Avast VPN Review 2020

Virtual Private Networks, or VPNs, add an extra layer of encryption to your internet. Avast SecureLine is one such service, backed by the famous antivirus company behind it; owning the reputed AVG and HideMyAss VPN counterparts.

One may think with such a pedigree, the VPN delivers exceptional security/privacy online. Sadly, Avast has proved to be a mediocre service, which is why I do not recommend it to my viewers/readers.

Their pricing structure is immensely confusing, you only have a limited 55 servers in 34 countries worldwide, performance is poor for streaming/torrenting activities, and only two payment methods are supported.

Not to mention, Avast fails at unblocking VoDs, suffers from a lack of advanced features, and even records connection logs. You can get better reliability for less with Surfshark or PureVPN instead.

Read this 2020 Avast VPN review, to learn more about the providers’ security, transparency, pricing, servers, performance, compatibility, support and more.

Rating Criteria

1. Jurisdiction: Is Avast VPN Located in a 5-Eyes Country?
2. Security: Is Avast SecureLine VPN Safe?
3. Leaks: Does Avast VPN Leak IP, DNS & WebRTC?
4. Servers: Is It P2P Compatible, Does it Work in China?
5. Streaming: Does it Work with Netflix & Other VoDs?
6. Speed: How fast is Avast SecureLine VPN?
7. Compatibility: Apps and Supported Devices
8. Pricing: How Much Does Avast VPN Cost?
9. Trustworthiness: Trustpilot Ratings, Reddit & Customer Support

Jurisdiction: Is Avast VPN Located in a 5-Eyes Country?

While technically, Avast SecureLine VPN isn’t based in any 5, 9 or 14 Eyes country it does have its headquarters in a place known for cozying up in terms of information sharing with these alliances i.e. the Czech Republic.

So the jurisdiction is not fully secure and even its not a part of any problematic alliance, it’s dilly-dallying with members of these alliances raise a big red flag that’s not ignorable at all.

Security: Is Avast SecureLine VPN Safe?

After going in-depth into Avast VPN’s location, logging policy, encryption and apps,  you can feel assured that the VPN is a safe choice. It is a good option if you want to leverage strong security and privacy.

Logging Policy

Avast VPN secures claims to be a Zero logs provider. This claim is actually plausible, as the provider doesn’t store personally identifiable information like your real IP address, the IP you connect to, your browsing activity or any other similar logs.

However, Avast VPN does store connection and bandwidth logs, so it does know when you connect, how long you use the VPN and how much data do you use during that duration. Does this make the VPN unsafe? No, not at all.

While a true VPN shouldn’t keep any kind of logs, not even connection or bandwidth logs, these types of logs are usually harmless and even if a VPN collects them it won’t compromise your privacy in any major way.

Encryption and Protocols

Avast SecureLine VPN uses the AES 256 cipher to encrypt user data that goes through its protected connections. No can decipher this encryption standard because that’s not a plausible possibility.

Even if you have a thousand supercomputers working simultaneously, they will not correctly decipher the data encrypted under this cipher for hundreds of years, probably even more.

In terms of protocols, Avast VPN just offers OpenVPN but only with UDP and another protocol in the form of IPSec. This is alright since OpenVPN with UDP is faster than OpenVPN with TCP.

However, if we talk about it from a perspective of security, this is not much of an issue. OpenVPN itself is a secure, open-source software and that’s best for protocol support to VPNs.

Apps Virus Check

For a complete security review on Avast SecureLine VPN, I decided to check their apps for viruses. Fortunately, none of their VPN clients contain any viruses, after running them through VirusTotal. The results are shown below:

Kill Switch

In this fast-paced digital world, where even the simplest of activities can get you into legal hassles, thanks to mandatory data retention and mass surveillance laws; VPNs serve as crucial tools for receiving protection.

Oftentimes though, a VPN connection may get hampered, resulting in a disconnection. This poses great risk at revealing your identity, but thanks to Avast’s Kill Switch feature that disables the entire internet, you remain secure.

Leaks: Does Avast VPN leak IP, DNS & WebRTC?

The answer is absolutely not! Avast VPN is safe and doesn’t leak your IP at all. Here are the tools I used to test Avast’s grittiness in protecting your real identity, along with the results.

