Hello everyone!
On this forum, I will review, this year, IVPN, one of the most recommended VPN providers in the privacy community. This review uses my own review protocol, at version v1, after the release of this review, it will be available soon(ish) on GitHub.
This review will be scored out of 5 with :
The company → 1
The service itself → 1.25
The apps → 1.25
Privacy/Security of the service → 1.5
Note
Like I said, it will use the Review protocol, if you find something that should be fixed, adding criteria or make improvements, don’t hesitate to let me know via this thread or directly in GitHub issues. Thanks.
I have tested it for a month now so here’s my thoughts about IVPN 
The company
IVPN is based in Gibraltar aka a British Overseas Territory, some people, because of that appelation, could think that Gibraltar = British = 5 Eyes… Well, no.
IVPN has a great blog post with many arguments and explanations of why Gibraltar shouldn’t be classified as a “5 Eyes” country, check this out, it’s pretty well written :
It has transparency above all else, their team is public, so this isn’t a service run by anonymous people. It also doesn’t seem to be implicated to some questionable things and the company is around the VPN space since a lot of time now, 2009.
So, in terms of company ownership, test of time, questionable things and their jurisdiction. IVPN is phenomenal in this regard.
So IVPN gets :
0.30 for their good jurisdiction
0.20 for their transparent, public team
0.20 as they didn’t done anything suspicious
0.30 for the test of time as they were around for 14/15 years now.
With a total score of 1/1. Excellent!
The service itself
Let’s talk about the service itself. What plans they offer? The price? Is it easy to use? What features they offer? are all valid questions so here’s a quick breakdown.
The plans
IVPN offers 2 plans : IVPN Standard and IVPN Pro, of course, Pro is better as you get 7 devices (instead of 2 for the standard plan) and multi-hop. The Standard and Pro plan have all the features like the Anti-Tracker, no server choice limitations, and pretty much all app features which we will talk about later on the review.
Now, for the price, it’s pretty iffy. If you choose the Pro plan, for just a week, it’s already 4 dollars and 10 dollars for the 1 Month plan. It’s 2x more than Mullvad and ProtonVPN, so if you want a “cheap” VPN, I don’t think IVPN is for you.
If you want to get the price equivalent of ProtonVPN and Mullvad, you should go with the standard plan, which kinda suck. You only have 2 devices and no multi-hop option.etc
Also, IVPN doesn’t offer a free plan which isn’t bad but for people who cannot pay, I’d recommend them to go with ProtonVPN, Windscribe which have limited but usable plans.
Features
Note
I only had for testing the Linux and Android apps since I don’t have any Apple devices nor do I use a Windows machine, if there’s some errors in this section, let me know!
Now, let’s talk about the second part of the review : the features. What does IVPN offer that can be interesting for some of you?
FIrst, we have the basic VPN features, you have OpenVPN and WireGuard available to you (I recommend the latter), Split Tunneling, Custom DNS (Android = IPV4/6 only), Kill Switch, etc..
Their interesting features which could make a big difference are :
- AntiTracker (blocks ads, trackers and malware, you can change blocklists)
- Hardcore mode (part of AntiTracker, let’s you block all Google and Facebook servers entirely)
- Mock Location (let’s apps think you are located in [VPN CONNECTION SERVER] instead of your real GPS location)
These are interesting features that could make a difference when you are in the search of the best VPN for your needs.
Feature parity
“What is feature parity?”, you might say? Well, it’s pretty simple, it’s a principle where all apps of a service (in this case, IVPN) have the same features and behaviors on all supported operating systems (Linux, Windows, macOS, etc.).
Example
A VPN that has an AntiTracker option in iOS should also implement that functionnality on all OSes they support. If they don’t, then feature parity is not respected.
Between the Linux and Android app, the feature is well respected. Of course, there are OS-specific features like the custom DNS as Android has already that feature built-in (well, the IVPN feature is available on Android but with no DoH/DoT) or the “minimize to tray” which is obviously only for desktop OSes.
So here again, that’s pretty good for IVPN.
