Atlas VPN presents an honest set of privateness options and fundamental VPN performance that, on paper, is comparable with the perfect VPNs available on the market. Limitless simultaneous connections for paying customers and a excessive information cap totally free customers make it particularly enticing. Some design quirks and strange habits in hands-on testing marred our expertise, although, and we might desire the corporate endure a third-party audit of its insurance policies and infrastructure. Our top-rated VPN general is Proton VPN, which presents many extra instruments for much less cash.
How A lot Does Atlas VPN Value?
Atlas VPN prices $10.99 per 30 days, over a greenback greater than the $9.93 common amongst providers we have examined. A number of wonderful VPNs provide costs far beneath the common: Editors’ Selection winner Mullvad VPN, for example, prices simply 5 euros per 30 days ($5.57 as of this writing).
Almost all VPNs provide steep reductions in the event you join long-term subscriptions. Atlas VPN’s worth drops to $27.40 for the primary yr of an annual subscription and $71.49 for 3 years. The yearly and three-year subscriptions routinely renew at $47.83 yearly as soon as the preliminary time period ends. Further reductions with a worth enhance are typical within the antivirus world and have gotten extra widespread amongst VPNs. We discover the apply complicated and consider most shoppers wouldn’t anticipate the value hike. Ivacy VPN and Kaspersky Safe Connection have the most cost effective annual plans amongst VPNs we have reviewed, at simply $29.99 per yr.
Whereas you’ll get monetary savings on a long-term subscription, we advise towards beginning with one. As an alternative, join the shortest subscription to check how the VPN performs in your web atmosphere. Paying further upfront is best than being caught with a disappointing product for a yr or extra.
Atlas VPN is without doubt one of the few VPNs providing a full-fledged free subscription. Free subscribers have limitless bandwidth and entry to a few VPN server places—Amsterdam, Los Angeles, and New York—and may have two simultaneous connections.
Atlas VPN lately adjusted the information cap positioned on its free clients. The corporate now limits all free clients to 5GB of month-to-month information. Doing so simplifies Atlas VPN’s free providing, which has completely different information caps relying on the platform, nevertheless it additionally dramatically reduces the quantity of information free customers can devour. It is nonetheless way more information than Editors’ Selection winner TunnelBear VPN, which caps customers at a mere 500MB per 30 days, however lower than Hotspot Defend VPN, which caps customers at 5GB per day. Editors’ Selection winner Proton VPN is our decide totally free VPNs because it locations no information restrict on its free subscribers and presents inexpensive pricing tiers.
You should buy an Atlas VPN subscription with a serious bank card, Google Pay, or PayPal. It doesn’t at the moment assist money or cryptocurrency purchases. Editors’ Selection winners IVPN and Mullvad VPN settle for nameless money funds despatched to their respective HQs and use privacy-protecting, semi-anonymous account programs.
What Do You Get for Your Cash With Atlas VPN?
The first operate of a VPN is to create an encrypted connection between your machine and a server operated by the VPN firm. All of your web site visitors passes by this connection to the server and returns to the web as typical. Doing so ensures your ISP cannot monitor or revenue out of your on-line actions. It additionally makes it tougher for advertisers and snoops to trace your actions throughout the net.
Most VPNs restrict the variety of gadgets that may connect with the VPN service concurrently. Normally, the restrict is 5 gadgets per account. That is altering, nevertheless. Atlas VPN is amongst a brand new class of VPN providers that place no restrictions on the variety of simultaneous connections. Companies which have gone this route embrace Avira Phantom VPN, IPVanish VPN, Editors’ Selection winner Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN.
(Word: IPVanish is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s mother or father firm.)
Break up tunneling is a comfort characteristic included by a lot of the greatest VPNs. When enabled, it routes the site visitors of particular apps outdoors the VPN’s encrypted connection. It is helpful for high-bandwidth however low-security actions, equivalent to video streaming and gaming. Atlas VPN does embrace this characteristic, however solely in its Android app.
