Once used exclusively by tech specialists, VPNs are now mainstream tools for the masses. They allow you to browse the web anonymously, connect to public wifi securely, and spoof your location to bypass internet filters and access geo-restricted content on streaming services.
IPVanish is one of the more popular VPNs available, but how does it compare to the best VPNs out there? Founded in 2012, the service is a veteran of the industry and has more than 2,400 servers in 135 locations.
The VPN is particularly useful for internet users who want to appear to be connecting from around the US, as the majority of servers are concentrated in North America. A glut of configuration options will appeal to more advanced users who want to tweak things.
IPVanish has a no-log policy, which has been independently verified by cybersecurity firm Leviathan. That means it shouldn’t store any data about things like your search history or the sites you visit, nor would it be able to hand over this information to law enforcement, nor lose it in a data breach.
A single subscription allows you to use the VPN on as many devices as you like, with apps that work on Windows, macOS, Fire TV, Android, iOS, Chrome OS and Linux. BitTorrent and other P2P services are supported. Bandwidth is unlimited and speeds aren’t capped, and in tests we found IPVanish to be fast and reliable.
How we tested
To review IPVanish we tested it on a variety of platforms for months, including our desktop Windows PC, the Pixel 9 Pro, the Google TV Streamer and iPad Air. We measured speed using Ookla and Google’s speed test and checked compatibility with streaming services like Netflix, Prime Video and BBC iPlayer. We researched the VPN’s privacy policy and its record on data security and compared the cost of a subscription to similarly featured VPNs.
Why you can trust us
Steve Hogarty has been covering all things tech for IndyBest since 2021. As well as reviewing just about anything with a chip in it, his areas of expertise include the latest and best cybersecurity software and VPNs. His reviews draw on extensive research into the practices and promises of the companies behind each VPN, as well as thorough testing across a wide range of use cases. This attention to detail makes him an excellent judge of performance when it comes to finding the best VPNs for our readers.
IPVanish
Price
IPVanish has two tiers to choose from: essential, which has all the basic features, and advanced, which adds a secure browser, cloud backup, file sharing and phone support.
The essential tier costs £9.99 if you pay monthly, £2.92 per month when you pay yearly and £1.58 per month when you pay for two years. The advanced plan costs £11.49 monthly, £3.27 yearly and £2.39 for a two-year plan.
The prices are roughly in line with the rest of the VPN market. We’d recommend steering clear of two-year plans unless you’re absolutely sure the VPN is right for you, as you could end up locked into a service that doesn’t work for your purposes or gets slow speeds in your area – but the one-year plans beat NordVPN’s pricing (£3.79 per month for basic and £6.49 for ultimate).
There’s no free trial for IPVanish and payment is upfront, though you can cancel any time within the first 30 days and receive a refund. IPVanish recently started accepting GBP too, so you’ll avoid currency conversion fees when you sign up.
The advanced tier comes with 1TB of online storage with LiveDrive, priced separately the service is expensive at $14.99 (£12) per month, $4.49 (£3.65) per month for a one-year plan and $3.29 (£2.60) per month for a two-year plan.
There are much cheaper cloud storage options out there, and some free alternatives if you don’t need that much space. Dropbox and Google Drive offer 2GB and 15GB of free online storage respectively. Dropbox Plus offers 2TB (2,000GB) of storage for £7.99 per month, while Google One offers 2TB of storage for £7.99 per month.
Privacy
Your IP address and DNS are two identifying markers that can sometimes still be picked up even when you’re using a VPN, allowing websites and other services to see your true location and other details. Streaming services like Netflix and Spotify actively try to uncover this leaked information from VPNs to block users from accessing geo-restricted content.
IPVanish passes IP and DNS leak tests, meaning it doesn’t leave traces of your identity or location while you browse.
To test this, we used rival NordVPN’s series of VPN tests, as well as IPleak.net and DNSLeakTest, which confirmed that IPVanish was successfully obscuring our identity as we browsed. IPVanish was also WebRTC secure and prevented IPv6 traffic leaks in our tests.
IPVanish uses AES-256 encryption. Often called “military-grade” encryption by enthusiastic VPN marketers, it’s the most secure standard for transferring and storing data. AES-256 is commonly used by almost all VPNs and is strong enough for most purposes.
A kill switch shuts down internet access when the VPN is not connected so that your real identity is not suddenly exposed if your connection drops out halfway through loading a page.
By default, IPVanish uses the WireGuard and the IKEv2 protocol, but it also supports OpenVPN, a popular and trusted open-source protocol used by many leading VPNs. IPVanish is highly configurable and advanced users have a lot of buttons to play with here, including changing OpenVPN ports and scrambling server traffic to bamboozle some anti-VPN measures.
Logging
Trust is the cornerstone of online privacy. When you use a VPN you’re choosing to trust a private company rather than your internet service provider, and taking the VPN at its word that it will handle your personal information properly. It’s important to keep this in mind when comparing the privacy policies of different VPNs.
IPVanish has a clear zero logs policy, which states: “We do not keep a record of any connection, traffic, or activity data in regards to our services”. Though a VPN can be compelled by a court to hand over information about its users to the authorities, a zero log policy is one way to avoid this. By keeping no information about its users, a VPN has no information to share.
