Private Internet Access review: A cheap, powerful, open-source VPN

It's important to remember that VPN companies regularly change their fees, so what we're publishing here might well be different tomorrow. But with that caution, here's a chart showing Private Internet Access VPN's current basic fee structure:

But, of course. Must. Have. Upsells. In Private Internet Access' case, it has a paid-for antivirus upsell and a dedicated IP address upsell. Let's look at the antivirus one first:

Private Internet Access has downloadable client applications for Macs and Windows machines, as well as iPhones, iPads, and iOS devices. It does not work on Windows for Arm, nor will it work under Parallels on the Apple Silicon Macs. On the other hand, the company does offer a number of guides for configuring Private Internet Access for a variety of home consoles, TVs, and other devices.

Private Internet Access supports up to ten simultaneous connections. For most home networks, and certainly for when on the road, that should be enough for most people. That said, it's not as generous as Surfshark's unlimited plan.

I installed the Private Internet Access VPN app on a fresh, fully-updated Windows 11 install on a brand new HP i3 laptop provided by Private Internet Access. To do this kind of testing, I always use a fresh install so some other company's VPN leftovers aren't clogging up the system and possibly influencing results. This was a new, sealed-in-box laptop, so I know that it was a fresh machine.

I have a 1 gig fiber feed, so my baseline network speed is quite fast and, with this laptop, I'm testing over a Wi-Fi connection located in the room next to my router.

To provide a fair US performance comparison, rather than comparing to my local fiber broadband provider here in Oregon, I used speedtest.net and picked a server a few thousand miles away in Dallas Texas to test download speed.

I tested connections to every other continent except Antarctica. Tests originated in Oregon and connected to Stockholm Sweden, Taipei Taiwan, Perth Australia, Hyderabad India, Sao Paolo Brazil and Cairo Egypt.

You can see the results below.

That depends a lot on your connection, where you're starting from, and where you're connecting to. For some of the other VPN offerings I tested, the VPN actually increased the speed. You can see that with Private Internet Access in the connection to Cairo, where the download speed actually increased by 9% (although the ping speed did go down). It's far more pronounced in the connection to Taiwan, which was virtually unusable without the VPN and quite workable with it. 

That's likely because the VPN takes a different route, optimizes the route, uses its own protocols, and probably lands more local to the servers than when I just used the speed test on its own.

But here's the thing about faster or slower when it comes to a VPN: Everyone's performance is going to be different. Truly the only way you can be sure is to install the software and try it out. That's why we pay so much attention to those money-back guarantees. Make sure you choose a VPN who will give you a refund (read the terms of service), because how you buy may determine your eligibility. Then test, test, and test.

There are actually two considerations here. The first is hiding your location. There may be many reasons why you want to do this, from personal security to content access. If you're concerned about personal security and believe that the only thing standing between you and death, abuse, persecution, or imprisonment is the VPN you're using, I strongly recommend you read this article: When your VPN is a matter of life or death, don't rely on reviews

The second consideration is whether your VPN hides the fact that you're using a VPN. Many services will block anything they can tell is using a VPN, and VPN use is also illegal in some countries.

While connected to each of the continents, I also tested whether there was a DNS leak, which would potentially provide information to your ISP or other services about what sites you visit or your originating location or IP address.

Initiating a connection with Private Internet Access was quite straightforward. I'm going to demonstrate this on Windows, but the interfaces are somewhat similar for Mac, iOS, and Android.

Upon install, an app was placed in the system tray. As you can see, starting with the default connection is a matter of just pressing the amber power button:

So, this one's kind of interesting. While using VPNs to bypass geoblocks is not necessarily illegal in most areas, it most definitely is a terms of service violation -- and streamers like Netflix and Hulu do not approve. 

But what about torrenting? Sure, torrents are great for downloading big Linux distribution images (better known as "distros"). But when people talk about torrenting in the context of VPNs, it's because they mostly want to illegally download images of movie and TV DVDs and Blu-rays -- which is basically just stealing.

Also: The best VPNs for torrenting

Private Internet Access does not mention torrenting, streaming, Netflix, or any streaming service anywhere on their site. Based on performance testing, if you have a fast enough initial connection, you should be able to do some streaming and torrenting. But I'm not going to test it, because I'd rather not violate the terms of service to the streaming video services that bring me so much joy. 

Also, since Private Internet Access is US-based, it's likely they're not going to talk up violating not only terms of service, but skating really close to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

I liked some of the documentation, but I found some of the guides a little thin. For example, there's a guide listed for setting up Private Internet Access with the Raspberry Pi, but the instructions are only three paragraphs long. If I were to give the online documentation a rating, I'd give it a solid B.

As for interacting with humans, I struck out. The only support mechanism provided is a web form. But I was unable to submit the form, due to this error:

There are three really important things to know when choosing a VPN:

1. Does it log any of your data?
2. Does it hide you while online?
3. Is it fast enough to get done what you need to get done?

I can't independently verify the first question, but Private Internet Access says it doesn't log any data. That question is probably the hardest to answer definitively because few of the VPN vendors we've looked at have independent audits to verify their claims, but Private Internet Access is one who does. They recently conducted an audit with Big Four accounting firm Deloitte. You can read the results of that audit here.

As for the second question, Private Internet Access does hide your data, it does hide your originating location, and it appears to hide the fact that you're using a VPN. That's a solid result.

As for the third question, for the locations I was able to test (with the exception of India), the answer is a clear "yes." You can easily move files, stream YouTube, and do all your basic work while active VPN connection. 

Overall, I was satisfied with Private Internet Access. At $2.03 per month for three years, it's one of the more inexpensive plans I've looked at, and yet it's very full-featured. I liked the setup and configuration options, although seeing the automations turn into full-on profiles would be nice. I also like that Private Internet Access offers its client software in open source on Github.

As always, I recommend you take advantage of the 30-day money-back guarantee and give it a complete test. The only way you can truly know if it'll work for you is if you put it to work and find out for yourself.