The perfect VPN providers let customers improve the privateness of their connections with multi-hop connections. This characteristic routes your VPN site visitors by a second VPN server, making monitoring your site visitors tougher, even when one of many VPN servers is compromised. Atlas VPN does embrace multi-hop connections, however we discovered the execution lackluster (as you will note).
Different providers present entry to the free Tor anonymization community by way of VPN for much more anonymization. Tor is free to make use of however considerably cuts into web speeds—particularly when a VPN is concerned. Editors’ Selection winners NordVPN and ProtonVPN are two of the few VPN firms providing each options. Atlas VPN is just not.
Many VPNs declare to dam adverts and trackers, however Atlas VPN is without doubt one of the few providers that tries to point out its work. Like Norton Safe VPN, Atlas VPN retains a tally of its blocked adverts and trackers.
A subset of Atlas VPN’s servers is named SafeSwap servers. Atlas VPN tells us these have a pool of IP addresses and cycle by them periodically. The concept is that continuously altering your IP deal with makes it tougher to trace you on-line. The one comparable choice we’ve got seen is the IP Shuffle choice in HMA VPN.
Atlas VPN additionally features a Information Breach Monitor. Enter an e-mail deal with, and Atlas VPN will inform you if that deal with seems in a group of breached credentials. It is just like the favored HaveIBeenPwned web site. Free customers can observe a single deal with; paying clients can observe any variety of addresses. A consultant for Atlas VPN instructed us it does not ship the emails used for information breach monitoring by way of plaintext. The corporate solely makes use of these addresses for information breach monitoring, not advertising or gross sales exercise.
VPNs are useful privateness instruments however do not shield towards each menace. We extremely advocate utilizing standalone antivirus software program to guard your machine, enabling multi-factor authentication wherever it is obtainable, and utilizing a password supervisor to create distinctive and sophisticated passwords for every web site and repair you employ.
What VPN Protocols Does Atlas VPN Assist?
There are a number of methods to create a VPN connection. We have lengthy most well-liked OpenVPN, an open-source choice that will get picked over for potential vulnerabilities. Open-source protocol WireGuard makes use of newer expertise, and we anticipate it to quickly grow to be the usual amongst VPN firms.
Atlas VPN helps WireGuard and the superb IKEv2 protocol on all its apps. It doesn’t assist OpenVPN.
Atlas VPN Servers and Server Places
We desire VPN providers that present quite a few and well-distributed VPN servers. Having a close-by server ensures good service, and having many server places provides you extra choices for spoofing your location. Atlas VPN presents servers in 38 international locations, properly beneath the common of fifty amongst VPNs we have reviewed. Extra disappointing is that Atlas VPN’s servers are closely concentrated in North America and Europe, with no presence anyplace in Africa. To the corporate’s credit score, it has expanded its server presence to incorporate South America. ExpressVPN has servers in 94 international locations, with a robust world presence.
Atlas VPN studies having 750 servers. That is a tenth the scale of CyberGhost’s server fleet, however the variety of servers does not essentially correlate to raised service. Atlas VPN says it rents its servers somewhat than proudly owning them however factors out that it absolutely manages them—a standard association. To guard their servers, firms together with ExpressVPN and NordVPN have embraced RAM-only servers, which don’t retailer info to disk and are wiped each time they’re powered off. Atlas VPN says it depends on absolutely encrypted disks to guard its servers.
Many VPN providers use digital places, that are servers configured to seem someplace aside from the place they’re bodily situated. This isn’t essentially unhealthy; some firms use digital servers to offer native protection to unsafe areas. Such servers needs to be clearly marked, nevertheless it’s a nonissue for Atlas VPN because it doesn’t use any digital places. All servers are situated exactly the place they are saying they’re.
Just like digital places are digital servers, the place a single {hardware} server performs host to a number of software-defined servers. This could embrace digital servers from many firms on a single bodily server. Atlas VPN tells us it makes use of solely devoted {hardware} servers, nevertheless.
