Betternet vpn mac full#
Betternet vpn mac windows#

Betternet may cut corners in a lot of areas, but speed isn't one of them. Near European and US servers were little different, and even the less well-connected locations - Vietnam, Cambodia - hit 50Mbps and more. UK servers gave us up to 70Mbps, as much as we would expect to see without a VPN. We had success with US YouTube and some smaller sites, but these can be unblocked by just about every VPN in the business.īetternet Premium wins out for performance, though, no great surprise as it's using Hotspot Shield's speedy servers and efficient Catapult Hydra protocol. The Betternet website doesn't make big claims about unblocking every single streaming site in the world, and our tests showed why: it failed with US Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Amazon Prime Video and Disney+. We use several different speed tests to determine the performance of each VPN we review (Image credit: Ookla) Performance

Betternet vpn mac full#

The client does offer some protection if the VPN drops, and it's better than many, but it's not up to the standard of a full kill switch or firewall. The bad news is that there was no desktop notification to alert users, and for a very brief period, perhaps a fraction of a second, our real IP address was visible to the outside world. The good news is that when we manually closed the VPN, the app interface updated immediately to show the loss of connection, then reconnected within seconds. There are worse choices - Catapult Hydra can be very, very fast - but anyone looking for flexibility or control might be left a little disappointed.īetternet doesn't claim to have a kill switch to protect you if the connection drops, but we ran our regular tests, anyway, just to see how it behaved. No chance to change protocol, for instance Betternet only supports Hotspot Shield's Catapult Hydra to make its connections. If your favorite local streaming site blocks IPs from outside your country, add its domain here and it'll use your regular internet connection in future. You can also set up the app to connect automatically when you access insecure or other network types, though, conveniently.Īn unusual Exclude Domains feature (a sort-of split tunneling system) enables defining domains which won't be routed through the tunnel. 'Reconnect Automatically' and 'Prevent IP Leak' are enabled by default, and you should probably leave them that way. There are only a handful of settings, too.

Betternet vpn mac windows#

That still can't tie the device to a particular internet activity, but it may be too intrusive for some.īetternet's Windows app only provides you with a few settings (Image credit: Betternet) such as for measuring bandwidth use, providing support, understanding how you interact with our VPN, and other analytics and marketing purposes.'Īs the document also says it can log 'your approximate geographic location', that might allow it to build a record of when and where this device connected to the service, the length of each session, the data transferred, and more. There's another concern in Betternet's ability to 'identify devices and associate them with other data we collect. Touch VPN logs the domains accessed by users, but only the domains, not the full URLs, and data is anonymized to ensure the company can't associate a domain access to a specific user, time or session. The system records your IP address when you connect, but this is hashed, and deleted at the end of the session. It 'does not inspect or record the contents of what you are browsing, viewing, or doing through them', either. The policy explains that it 'does not record your VPN browsing activities in any way that can be associated back to you.' Or to get more specific, 'When you use a VPN connection, we do not store any information that identifies what you browse, view, or do online via that VPN connection.' VPN privacy policies vary hugely in their detail and quality, but Betternet's is better than most, probably because it uses the same comprehensive document as the other VPNs in the Pango group (Hotspot Shield, Betternet, Hexatech, VPN360, and VPN in Touch.) Betternet does not record your activities online in any way that can be tied back to you though it does record some information such as your IP address when you connect (Image credit: Betternet) Privacy