or differences between them. I did encounter slow connections, but this was entirely related to settings on the app side. The servers themselves were all fast and reliable.

Privacy and Security

Those “Quantum Resistance” servers are the dedicated tin foil hat option, but it’s hard to say how exceptional they really are in giving you extra protection.

PureVPN ticks all the basic boxes you’d expect, but I would say what it gives you is the bare minimum these days. Using words like “obfuscation” without really implementing anything that passes for it in 2025 might be misleading. And offering a tracker blocker while putting trackers in their own app and site is just embarrassing. The gold standard in this space is set by Mullvad and a few smaller providers. While they may lose out in areas like speed, it’s certainly worth using them as a reference when it comes to underlying technology, privacy and censorship circumvention.

Encryption and Protocols

PureVPN gives you OpenVPN, IPSec/IKEv2, and WireGuard. Confusingly, in the app and on the dashboard site OpenVPN is just called “TCP” or “UDP” depending on the underlying transport. This will annoy power users trying to understand what works better in their environment, or downloading config files for routers and other devices.

Examining these config files, I see acceptable security. For example, OpenVPN TCP uses TLS for authentication and key negotiation (part of the SSL family that also gives you secure banking and cat videos via HTTPS). They set AES-256-GCM as the encryption cipher, which is recommended as being both fast and secure by the OpenVPN project. So far so good.

Unfortunately, this appears to be the best config I can get when selecting “obfuscation”, and indeed they don’t mention any better options anywhere on the site. These configs use port 80 and 53 which are normally occupied by innocent web traffic. It’s a nice trick that worked in 2005, but it can’t pass as traffic obfuscation today. Many corporate networks and even entire countries easily block VPNs like this using deep packet inspection (DPI) on modern network hardware. VPN providers like Mullvad that are serious about obfuscation and beating censorship use protocols like Shadowsocks that are harder to detect. Amnezia maintains its own version of WireGuard which is both fast and looks like gibberish when analyzed. If this is an arms race, those folks are running hard. PureVPN did half a lap before relaxing on the bench, and for many users this will be a dealbreaker. They just won’t be able to connect where they need their VPN the most.

On a more positive note, it looks like the private encryption key for connections is generated on the client side. I can’t speak for their apps, but at least when using the dashboard this step is performed in your browser instead of on their side. This is very important for real cryptography, especially because their backend is run behind Cloudflare and sending private keys would totally compromise encryption.

Source Code

Unlike more privacy-oriented providers like Mullvad and Tailscale, PureVPN does not publish the source code for its client apps. It’s not possible to independently review their software or reproduce builds, and that’s the kind of transparency that really helps build trust in your VPN. They claim to “get surprise audits by Well known audit firm” (sic), but who knows what that really means. There’s always the possibility of bugs, mistakes, negligence, or worse. WireGuard and OpenVPN are open source projects for a reason.

Logging and Trackers

PureVPN’s privacy policy is clear:

We DO NOT keep any record of your browsing activities, connection logs, records of the VPN IPs assigned to you, your original IPs, your connection time, the history of your browsing, the sites you visited, your outgoing traffic, the content or data you accessed, or the DNS queries generated by you.

They do keep “Network Logs — Also known as Troubleshooting, Maintenance, or Connectivity Logs”, which they claim are never personally identifiable. They report that this has been certified by an external IT auditor.

But text on a website is one thing. A quick look at the software they want to run on your devices is another. According to the Exodus report on the Android app, it includes eight trackers. I know at least one on the list can be configured for better privacy, and maybe the auditors checked this. But why take the risk? And the presence of others (especially Facebook and Google) tells me privacy might not be a real priority here. By comparison, Mullvad requires zero trackers and far fewer permissions to put a reliable VPN on your phone.

If all this concerns you, it’s possible to generate manual configs and use standard trustworthy open source clients to connect to PureVPN on many devices. But the dashboard site you need similarly uses tons of loggers all over the place:

It’s also worth noting that their backend (my.purevpn.com) is running on Cloudflare. This certainly gives that big tech company access to metadata. And unless PureVPN is signed up for the best enterprise service, the actual content of these API requests is decrypted and visible to Cloudflare as well. Cloudflare’s offerings are excellent, but a service that markets itself as a guardian of your online privacy should be using them very wisely or not at all.

To be honest, I’m not sure how to reconcile all this with PureVPN’s privacy policy and auditing claims. Maybe it’s as simple as not accepting responsibility for whatever information these third parties collect, store, and share about you in the future? Here’s an example: they can likely log that somebody from your real IP address requested access to a specific VPN server at a specific time. I’m not asserting this actually happens, or even that most users should care (although an activist in China probably should). What is certain is that privacy and security is all about minimizing attack surfaces and limiting data collection, because we can’t even imagine how these may be exploited down the line. And it is possible to build a successful, truly privacy-friendly VPN guided by those principles. PureVPN just appears to have chosen a different path.

