AdGuard VPN Review: Does the Basics

AdGuard VPN is a freemium product that, like all VPNs, masks your identity by giving you a different IP address and thus makes you appear in a different location, thereby masking your internet activity.

The servers may be in your own country or in another part of the globe, which means you may be able to access content that is not available locally. For example, if you set up Adguard VPN on a US server, you will be able to view the widest range of Netflix content available there, or watch live TV that has been “geoblocked” in your region.

Despite what you might imagine, AdGuard VPN does not block ads. The ad blocking service, which the company has successfully offered for many years, remains separate and requires an additional subscription.

While AdGuard didn’t do anything wrong here, it could be made a little clearer on its website, as some people may assume ad blocking is included because of its name. Also, AdGuard is very happy to email subscribers telling them what they don’t have, but can have for an additional fee.

Features

As a freemium product, you can download AdGuard VPN and use it without paying. However, the free version is limited. You can only use the free version for a maximum of 3GB of data per month – which is barely enough for an HD movie, and it limits your internet speed to 20Mbps.

That’s good enough for most things, but if you’re paying for much higher speed from your provider, it will be frustrating to use a product that slows down your internet connection. In general, we always recommend paying for a VPN, but you might want to try the free version before deciding to subscribe.

From there, we therefore only look at the paid product.

AdGuard VPN is available for Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android as a standalone application, providing system-wide protection. Alternatively, a browser extension is available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera. This limits your web browsing protection, but like many “VPN” extensions, AdGuard uses deceptive terms to trick you into thinking it’s a VPN when it really isn’t. than a proxy service that does not encrypt your connection like a VPN.

Chris Merriman / Foundry

A paid AdGuard subscription covers you for up to five simultaneous connections, but you can install the app/extension on as many devices as you want.

Android users also benefit from an additional feature not available to free users: AdGuard’s DNS servers. These ensure that your own ISP’s DNS is not used, which could reveal your activity and possibly your location. There’s even a choice of filtered and unfiltered, in case you’re setting up the app on a kid’s device and want to protect it from adult and other inappropriate content while searching the web. There are also other options, such as using Google’s DNS, CloudFlare and more.

Oddly enough, it’s not in AdGuard VPN’s other apps.

There’s also a specific app for Android/Google TV, which opens the door to streaming content from abroad to your TV, but it’s a shame there’s no equivalent for Amazon Firesticks.

AdGuard notes that it is unable to unblock content from the NBC Peacock streaming service. NBC content is notoriously difficult to access outside of the US and trip up many VPNs, but if that’s a deal breaker for you, it’s worth knowing. However, it works with some of the major streamers – Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max.

Chris Merriman / Foundry

On the other hand, for more advanced users, the company opted to use a bespoke protocol, rather than the more widely used OpenVPN or WireGuard. This means you won’t be able to configure your router with AdGuard to provide protection for your entire home network, or unblock streaming on devices that don’t support VPNs such as game consoles and Apple devices. TVs and Rokus.

Chris Merriman / Foundry

An advanced feature is split-tunnelling. This lets you use both your regular internet connection and the VPN. By using a blacklist or whitelist, you can, for example, configure it to only use the VPN for Netflix, or configure it to use it for everything except the BBC. This is a useful feature that adds to the appeal of AdGuard VPN, and while standard on the likes of ExpressVPN and NordVPN, it’s not a given with all VPN providers.

Privacy

Once you choose from over 100 servers in 44 countries, AdGuard VPN has a kill switch. This means that if it loses its connection, it will block internet access entirely, rather than suddenly exposing your true connection. While we were testing, we didn’t encounter any drops.

Chris Merriman / Foundry

From a privacy perspective, AdGuard VPN has a no-logs policy. This means that if the company were asked to provide information about who uses its service and when, it could not, which would increase the level of security and anonymity offered. Unfortunately, this hasn’t been independently verified, so on this one we have to take the company’s word for it that they really aren’t recording anything.

AdGuard’s jurisdiction is Cyprus, which means that all data is protected by European GDPR rules, offering better protection than companies based in, for example, the United States.

AdGuard VPN does not offer the option to run a “double VPN”, which services such as NordVPN do. This is where your connection is routed to one server and then another, so there’s even less of an audit trail and it prevents even the most determined from tracking you.

It’s not a huge loss for most people, though, and such features can often have a big impact on speed. The good news is that AdGuard allows Bittorrent traffic, so if you’re trying to download, shall we say, “sensitive” files, you can do so anonymously.

One thing that impressed us was that when we forwarded the account login to a colleague for speed testing, AdGuard’s system spotted the login attempt from a different location and temporarily locked the account. . This is the first time we’ve seen this happen and it’s a reassuring extra layer of protection.

Performance

AdGuard didn’t leak our IP or DNS address during our tests: the first big hurdle for any VPN.

In terms of unblocking, we had no issues watching content from the services it claims to unblock, with the exception of Prime Video. And it wouldn’t allow us to watch HBO Max or BBC iPlayer either.

AdGuard’s speed test results were less than stellar. Using a Gigabit connection in the Bay Area in the United States, with a base connection speed of 773 Mbps download and 945 Mbps upload, we found that using AdGuard VPN slows down your browsing considerably – here are the results for four key servers:

• AL: 158 / 98
• NY: 78 / 57
• London: 96 / 55
• Tokyo: 8.5/9

Although you won’t experience any noticeable slowdown on many home broadband connections below 100 Mbps, if you’re lucky enough to have Gigabit broadband, you will be feel the difference. As we mentioned, AdGuard VPN deliberately limits connection to its free clients and these results were more or less as expected:

• New York: 10/21
• London: 21/22
• Turkey: 10/8

(We couldn’t test on Tokyo/LA servers as these are not available for free users.)

Assuming AdGuard doesn’t deliberately throttles its paying customers, we can only conclude that its performance is not so good. Now that fast broadband connections are becoming more widespread, AdGuard needs to optimize its protocol or improve its infrastructure because, at the moment, it cannot compete with the best VPNs.

We also found an issue with the Windows app. When waking the test laptop from sleep, Adguard VPN could not recover and asked us to close the program and restart it. There is an “Attempt to recover” option, but it failed several times during our test and it became very frustrating.

Price and availability

VPNs tend to run specials all the time, especially if you’re willing to pay a year or two up front. At the time of the review, AdGuard VPN advertised a deal at $2.99 ​​per month (around £2.52) for a two-year subscription. This is paid for in advance, so costs $71.76 (about £60.50). Paying monthly is much more expensive, at $11.99 (£10).

Compare that to our current favorite, NordVPN, and it’s about a dollar a month cheaper. NordVPN’s two-year plan costs $4.15 per month, or $99.63 upfront.

However, given that NordVPN offers a much wider range of extras – including an ad blocker (!) – and much better speeds, it makes AdGuard VPN seem shoddy, even though it worth adding that Nord does increase their prices on renewal after your subscription ends. . AdGuard does not.

Verdict

Ultimately, AdGuard VPN is hard to recommend. It doesn’t excel in any particular area and costs as much or more than other better services that offer better speeds, more apps, don’t exclusively use proprietary protocols, and bundle ad blocking at no extra cost.

When NordVPN, Surfshark, and Cyberghost all include ad blocking as standard, having AdGuard doesn’t seem like a massive personal goal, especially when the combination of the two services makes it more expensive than those rivals.