A 2018 news article by TorrentFreak claimed that IPVanish had contradicted its no-logging policy in 2016 when the VPN’s parent company shared extensive user information with a federal investigation – reportedly for a very serious crime. IPVanish has since been acquired by another company, StackPath, and distances itself from the policy of its previous owners. An independent audit of the VPN’s systems by the security firm Leviathan found no evidence of stored logs.
Performance
IPVanish blasts through speed tests. When connecting to servers in the UK – from our test laptop in London – our download speeds typically dropped by around 10 per cent and our upload speeds by around 25 per cent. This compares well with other VPNs we’ve tested, including top-rated services like NordVPN and ExpressVPN.
When connecting to servers further away, naturally internet speeds drop a little more. When connected to a server in the United States, our download speeds fell by around 20 per cent, and our uploads by around 40 per cent. That’s still more than enough bandwidth for streaming, torrenting and downloading, though.
These are rough figures. The actual speeds you get are affected by the physical distance between your true location and the location you want to appear to be connecting from, but also things like network congestion and other factors outside of your control.
So long as the VPN isn’t consistently slow, reliability is more important than top speed. IPVanish gives us strong connections without dropouts or much of a noticeable slowdown.
Because of the unusual traffic patterns coming from VPN servers, with multiple users sending simultaneous requests, Google and other big sites often flag them as suspicious. When using a VPN you’ll be asked more often than usual to prove you’re not a robot by completing a captcha (those picture puzzles where you’re asked to spot traffic lights and bicycles).
In our tests, IPVanish was particularly bad for this, sometimes locking us into an endless cycle of captchas until we switched to a new server. The flagging of suspicious IP addresses is a game of whack-a-mole between VPNs and sites like Google and Netflix, so these types of issues can clear up one day and come back the next. It’s a nuisance rather than a serious problem, however, and your mileage may vary.
IPVanish and Netflix
You can watch US and UK Netflix using IPVanish.
To be clear, using a VPN to stream Netflix from a region that’s not your own violates the platform’s terms of service. That said, when connecting to a local VPN in your own country or when travelling, you should expect to be able to continue to use streaming platforms as normal and without interruption.
Streaming services attempt to block people in different countries from viewing certain movies and TV shows in order to protect local licensing and distribution deals. This means that the best VPN for streaming Netflix can change from month to month, as the service figures out new ways to identify and block VPN traffic.
In our tests, IPVanish successfully streamed Netflix in the UK and the US with no noticeable increase in buffering, dropouts or interruptions. Video quality was consistently high and we were able to stream in 4K without any problems.
IPVanish and Prime Video
We had less luck watching Prime Video shows using IPVanish. This could be because Amazon has a better idea of your true location based on your account’s activity – the platform will believe you’re travelling temporarily, rather than based in the country where your VPN server is located.
With the VPN turned on, Prime Video refused to stream any content and displayed a warning that our connection was being routed through a proxy server. This problem appears to be widespread for now, as Amazon’s anti-VPN efforts have seemingly managed to blacklist a swath of IPVanish’s IP addresses.
IPVanish and BBC iPlayer
You can watch BBC iPlayer while using IPVanish in 2025.
Connect to the streaming service using one of IPVanish’s UK servers and things work as they normally would. Keep in mind that accessing iPlayer from abroad using a VPN violates the service’s terms of use, even if you’re paying the TV licence.
Android and iOS apps
The IPVanish app works well on both Android and iOS devices. The plain and functional user interface won’t be winning many design awards – especially on Android, where it uses flat, outdated design elements – but the app is responsive and easy to navigate.
A short but helpful tutorial walks you through the steps of choosing your server location and connecting to the VPN. While connected, the app displays a graph of download and upload speeds, the server’s name, IP address and location, and how long you’ve been connected.
The Android and iPhone apps retain most of the features of the desktop VPN, such as the option to scramble traffic over the OpenVPN protocol, and the ability to set up split tunnelling to allow certain apps to connect to the internet without using the VPN. The kill switch feature requires a bit of fiddling in your phone’s settings before it works.
We especially like how the app can identify unsecured wifi networks on the fly, and automatically connect you to a VPN without having to manually select anything.
Buy now £3.80, Ipvanish.com
The verdict: IPVanish
What it lacks in polish, IPVanish makes up for in speed. This is a fast VPN with latencies low enough to enable gaming and a server-selection list that can zero in on low-ping servers.
We liked how straightforward the installation was on Amazon Fire TV and Firestick, and how non-intrusive the desktop app is on Windows. Unlike most VPNs, IPVanish doesn’t automatically set itself to launch on startup and doesn’t hide out in your system tray when you’re finished using it. We like that the number of devices you can use isn’t capped, too.
We ran into trouble when trying to watch shows from Amazon Prime Video, but had no problems with Netflix. This could change as the VPN adds more IP addresses to outwit the streaming platforms, so it’s worth dipping your toes in with a one-month subscription before committing to a full year.
IPVanish isn’t as cheap as it once was, though it does offer benefits with the Advanced tier that similarly priced VPNs don’t. If those benefits aren’t useful for you, it could be worth shopping around for another service.