So does their fancy Tracker Blocker block their own apps and site? It should.

Jurisdiction

PureVPN says it chose the British Virgin Islands as its headquarters as there are “no mandatory data retention laws” there. They go on to say “we are, therefore, not legally obliged to store user data or share it with anyone”. It’s worth pointing out that their iOS app at least is published by GZ Systems Limited which is a Hong Kong company.

Personally I’m a sucker for entities based in European democracies like Sweden. Tip of my hat to Mullvad once again! I can also see that residency somewhere in the Virgin Bikini Sandwich Islands can bring extra privacy benefits to users and protect the developers from prosecution for activities like torrenting. But publishing a VPN app from Hong Kong seems less than ideal, although I can’t possibly comment on the legal/practical implications.

Leak Protection

All good here! I found no IPv6, DNS, WebRTC or other leaks on my connected devices. It appears that PureVPN use their own DNS servers in the country you selected, probably in the same data center. Personally I have no concerns about using any DNS provider as long as those requests are correctly routed through the tunnel along with the rest of my traffic, which PureVPN takes care of.

I also checked if any other addresses are reachable on my subnet while connected to the VPN. Virtual Private Networks were actually designed to allow devices to “see” each other, and a badly configured service can actually expose you to other users as if they were on your home WiFi. Nothing like that here, my VPN addresses were properly isolated as expected.

Extra Security Features

PureVPN claims to secure your connection with future-proof cryptography with their Quantum Resistance servers. Europol recently urged a transition to post-quantum crypto in sectors like banking. The danger is that your regular encrypted traffic can be collected today and potentially easily decrypted in 5-10 years by a new generation of computers. Right now this is only a feature for the paranoid.

If you do care, keep in mind this entire discussion has only recently left academic circles. PureVPN’s solution is not open source and they don’t publish any details, so there’s no way to judge them on substance without doing some very advanced traffic analysis.

The Internet is a brilliant way to give anyone on the planet access to any content, and let them pay for it too! Too bad the Man wants to crush that. Does PureVPN help us stick it to the Man?

Netflix

Netflix doesn’t let you sign in on any device via PureVPN, claiming an “incorrect password”. Ugh.

This login works just fine on the same device without a VPN. Once logged in, I was able to stream and connect an Android TV via confirmation code without problems. Using different servers, playback was stable at the maximum quality available in my account. No buffering or drops in resolution observed.

Unfortunately, the streaming party ends there.

Prime

Hoping to binge Prime? Try Netflix instead.

Disney+

Nope.

BBC iPlayer

No more David Attenborough for you!

After trying these services with many servers on multiple devices, I’m forced to conclude PureVPN is only good for streaming Netflix. But this is yet another arms race, and the situation can improve or deteriorate very quickly.

With any of the P2P servers selected, PureVPN is a file sharing beast. This perfectly legal Linux download took just a few minutes at 10-40 MiB/s. Why, what do you use torrents for?

Traffic is unlimited. Seeding appears to work, at least during an active download. There probably aren’t many people looking to seed longer through a VPN. Full marks!

Ping/Latency

I did not observe PureVPN adding any extra latency at all to my connections. For example, direct ping times from my VPN test bench to my server in the UK are ~37ms, and I got exactly the same result through a UK PureVPN connection. This is a VPN that won’t slow you down! Some people hope to see an ordinary VPN actually improve their ping times, but this is highly unlikely to happen as I’ll explain in the Performance section.

Geo-Blocking for Games

Using a US server I was able to see games only available on Steam in the US and proceed to checkout.

You may still need to create a new account and/or add another payment method to actually install georestricted games like this. Unfortunately, more and more services are linking your country to your payments.

After using Steam for some time, I didn’t see it block PureVPN or treat it as suspicious in any way. The right country is automatically selected for game downloads, and they’re fast.

Uh oh.

While their diverse list of countries is fantastic, PureVPN does badly on IP reputation tests, even when compared to some other VPNs. This is the reason your web traffic is immediately treated as suspicious by sites like Reddit:

This situation has been getting worse for all VPN providers in general, with growing numbers of malicious users and more pushback from the rest of the Internet. PureVPN looses a few marks because it seems especially affected. They may need to take steps to make their service less attractive to spammers and phishing scum. That could mean sacrificing a feature like port forwarding which is often used for evil stuff. At some point every VPN needs to start making tough choices between their “good” and “bad” users, however it wants to define them.

As I’ve mentioned, I’m not a fan of the trackers. On a user experience level though, the apps are quite good. For something people are likely to use on multiple devices, it’s nice to see almost exactly the same UI and menu options across all of them. Getting started is very easy and there’s a small set of advanced options as well.