WebRTC and HTTP Request Leaks:

• https://browserleaks.com/webrtc (Clear)
• https://www.doileak.com/ (Clear)

DNS Leaks:

• https://www.perfect-privacy.com/dns-leaktest/ (Clear)
• https://www.dnsleaktest.com/ (Clear)

IPv4/IPv6 and Torrent IP Leaks:

• https://ipleak.net/ (Clear)
• https://ipx.ac/run/ (Clear)

Servers: Is It P2P Compatible, or Does It Work in China?

The server infrastructure of Avast VPN is far weaker in numbers than what you can get for a much lower price from other top industry VPNs. The reach is really poor, extending to only 55 servers in 34 countries worldwide.

These lesser numbers result in overcrowding, thus keeping speeds slow on congested servers. Plus, the low number of countries in which the servers are hosted, make the distance to servers longer, thereby increasing lag.

P2P/Torrenting

Avast VPN offers good torrenting capabilities and definitely tends to be one of the fastest VPNs I have tested. However, I am yet to see torrent-specific features like SOCKS5 proxies from the provider.

At the same time, Torrenting and P2P support is offered by Avast SecureLine VPN but only on these limited number of server locations (listed below). So, I would like seeing an improvement in the servers too.

• Prague, Czech Republic
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Amsterdam, Netherlands
• New York City, New York
• Miami, Florida
• Seattle, Washington
• London, United Kingdom
• Paris, France

With regards to P2P/Torrenting, I also conducted a test on IPLeak.net, which requested downloading a magnet link and then assessing the background behind the network.

As you can see, the results show that my identity is protected, revealing a different IP from my actual location and address: 185.191.205.6. This means, there are no leaks whatsoever.

Does Avast Work in China?

Sadly, the provider does not offer a StealthVPN a.k.a. obfuscation feature. I still had a representative of mine test the service in China (as part of our 80+ providers analysis), but it did not work.

Albeit, it is important to note that the VPN did function in other locations like Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt, where VPN bans are imminent and quite difficult to bypass.

Streaming: Does It Work with Netflix and Other VoDs?

Avast SecureLine VPN’s biggest weakness is its inability to unblock Netflix US or any other streaming site. Netflix has a VPN ban on its site, disallowing VPNs to initiate a connection to its site.

The streaming giant has done this to protect its copyright pacts it has with other media houses. It blacklists VPN based IPs, so if you try and connect to Netflix with such a provider with blacklisted IPs, you will see an error.

Avast SecureLine VPN didn’t make this screen go away. Avast SecureLine VPN doesn’t support Netflix unblocking from any country or through any of its server, period!

I tested Netflix on at least 10 different servers offered by Avast VPN, but each time, I would get the error message. Avast VPN also doesn’t work to unblock any other major streaming site like BBC iPlayer, Hulu, Disney+ Amazon Prime or even Sports channels.

Speed: How Fast is Avast SecureLine VPN?

Surprisingly, Avast VPN turned out to have one of the lowest speed drops in the industry, easily making it one fastest VPNs in the industry. On my 100MB connection, I was getting these speeds without a VPN connection.

• Download Speeds: 87.92 Mbps
• Upload Speeds: 78.10 Mbps
• Ping Rate: 66 Ms

Here’s my speed from Avast VPN’s San Francisco Server from the same internet connection

• Download Speeds: 83.04 Mbps
• Upload Speeds: 79.88 Mbps
• Ping Rate: 79 Ms

Just a bit over 10% drop in download speeds is what I can term blazing fast. Too bad that Avast VPN doesn’t unblock VoDs, otherwise it would have been a no-brainer to go for this VPN, as your first choice for streaming.

Compatibility: Apps and Supported Devices

Avast SecureLine VPN offers a basic app repository with support available for popular platforms i.e. Avast for Windows, Avast for Mac, Avast for Android, and Avast for iOS.

Coming to the UI/UX of the apps, simplicity is what Avast VPN has focused majorly on. No complications, no edgy features that are difficult to interact with. Just a simple click and you get connected to your selected server.

The apps are designed with noobs in mind, so even if you are a novice with not much knowledge about the VPN domain, you can simply hide your identity online with Avast VPN’s single click interface.

You get a Preference menu on each app, which is their best user friendly feature. I probably believe that Avast’s wide experience in the Antivirus domain has allowed it to replicate the same on its VPN product.