Your Privateness With Atlas VPN
VPNs are in a privileged place and will observe your site visitors and promote your information in the event that they wished. We interview firms and browse their privateness insurance policies to be taught what measures VPN suppliers take to guard your privateness. The Atlas VPN privateness coverage was lately up to date to incorporate quick summaries of every part. We recognize this effort towards transparency.
The corporate instructed us it doesn’t log “any person exercise or some other information.” Any information wanted for making a VPN connection is wiped when clients disconnect. The corporate’s privateness coverage additionally says it particularly doesn’t acquire IP addresses or person exercise. That is accurately. The corporate confirmed to us that it doesn’t promote person information and that its solely income is buyer subscriptions.
Atlas VPN gathers info on app utilization and buyer gadgets, equivalent to system mannequin and OS model. We might wish to see Atlas VPN make this elective, as different firms have accomplished. The corporate additionally says it makes use of advert identifiers. Advert identifiers are IDs assigned by app shops to cell gadgets. You’ll be able to reset your advert ID your self. Taken collectively, this isn’t a stunning quantity of knowledge, however some VPNs—equivalent to Mullvad VPN—acquire even much less info.
The corporate notes that whereas it does adjust to authorized requests for info, “we shouldn’t have any information to share with legislation enforcement and authorities companies who make requests for details about what you have been doing by a VPN connection.” The corporate maintains a reside warrant canary, which doubles as a sort of transparency report by displaying the variety of nationwide safety letters, gag orders, and warrants it has obtained. All figures are at the moment zero. We desire extra in-depth studies that present disclosures over time, however this can be a good begin.
The situation of an organization can matter as a result of, relying on native legal guidelines, there could also be obligations to retailer buyer information. Atlas VPN operates beneath the authorized jurisdiction of the US, which doesn’t have information retention legal guidelines. The corporate defined to us that it has a world, distributed workforce with its bodily places of work situated in Lithuania. The corporate defined to us that Atlas VPN is a trademark of Peakstar Applied sciences Inc. and is now owned by Nord Safety Group, the homeowners of NordVPN.
On February 2, 2022, NordVPN and Surfshark VPN introduced that the 2 firms have been merging. The 2 manufacturers would stay separate merchandise with their very own infrastructure. Surfshark VPN and NordVPN will each be owned by a brand new holding firm referred to as Our on-line world, which is registered within the Netherlands. A NordVPN consultant defined that as a result of Atlas VPN was acquired by NordVPN straight, it will stay part of Nord VPN’s company construction.
The pattern among the many greatest VPNs is commissioning third-party audits of their infrastructure and insurance policies to ascertain their privateness bona fides. Thus far, Atlas VPN has solely commissioned an audit of its iOS app from VerSprite and an audit of its Home windows app from MDSec. Audits are imperfect instruments, however we recognize the trouble at transparency from VPN firms. NordVPN has undergone a number of audits over time, and TunnelBear VPN continues to make good on its promise to launch annual third-party audits. Atlas VPN ought to do the identical. We hope that coming beneath Nord’s umbrella means it should achieve this within the close to future.
Fingers On With Atlas VPN for Home windows
We put in the Atlas VPN consumer on an Intel NUC Package NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon) desktop with the most recent model of Home windows 10. Along with Home windows, Atlas VPN supplies Android, iOS, and macOS consumer apps. The corporate additionally lately unveiled a command line consumer software for Linux.
Whereas set up on Home windows went easily, determining how one can log in to the service was complicated. Neither the Atlas VPN app nor the web site prompts you to enter and even create a password. As an alternative, you enter the e-mail deal with you used when buying the service and obtain an e-mail with a “magic hyperlink” that routinely logs you in.
We’re no strangers to uncommon login schemes. The most effective options of each IVPN and Mullvad VPN is that they use a privacy-respecting account system that additionally doesn’t require a password. Atlas VPN’s strategy appears nice, although the corporate ought to do a greater job explaining the way it works.