One default setting I don’t like is having LAN access disabled:

Most users probably don’t want this. It means you can’t cast to your TV, access your home media server, office printer, etc. This is only really needed to give you some extra protection on sketchy public networks. LAN should probably be enabled if you selected something like “streaming” as your main goal when setting up the app, and disabled if you chose “protection”.

Some OS-specific notes:

iOS/iPadOS

The app handles network changes and device restarts perfectly, which has been a big problem for other apps like the official OpenVPN. After a few days on my iPad it reconnected every time and blocked WiFi until the link was established.

Warning: absolutely any VPN on any iPhone/iPad will leak traffic, mostly to Apple. The only way to completely tunnel a mobile Apple device is to configure a VPN on your router. In addition to this, Apple actively removes VPN apps from the App Store in some countries.

Linux

Full integration with NetworkManager is good to see, and the separate CLI is nice to have as well. Although especially on Linux I’d like to see open source tools.

Android TV

Very TV-friendly UI that’s easy enough to use with a remote, even when tweaking settings. Many other apps fail at this. They give you one ginormous on/off button for the VPN and that’s it.

Browser Extensions

PureVPN also offers browser extensions, which can be an easy way to get some split tunneling on your desktop. Your browser goes through the VPN, while all your other traffic does not.

Routers and Manual Config

The WireGuard configs just didn’t work for me: I got a handshake but no traffic was passing through the tunnel. I connect these same devices to my own WireGuard servers no problem. It also appears that the configs are only meant to work for a short time, which is rarely useful.

The OpenVPN UDP files from PureVPN did work though, so that’s a slower fallback option that seems to have no time limits.

Speed Tests

After testing bandwidth and latency to different servers, on various devices and during busier hours, I have to say performance is reliably fast.

Unfortunately, PureVPN loses a few marks because the app can inexplicable choose to connect using a slower protocol by default. This was especially noticeable when I tried a distant server on Android TV in a remote area with lower bandwidth, higher latency and more hops between me and the destination.

I selected a UK server and got an OpenVPN link with <7Mbps! Barely enough for HD 1080p video with an average bitrate.

Results remained like this until I opened the app’s settings, disabled automatic protocol selection and manually switched to WireGuard, which is faster.

Same server, but consistently almost twice the speed!

It’s unclear why PureVPN puts decent bandwidth at your disposal and then shoots itself in the foot with a suboptimal client-side configuration. Ordinary users should not have to go into settings and override defaults.

Anyways, on to the big speed tests! Here’s an iperf3 industry standard benchmark between my test bench and my own UK server, with gigabit data center links on both sides. Saturday rush hour. First a direct link, then through PureVPN.

It’s also worth comparing multiple and single connection speeds, because individual connections are limited (often by providers) and only add up to impressive bandwidth when stacked together. Most of what we do online doesn’t work like that though: if you’re downloading a file in a browser, that’s done over a single connection at the slower speed.

4 connections, direct

$ iperf3 –client ###.###.###.### –omit 1 –parallel 4 –time 20 –reverse

…

[SUM]   0.00-20.00  sec  2.24 GBytes   961 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Single connection, direct

$ iperf3 –client ###.###.###.### –omit 1 –time 20 –reverse

…

[  5]   0.00-20.00  sec  1.37 GBytes   587 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Now the same test through PureVPN UK. This result is pretty consistent with other servers and regions at peak times.

4 connections, PureVPN UK

$ iperf3 –client ###.###.###.### –omit 1 –parallel 4 –time 20 –reverse

…

[SUM]   0.00-20.00  sec   258 MBytes   108 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Single connection, PureVPN UK

$ iperf3 –client ###.###.###.### –omit 1 –time 20 –reverse

…

[  5]   0.00-20.00  sec   199 MBytes  83.4 Mbits/sec                  receiver

Speedtest.net

Providers have been known to cheat at popular speed tests by giving this traffic priority. It’s also hard to be sure you’re using the same destination servers between tests, which is important. So for a more real world test I prefer using iperf3 with my own destination servers. But pretty pictures are nice, so here’s a multi and single speedtest.net result for what it’s worth.

Conclusions

While results can be 100-300 Mbps faster that this (especially during off-peak hours), I haven’t seen anything like true gigabit speeds from PureVPN. That said, it looks like ~100 Mbps is the absolute minimum you can expect and that’s still plenty for a typical home broadband connection. It’s normal to see <50 from some of the competition, so I wouldn’t call this a slow VPN by any means.

Speed Across Different Locations

People often compare VPN servers in different countries, so I’d like to dispel a myth here. The bandwidth and latency you experience to a destination in another country (especially on another continent) is usually limited by what your Internet provider and upstream exchanges have allocated for that international traffic. Doing speed tests like this tends to be a test for your ISP and even your country’s connection to the global Internet, and not a good test for your VPN. It’s perfectly normal to get 100 Mbits to a local streaming service and 20 to a distant one, with or without a VPN. What’s more, results can vary widely even between neighbours with different ISPs.

