IPVanish Review

Why use IPVanish VPN?

IPVanish is one of many big commercial VPNs, but it owns and operates all of its own servers – many rivals just lease theirs from a third-party datacentre – and has over 1,000 of them serving over 60 countries. It allows peer-to-peer file-sharing, which some VPNs forbid or discourage – and the service is covered by a 7-day money back guarantee.

VPNs can help you maintain your privacy and anonymity while you’re online or can also ensure that your data isn’t being harvested and spied on when you’re connected to the Internet through public WiFi.

What’s more, the location of the VPN server is all that websites and services can see, which makes it possible to use a server in another country or even continent and access content that might normally be blocked or locked, like programs on the U.S. version of Netflix service if you’re streaming from outside of the States.

IPVanish is in fact one of our top-rated VPNs we've tested. See how it compares to other VPN services in our results table, below:

IPVanish: The Good

With excellent features and a nice display panel, there's lots to recommend with IPVanish.

Features and Settings

IPVanish gives you a lot of useful information to help you choose the right server, and the normal server list allows you to search by country or city or sort the list by country, response time or how heavy a load the server is currently managing – a less-used server will normally be faster. You can also switch to a map if you prefer a more visual approach.

Detail for Power Users

The Windows app also has a lot of settings, so if you want to change the VPN protocol or enable different kinds of leak protection, you can. There are also features like a killswitch or obfuscated traffic, which can stop sites detecting that you’re using a VPN. If you think of yourself as an advanced user, IPVanish is one of the best major commercial VPNs.

Good Speeds Maintained

Speeds are impressive over short-distance VPN links and just on the right side of average when you’re browsing or streaming over a transatlantic link.  IPVanish has over 1000 servers in over 60 countries, so its global coverage is pretty good. Whether you’re planning to catch-up with American TV shows while on a European vacation or looking to guarantee your privacy against corporate or government intrusion, you won’t have a problem finding a server that fits the bill.

IPVanish: The Not-So-Good

The downside of all those settings and features is that IPVanish can be a bit intimidating if you don’t already know your way around a VPN.

You need to disconnect manually from one location before you can connect to another, which feels like an unnecessary extra click.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t get Netflix to stream through a US VPN, though other US catch-up TV services worked fine. Netflix is pretty savvy at detecting VPNs these days, though some services have more success than others – see our roundup of the best VPNs for Netflix to see which we'd recommend.

IPVanish Prices

At $10.99 a month, IPVanish isn’t particularly cheap if you pay monthly, though $10 is pretty average for a big name VPN.

The deal gets better when you pay for a year upfront, with a $47.99 annual bill for the first year (which is $4 per month) and a $89.99 annual bill for each year after the first (which is about $7.50 per month). Still, when some other services, like NordVPN, PureVPN or Private Internet Access give you a year for $60 or less without a price hike in the second year, IPVanish could be more competitively priced.

There's another plan tier that adds 500 GB of cloud data storage and nothing else: It's $12.99 a month when paid monthly and $4.89 per month for the first year when paid yearly.

Getting Started With IPVanish

IPVanish makes it easy to sign-up and get started. Just enter your email address and a password then confirm your payment information, and you’ll get a confirmation email with clear links to a page where you can download the appropriate app for your PC or Mac. iOS and Android apps are available from the respective app stores.

The Windows app is a little more complex than the average, and the emphasis seems to be on control rather than one-click accessibility. Take the Quick Connect option, for example. Where other apps have a single button to click and make all decisions for you, IPVanish aks you to pick a country and gives you scope to select a city and a server within that city, though clicking the Connect button will just connect to the nearest, fastest server in the region.

While it’s not too difficult for VPN novices, it’s clearly designed to give more expert users more control.

The Verdict

IPVanish is an attractive VPN for more expert users, with some impressive features and all the options and settings you could hope for. Other users might want something a little less intimidating – and a little more affordable.