Surfshark VPN Review - An Almost Perfect VPN

TechMechBlog.com    September 01, 2020    Best-of , How-to , More , Reviews    3 comments   

Welcome to TechMech my name is Varun and today we will review the Surfshark VPN most underrated VPN. 

Surfshark VPN claims to be a better VPN than some of the most popular VPNs like Nord VPN and ExpressVPN so how do they actually stack up, well we're gonna find out today cuz we're gonna break down the numbers and see how they score using a systematic review protocol.

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Surfshark VPN Review

Security

 

Surfshark VPN offers open VPN support as well as other protocols like ike v2 and shadow Sox which are all great protocols. 

Surfshark VPN changes the IP address of all devices and it passed all DNS tests on DNSleaktest.com, it offers a full system kill switch that there is no ipv6 leak support, unfortunately, they offer 256-bit data encryption and pretty uniquely they actually have 2048 or 30 72 handshake encryption depending on the protocol. 

Surfshark VPN has no two-factor authentication which puts their total security score at 4.2/5, overall very strong with very few things to fix, let's move on to the privacy of Surfshark VPN.

Surfshark VPN Privacy

Surfshark VPN jurisdiction is based out of the British Virgin Islands which is actually pretty well known for the data retention laws they have a pretty explicit no-logging policy, so it's a very big claim to make. 

Unfortunately, we can't really verify that but we do have to take their word for it Surfshark VPN does use their own DNS servers when you connect to their VPN they have a very very clean previous history. 

So that is a huge upside because every major VPN nowadays seems to have kind of a weird history so Surfshark VPN actually does have a strong history at least as of today.

 

Surfshark VPN has no first-party VPN servers which are pretty normal, there are no direct anonymous payments so they're not gonna offer anything like Manero or cash but Surfshark VPN actually does offer some cryptocurrencies and you can always use something like a prepaid debit card. 

Surfshark VPN does require an email to register which would fall under the basic information needed in scoring and there are actually a few site tracking concerns that are founding a privacy policy but they definitely get deemed a little bit here for having some trackers on their website. 

With no easy way to opt-out, all these things put together to put their privacy score to 4.3/5 which is definitely strong but there are some little areas to improve.

 

Surfshark VPN Speed of Service Ping

In my speed tests synthetic by the way throughout the 2.2ms download dropped 15% and it's mostly due to speed inconsistency so some speed tests actually didn't really well. 

Hot uploads were affected less than 1 percent the Android studio download test dropped 5 percent and the Google Drive download test dropped 5 percent, speeds were actually really strong.

 

What really brought them down that there was the synthetics which is kind of sad especially since even a synthetic spermatozoa graph down by inconsistent speeds not necessarily bad speeds the good thing is Surfshark VPN doesn't seem like that carried over to the real-world tests which are what should be important.

So I'll let you decide what happens there but in terms of scoring, they're gonna score 4.5/5 putting everything together let's cover the settings offer to buy Surfshark VPN.

 

Surfshark VPN Settings Features

Surfshark VPN does not offer very customizable windows to their client. Surfshark VPN have some basic startup options you can auto-connect to a server they have a kill switch, they have some notifications different protocols you can choose from there are no borders feature an invisible land.

 

Surfshark VPN is pretty minimal but it's what people mostly need however when it comes to customization scoring I'd say this is right around where something like Nord would offer its users which is a very average amount of customization nothing too crazy.

But as a side note there Android client has an awesome collection of settings which I love and I'll talk about that more later down. Surfshark VPN setting the score came out to be 3/5 the second to last category is usage let's go over all of their clients.

 

Surfshark VPN User Interface

Surfshark VPN Windows UI

Surfshark VPN user experience for Windows System was awesome seriously I haven't really been surprised by a VPN client in a while the user interface is very well done everything scales super well and Surfshark VPN supports the window management really well which is really not common nowadays with VPN providers.

I don't know why in terms of the general usage on Windows I didn't have many complaints and everything just really seemed to work super well VPN is very polished so a good job in the Windows client.

Surfshark VPN Mac OS UI

Mac OS was a very similar story to Windows it was very well polished and all in all, I had a great experience using it with no notable complaints during my usage.

 

Surfshark VPN Linux and Other

Linux is a big oh yeah they do offer a command-line tool which is better than nothing but I'd much rather have a GUI client keep in mind they do offer Open VPN profiles if you want to use Open VPN instead on Linux or any other client.

 

Surfshark VPN Android UI

Android so I talked about this earlier I enjoyed this client a lot it has a great UI as well as some other really unique settings like an override GPS location so apps on your phone think you're located where your VPN is located.

I kind of freaked out over that one feature. But all in all, I'd still do love the Android app even if that feature wasn't there.

 

Surfshark VPN iOS UI

iOS mirrored the Android app pretty well it offers a polished experience of good level customization especially on iOS where most VPNs are very very limited feature-wise. 

Their auto-connect worked very well for me for the most part outside of it sometimes connecting to New York on mobile devices and search art does not seem to censor or block any types of traffic So you'll be good there my main complaints about usage are some analytics are turned on by default and some of their clients just turn them off but they should be off in the first place and there is no GUI client for Linux outside of those two things.

 

My Opinion on Surfshark VPN

Surfshark VPN was seriously a pleasure using yeah you see score was 4.5/5 the last category is stability I used all their clients first several hours and didn't suffer any issues with their clients there were no crashes bugs or performance issues.

So yeah that's really about it so they score a perfect score of 5 out of 5 as I know they offer over 1,000 servers in over 61 countries which is a good server selection and a great country so price-wise they're currently killing it from my research normally $1.99 a month which is still a really good deal.

They are competitively priced as for trials they do offer a 7-day free trial for mobile devices but this isn't offered for their desktop clients for some weird reason they do offer a 30-day money-back guarantee though which I guess is nice.

 

Surfshark VPN Some Other features

The last few features they offer are they have a clean web which prevents ads trackers and malware and phishing attempts they have something called camouflage mode to prevent service providers from noticing you're using a VPN.

 

They have a multi-hop and Geo restriction no borders mode and a chrome and firefox extension oh and lastly a clock to check for email breaches blind search to perform a private search and a password checker tool none of those last few features are brand new or revolutionary.

Finally giving you the final score they have good security and good privacy they have a whistle clean history good speeds limited customization and overall great usage across their clients although I do wish they had a Linux GUI client and stability was dope so they ended up scoring 4.4 out of 5.

Your Turn 

So I hope you all take into consideration if you enjoyed the complete review and thought it was in-depth and useful please share this with your friends and do comment below which feature you like the most.