Some services like Cloudflare WARP do let you beat the routing system by accepting traffic in your country, and then taking it abroad through very fast backbone links that aren’t available to your regular home ISP. For this magic to work the physical infrastructure needs to be there, and the VPN needs to have a multi-hop setup. PureVPN doesn’t offer this.

Impact on General Use

Overall, once those annoying app settings are fixed, this VPN gives you decent speeds. Unless you’re expecting gigabit during peak hours, PureVPN won’t noticeably slow you down in daily use.

Price Comparison

PureVPN offers super flexible pricing, from $12.95 monthly to a 5 year commitment that brings the price down to only $2.16 for 10 devices! There are also different types of accounts and an option for teams that lets you pay per user (up to 1000). Add to that a bunch of paid addons. It might actually be too much choice, especially if you’re new to this.

By comparison, Mullvad has no bewildering array of plans and options. Just €5/month for 5 devices, same service for everyone. That simplicity is worth something. But if PureVPN delivers exactly what you want (like fast unlimited torrenting) and you’re willing to commit, it’s a better deal.

Speaking of too much… check out the rates for residential traffic! In many countries you can rent a flat with unlimited Internet for much less. Just a thought.

Within seconds, the support chat connected me to somebody who seemed very human. Of course they have a script to follow, but were quite helpful in the end and very polite.

The self-help support site is huge and seems to cover everything with loads of instructions and screenshots.

Common issues

• Help, I can’t cast to my TV or use my network printer!
  Enable “Bypass VPN for local networks” in advanced settings.

• Speeds are slower than expected!
  Try manually setting WireGuard or Proxy as your protocol in advanced settings:

• Help, I can’t connect behind my company firewall or in my fascist dictatorship!
  The most “obfuscated” protocol PureVPN gives you is OpenVPN TCP, try that.

Router Setup Troubles

If you’re setting up WireGuard, don’t. Turns out even with an add-on each config is limited to 24hrs. And I couldn’t even get that to work. Try OpenVPN UDP.

PureVPN is a widely recognized VPN service, but Reddit discussions show mixed opinions. While some users appreciate its affordability and features, others express concerns over its privacy policies, auto-renewal practices, and inconsistent performance.

Key Takeaways from Reddit Users

Reddit Opinions on PureVPN’s Privacy & Security

Many Reddit users are skeptical about PureVPN’s security claims, particularly its no-log policy. Some are concerned that the VPN is closed-source and lacks independent audits.

“PureVPN’s tools and apps are all closed-source. If privacy is important, why trust a VPN you can’t evaluate?”

Users are concerned about the absence of independent app reviews and the company-funded security audits, which raise doubts about credibility.

Read the whole discussion on Reddit PureVPN security concerns.

Reddit Complaints on Auto-Renewal & Refund Issues

Several Reddit users report being charged for a renewal despite turning off auto-renewal. Others say they didn’t receive a warning before being billed.

“They charged me for a full year even after I turned off auto-renewal. No email, no warning!”

Common issues reported include auto-renewal charges after cancellation and the absence of renewal notifications.

Tip: Always double-check your renewal settings and monitor transactions.

Read the whole discussion on Reddit: PureVPN auto-renewal issues.

Reddit Discussions on PureVPN’s Speed & Performance

Some users find PureVPN’s speeds decent, but others experience slowdowns, mainly when using it on routers.

“Had a 100 Mbps connection, but with PureVPN, I barely got 30 Mbps.”

Performance issues include slow speeds on high-speed connections and significant drops on certain devices.

Read the whole discussion on Reddit. Is Pure VPN Good?

Is PureVPN Worth Using in 2025?

Reddit discussions reveal a mix of opinions. While some users find PureVPN functional, others avoid it due to privacy concerns, renewal complaints, and inconsistent speeds.

“PureVPN works, but there are better options for privacy.”

Some users avoid it due to privacy concerns, lack of transparency, and slow, unreliable speeds for streaming and browsing.

Read the whole discussion on Reddit: Is PureVPN worth it?

🔹 Suggested alternatives: Mullvad (privacy-first), ProtonVPN (no logs, strong security), NordVPN (for better privacy and performance), or ExpressVPN.

I can only recommend PureVPN for a few very specific use cases like these:

• You want fast torrenting sometimes.
• You want to watch a Chinese streaming service abroad and have checked that it works.

If you only care about that and nothing else, you’ll get great performance for a great price. But this is definitely not a good all round VPN for the entire family and all your needs in 2025. It’s certainly not an option for any place that tries to block VPN traffic, or for people who are concerned about privacy.