What bothers us is that Atlas VPN makes use of its login system as a relentless nag to enroll in its advertising emails. Logging in to the Atlas VPN web site, you must uncheck a pre-checked field to keep away from signing up for “unique Atlas VPN presents.” Within the Home windows app, you must do the identical everytime you log in. We’re stunned and dissatisfied at this aggressive signup tactic.
As soon as we logged in, we discovered the Atlas VPN to be simple to make use of and perceive. In contrast to most VPNs, Atlas VPN is constructed round a listing of accessible servers. These are damaged down by area, and clicking some international locations reveals extra server places for the nation. This seems to offer clients entry to particular VPN servers, however we might wish to see extra details about utilization and ping time. Atlas VPN ought to, for instance, introduce a naming system that differentiates between the three servers labeled New York. The listing must be extra searchable, and there is not any included map to fudge a location if you cannot discover what you are on the lookout for. Buttons on the prime allow you to see All Servers, Streaming Servers, and Privateness Professional, which incorporates SafeSwap and multi-hop choices.
Whereas testing Atlas VPN on Home windows, we seen the app obtained some improved options and visible tweaks, sporting brighter colours and an improved interface. We nonetheless want the textual content have been a bit of bigger and the window resizable, nevertheless it’s an enchancment that bodes properly for the long run.
An infinite Join button occupies a full third of the app. We recognize how simple Atlas VPN makes getting on-line. While you toggle the connection, the button slides over, pushing a trio of spiky baddies offscreen and revealing the heroic, spherical Atlas VPN mascot. We like these prospers, which give Atlas VPN a bit of extra character than many different providers. Nevertheless, we nonetheless desire the colours and pleasant bears in Editors’ Selection winner TunnelBear VPN.
Throughout testing, we seen an odd quirk with Atlas VPN. No matter what number of occasions we chosen a distinct server, the app routinely routed us to Eire after we restarted it. We skilled a poor connection by the Dublin-based server, and we surprise if different customers would have assumed the service merely didn’t work. Atlas VPN was up to date in the midst of our overview course of, and the difficulty remained. Efficiency was considerably higher when utilizing a close-by US-based server.
The corporate has knowledgeable us that auto-connect and quick-connect performance has been improved in all of the Atlas VPN apps. We confirmed in macOS that the app now defaults to native servers. We look ahead to testing this characteristic in Home windows quickly.
We’re impressed by Atlas VPN’s distinctive SafeSwap servers, which routinely rotate your IP deal with for extra anonymity. We confirmed our IP modified a number of occasions whereas we have been linked to the US SafeSwap server.
Atlas VPN takes a barely completely different strategy to multi-hop servers. Most providers allow you to select an exit level to your information or a preset path with an entry and exit level listed. Atlas VPN has simply two buttons, one labeled Europe and the opposite North America. We like that multi-hop is included however discover this strategy obscure. IVPN, notably, allows you to combine and match its server places to construct your individual multi-hop connection.
If in case you have turned on the Atlas VPN Kill Swap, a warning message pops up everytime you manually disconnect the VPN, alerting you the Kill Swap will even be deactivated. We recognize the transparency in regards to the app’s performance. We weren’t in a position to induce an error to check the Kill Swap.
Two of Atlas VPN’s extra uncommon options are discovered within the Assistant part of the app. Right here, you possibly can enroll emails to be monitored for information breaches and see what number of trackers Atlas VPN has thwarted. We’re happy to see that the Tracker Blocker counter appeared to work accurately and word that the websites we visited did have fewer adverts—though we don’t formally check the efficacy of VPN tracker blocking.
Streaming providers block entry from VPNs to implement regional distribution offers. In our testing (as soon as we satisfied Atlas VPN to not use an Irish server), we might stream content material from Netflix whereas linked to a US-based server. Word that VPNs and streaming providers are in an energetic arms race, and a VPN that works sooner or later could also be blocked the following and vice versa.
To make sure that a VPN is hiding our IP deal with and never leaking our DNS info, we run an prolonged check utilizing the DNSLeakTest.com device. With Atlas VPN, the check confirmed that our true IP deal with was hidden and our DNS info was not leaked. We examined just one server; different servers might not be accurately configured.
