BlackVPN is headquartered in Hong Kong, a nice selling point for those who want to get their VPN service outside of the US. The company has been around since 2008. They have been rated as one of the more reliable services in the market and has been compared to top VPN providers, however, their speed is lackluster in testing and cannot reliably block some popular streaming sites.
Pricing & Plans
BlackVPN packages are divided up a bit differently than most and you can pay via PayPal, credit card or Bitcoin.
- Privacy Plan – €49/ year
- €5.00 – 1 month access
- €13.00 – 3-month access
- TV Plan (USA & UK) – €75/ year
- €7.50 – 1 month access
- €20.00 – 3-month access
- TV Plan (USA or UK) – €49/ year
- €5.00 – 1 month access
- €13.00 – 3-month access
- Global Plan – €99/ year
- €9.50 – 1 month access
- €27.00 – 3-month access
Free Trial/ Money-back Guarantee
BlackVPN offers a free 3-day trial for Android and iOS apps. New customers also get a 14-day money-back guarantee when subscribing to a BlackVPN plan.
Privacy & Anonymity
BlackVPN has very good privacy policies. First and foremost, they don’t log your IP. They only log when you are connected, disconnected and how much data you downloaded.
The privacy servers have fewer IP addresses than the other BlackVPN servers. Users sometimes have to share IPs. This prevents the company from logging user activity at a specific IP, but they will shut down access to a site in the event of hacking.
BlackVPN Logging Policy
- No internet activity logs – never logs your internet activity or your real IP address.
- No connection logs – does not log connection timestamps or the total amount of bandwidth used – however they can see when a user is connected and how much bandwidth was used for the current connection. This data is gone when the user disconnects.
- No bandwidth logs.
- No DNS logs.
They DO keep your email address and payment records.
Torrent Policy
Unrestricted P2P/Bittorrent is not permitted on the USA & UK VPN locations. Privacy locations are the only ones authorized for torrent use.
Customer Support
There is extensive information on setting up BlackVPN manually on the company website. BlackVPN also has a support ticket submission section on their site, however upon checking, it currently isn’t working. But there are other several helpful sections on their site that users can explore from FAQs, Blog, Password troubleshooting, etc.
Product Testing
BlackVPN uses the Viscosity client. You can also hook up to their servers manually by making a new connection in Windows.
The Viscosity client provides a nice interface with all the controls you need.
VPN Server Locations
BlackVPN has 31 servers in 20 VPN locations across 18 countries.
Countries Supported:
Speed Test
IPCheck and DNSLeak Test
Our IP was effectively changed but DNS did leak over this service.
Feature Summary
- Works on Windows, MacOS, Linux, Android, iOS, Routers
- 7 simultaneous connections
- No logs – no connection logs, no DNS logs, no IP address logging
- Zero-knowledge DNS run
- Dedicated Bare-metal servers
- NAT Firewall
- Protocols: OpenVPN, SSL Tunnels, IPSec/L2TP, PPTP
- Shared IP addresses
- 3-day free trial for Android or iOS apps
- 14-day money-back guarantee
Additional Bonus Features
BlackVPN is a competitive but basic VPN provider and does not offer any additional features.
We Liked
The privacy package is very well designed. It offers some jurisdictional layering in a bundle that’s easy to understand and use. If you want TV access, the package for that is also well thought out. Being able to buy VPN routers through a company is always a good option.
Areas for Improvement
Speed was not impressive with BlackVPN and it is something that they should work on. Upon checking, they also do not have a Kill Switch in their application which, ideally, is a necessary feature since it protects users from leaks as well.
Conclusion
BlackVPN is a good and reliable VPN service but does not really stand out when compared to top VPN providers. However, we like that they offer users multiple and flexible plans. While the pricing of these plans are attractive, they may not be super competitive with that of other services.
The restrictions on P2P to specific servers make sense, but make the service a bit less flexible than some others in that regard. All in all, there are positives with this VPN provider, but several negatives should also be looked into for service improvement.
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