If that’s the case, I would like to see more such helpful user-based innovations. Coming back to the preferences menu, you can use it to set your own preferences on how you want the VPN to behave.

Want Avast VPN to connect automatically every time you open your PC? No issues, just click on the option for this in the preferences menu, and the VPN will function exactly like that.

The mobile apps are equally clean and responsive, with almost the same interface as their desktop counterparts. The server list is easily accessible and a single tap on any server name will automatically initiate a connection to it.

Pricing: How Much Does Avast VPN Cost?

Avast SecureLine’s most confusing aspect is its pricing. It apparently follows a device based pricing strategy, which is quite strange and creates a lot of confusion.

Nearly all top VPNs like IvacyVPN have streamlined subscription plans that are priced on the duration of a subscription i.e. monthly, yearly, or even two-year plans.

But apart from one regular plan that works on all devices, Avast SecureLine VPN offers device-based subscription plans. Below the Avast VPN cost on different plans is described in detail:

1. Yearly Subscription for 5 devices: $79.99
2. Windows OS access: $59.99
3. Mac OS access: $59.99 yearly
4. Android OS access: $19.99 yearly
5. iOS/iPad OS access: $19.99 yearly

For the pricing, you do not get access to a ton of features, like you would with Surfshark, Ivacy, or ExpressVPN. Avast also fails in unblocking VoDs, but you do receive good support for downloading torrents.

Although the pricing is confusing, Avast does offers an incredible, 7-day free trial offer where you just need to download their client and start running it on your device.

The only thing that is required to initiate this trial period is your credit card details. No payment will be deducted, if you cancel your subscription before the end of the trial period.

For payment methods, Avast SecureLine supports only two options: credit/debit cards or PayPal. There is no Bitcoin support though, which is a bummer, as it doesn’t give the user any leverage on being anonymous.

Can I Get Avast for Free?

Yes, you can avail a 7-day free trial available from Avast to test the service on your Mac, Windows, iOS, and Android devices. However, you will still have to add your payment details when signing up.

Trustworthiness: Trustpilot Ratings, Reddit & Customer support

Avast VPN has receiving an average rating of 2/5 on Trustpilot from a total of 2,656 user reviews. Needless to say, this is quite a poor score and indicates that not many users are satisfied with the provider.

Over 11% of users have given Avast a “bad” rating, meaning more than 290+ users believe the service “sucks” for lack of a better term; justifying why we too do not recommend the product.

Avast SecureLine VPN Reviews on Google Play Store

On Google Play Store, Avast VPN enjoys a 4.6 star rating from a total of 130,825 reviews. While most seem to be satisfied with the Android version, I saw many complaints of disconnections and server downtime’s.

Avast VPN Review Reddit

After searching for Avast VPN on Reddit, most of the reviews I came across were “negative”. And I noticed that a lot of users were complaining about irritating popup ads at the bottom of their apps.

This was consistent on other products as well. For instance, the below redditor download the Avast Premier and was frequently getting frustrating ads to install their SecureLine VPN application.

Customer Support

Avast SecureLine VPN opts for a unique approach towards offering customer support. While others offer live chat, you can actually call an Avast customer support exec for a talk whenever you want!

When I called on the support helpline, I found the execs to be really polite and incredibly experienced to solve major issues. Avast SecureLine VPN also offers a dedicated FAQs section, but it has only basic level queries.

Unfortunately, they are also missing a “live chat” support system, which is incredibly alarming. Nowadays, offering live chat is like an industry-standard, but Avast seems to be living in the 1990s.

Thankfully, they make up for it by offering a 24/7 phone support, but still that may not be a viable solution for many. If all else fails, you can reach Avast via their Facebook and Twitter profiles. 

Comparison between Surfshark & Avast VPN

Do I Recommend Avast VPN?

I do not recommend Avast SecureLine VPN to anyone reading this, as I believe the service has a long way to go to justify its high price range. The missing features, poor server reach, and lack of Netflix unblocking makes it pretty much useless.

The provider does offer great speeds and sturdy apps, but the flaws can just not be ignored. So, for now, this service is not on our recommendation list. If you are looking for a good, secure, fast and feature-rich VPN service, go for Surfshark.