Fingers On With Atlas VPN for iPhone
Atlas VPN has a succesful, whimsical-looking iPhone app. For this check, we used an iPhone 12 mini operating iOS 16.6. We love the enjoyable person interface adorned with brilliant blue and neon inexperienced depictions of cartoon heroes and monsters. Safety apps do not must be dour and utilitarian.
You’ll be able to select servers by nation, and in some circumstances, you possibly can specify a metropolis location inside a rustic. Atlas VPN additionally teams collectively the sooner servers beneath the Streaming tab, and the SafeSwap and MultiHop+ servers are beneath the Privateness Professional tab. As talked about earlier, SafeSwap servers will let you entry the web from a number of completely different IP addresses at a time, whereas MultiHop+ bounces your connections between completely different servers in numerous international locations.
Atlas VPN on iOS presents a Kill Swap and an auto-connect choice, nevertheless it doesn’t embrace extra superior networking settings. We’d significantly wish to see it add app-level cut up tunneling. The extra providers it presents for iPhone customers embrace SafeBrowse, is a browser add-on that claims to dam malicious websites and cease trackers. In a Reddit shopping session utilizing Google Chrome and the add-on, SafeBrowse claims it detected 69 trackers, of which it blocked 5. Atlas VPN’s app additionally features a information breach monitoring service. The monitor didn’t detect the deal with in any recognized breaches once we scanned for a piece e-mail.
We visited DNSLeakTest.com and carried out an prolonged check to see if Atlas VPN was leaking our actual IP deal with or DNS requests. We discovered no leaks whereas testing a server in Paris.
To check the expertise of utilizing Atlas VPN, we navigated to YouTube.com utilizing the Google Chrome browser app and watched a video of an individual restoring a Franco-Prussian warfare revolver that was discovered underwater. The video took a couple of seconds to load whereas linked to a VPN server in Amsterdam, however as soon as the video started, we might watch the restorer scrub the gun clear of rust for a number of minutes with none stuttering or interruptions.
Whereas linked to the identical Netherlands-based server, we navigated to Twitch.television and watched a streamer play F1 Supervisor 2023 for a couple of minutes. The stream took a number of seconds to load, and initially, the video high quality was severely distorted. After a couple of minute, the video and audio synced up, and the remainder of the reside broadcast streamed with none interruptions.
Atlas VPN Velocity and Efficiency
Utilizing a VPN usually reduces your add and obtain speeds and will increase latency. To get a way of that affect, we use the Ookla Speedtest device. We run it ten occasions with the VPN operating and ten occasions with out. We then take the median of each units and discover a p.c change between the 2. This can be a helpful option to examine VPN efficiency, nevertheless it can’t be taken as a complete analysis of a VPN’s efficiency. Your mileage might fluctuate. You’ll be able to learn extra about our testing, the way it adjustments, and its limitations in our characteristic How We Take a look at VPNs.
(Word: Ookla is owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag.com’s mother or father firm.)
Because of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we have had restricted entry to the PCMag Labs. We look ahead to testing Atlas VPN quickly. You’ll be able to see the most recent outcomes from all of the VPNs we have examined to date within the chart beneath.
At PCMag, we do not place a lot emphasis on VPN pace. As an alternative, we advise readers to deal with worth, options, and privateness protections.
Respectable Privateness Safety, Limitless Licenses
Atlas VPN is, in each respect, nice. It has a lot of the options we need to see in a VPN, however the execution wants work. It has a fairly well-designed app however wants to offer customers extra info and management. It makes use of a nifty password-less login system however is irritatingly pushy about e-mail signups. We like Atlas VPN’s free tier and its limitless simultaneous connections. Free subscribers are restricted to simply three servers, and the corporate has additionally diminished its free information cap. For a service with a free tier with no information cap, you possibly can’t do higher than our general favourite, Editors’ Selection winner Proton VPN.