Ease of use
This will be pretty short as… Well, nothing to say negative about that. IVPN is easy to use, stable. I have found no bugs and problems except one that I will talk about at the end of this review. Anyone can use it. So that’s perfect for IVPN.
Conclusion
So, IVPN gets :
- 0.15 for the plans
- 0.40 fo the features as you get everything to get things done.
- 0.30 for the feature parity
- 0.25 for the ease of use.
So, IVPN gets in that category a score of 1.1/1.25. Great score from them!
The apps
Also, this category will be kinda short since these are very easy to find info about that.
The IVPN apps are available on all major OSes : Linux (CLI + GUI), Windows, macOS, iOS, Android and even your router and your NAS. So, yeah, they support everything (except BSD, but you can use WireGuard’s client and use that instead.). If you are using Linux, you can even get the IVPN snap if you really wanted.
The apps (at least Linux and Android) are filled with a lot of features, so you have pretty much a lot of options that you can enable/disable. So, nothing negative here also.
For the UI, it is well written and beautiful in my eyes. Nothing to say much about that.
So, IVPN gets
- 0.50 for OS availability
- 0.50 for being feature-packed
- 0.25 for being a comprehensive, beautiful UI
It is a total of 1.25/1.25. Which the maximum score possible. IVPN checks all the boxes there.
Privacy and Security
First of all, speaking of encryption, IVPN uses AES-256 with 4096-bit encryption which is awesome. It’s one of the strongest encryption algorithms available today. It does seem that they use AES-256 for OpenVPN and ChaCha20 for WireGuard, both of these algorithms are very secure and great options for all of you.
For their privacy policy, it’s very transparent, they really go onto the details of how their store data and many other interesting things. It’s pretty easy to understand that policy so nothing problematic here.
Speaking of trackers, nothing. 0 trackers in all OSes and also nothing on the website. No Google Analytics, no Facebook Pixel, etc. That’s perfect!
IVPN doesn’t have any sort of whitepaper (at least to my knowledge) which is pretty sad but also with the privacy and security practices they implement, it’s not really that unacceptable that they don’t have a whitepaper.
Furthermore, speaking of audits, IVPN is great in that practice. They do them very regularly, and recently they have announced they are about to make their 6th annual security audit. That’s just phenomenal
Also, the Transparency Report and Warrant Canary are present on the website so you are free of seing them, so again, they are really transparent about that.
So, IVPN gets :
- 0.5 for strong encryption (AES-256/ChaCha20)
- 0.30 for the privacy policy
- 0.25 for not having any tracker of any kind.
- 0.0 for not having any whitepaper
- 0.25 for having regular audits
- 0.05 for the Warrant Canary
- 0.05 for the Transparency Report
So, for this category, IVPN gets a score of 1.4/1.5 which is phenomenal. They really did a great job from audits to encryption from the privacy policy and the abscence of trackers.
Things that do not impact the score
IVPN has over 165 servers in over 37 countries, which is one of the 4 providers Techlore recommends who has a (pretty?) limited server choice but this is still usable to be honest, I don’t think anyone needs 10,000+ servers cough PIA cough
For the Linux IVPN app, you need to install 2 packages to get IVPN running (ivpn and ivpn-ui). When, with Mullvad, for example you only need 1 package to get the CLI and GUI. I don’t know why IVPN does that but yeah that’s what they do.
Also for the same Linux app, if you have a /etc/systemd/resolved.conf that you modified to use, let’s say, NextDNS, you need to disable the IVPN firewall and go to the settings, in the DNS category, and enable “Force management of DNS using resolv.conf”. If you didn’t make those steps, then Internet will just not work. I don’t think it’s the fault of IVPN since I’m in an unique situation here.
IVPN also has a service called “IVPN Light” which can help you get VPN access in just 60 seconds. This is great if you want a quick VPN access for a limited time and for pretty cheap. It’s only with Bitcoin Lightning that you can pay.
Conclusion
IVPN gets a phenomenal and very high score of 4.75/5. That means, it is a trustworthy service you can use to protect your web traffic. Of course, don’t rely on VPNs to provide “anonymity”, they don’t and they cannot provide that, use Tor instead.
Thank you for reading this review!