Surfshark VPN vs Private Internet Access (PIA)

PIA and Surfshark are both budget-friendly VPN services that offer good value for lesser money. To start off, you have three tiers in subscriptions.

The monthly plan for PIA will cost you $10.95, whereas the same for Surfshark costs you $11.95. As such, PIA tends to be the cheaper option for monthly subscriptions.

Other tiers available from PIA include 6-months and a 1-year plan. The 6-months plan will set you back by $5.99/mo., billed as $35.95 once.

Meanwhile, the 1-year plan is available for $3.33/mo., giving you a massive 67% off. Therefore, users only pay a minimal $39.95 for 12-months.

Surfshark, on the other hand, does not offer a 6-months plan. After the monthly, they provide users access to 1-year and 2-years subscriptions.

The 1-year plan gives you a 50% discount on the original pricing. You pay $5.99/mo., which totals to $71.88 for 12-months. This is quite expensive compared to PIA.

However, Surfshark makes up for it by offering an 83% discount on the 2-year plan. For 24-months access, you only pay a minimum of $47.76!

As far as refunds are concerned, PIA only offers a 7-day guarantee. Meanwhile, Surfshark offers a lengthier duration of 30-days for getting a refund.

Both Surfshark and PIA offer great functionality on multiple devices. With each provider, you have native apps for all popular platforms/devices.

These include Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and even Fire TVs. You also get router support for Apple TVs.

Not to mention, you can even finds apps that work with Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch, which is quite helpful, to say the least for the gamer audience!

As far as simultaneous connections are concerned, PIA offers the ability to establish 10 multi-logins, whereas Surfshark goes the extra mile.

It gives users unlimited multi logins and features like Shadowsocks support for China, Hacklock for identity theft protection, and NoBorders mode for accessing obfuscated servers.

PIA, on the other hand, does not offer much in the way of features. Their apps are also missing the crucial “Split Tunneling” technology!

In terms of unblocking, I received exceptional capabilities from Surfshark. Sadly, PIA was not able to bypass geo-restrictions and VPN bans that easily.

The provider failed at providing consistent performance across multiple streaming services. As such, it may not be the best option for unblocking.

You receive better performance from Surfshark, which successfully unblocks  Netflix, BBC iPlayer, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Voot, Hotstar, and even Disney Plus.

I faced no downtime issues with the provider, streaming was smooth even on Ultra HD quality, and I did not get the “proxy/VPN detected error” on all above websites.

To get a better idea about the performance, I conducted a speed analysis on both: PIA and Surfshark. This required testing 5 different servers from each provider.

The countries selected were USA, UK, France, Australia, and Canada. All tests were performed on my 100 Mbps connection to get the best results.

In bare speed tests, Surfshark managed to deliver an average of 88 Mbps in uploads and downloads, indicating a speed loss of 12%.

PIA, on the other hand, had a higher loss touching the 25% mark in speed reduction, recording an average speed of 75 Mbps.

Surfshark is a big fan of the OpenVPN protocol and uses it as “default” across all of its devices with the exception of iOS. Users can shift between UDP and TCP whenever needed.

For encryption, it utilizes AES-256-GCM ciphers so no additional authentication is provided on the data channel.

For the control channel, Surfshark uses AES-256-GCM cipher with the TLS key exchange secured using RSA-2048. Perfect forward secrecy is provided by ECDH-(384?) key exchange.

PIA, on the other hand, supports the same number of protocols. As a default, it also uses OpenVPN across all devices with the exception of iOS and MacOS that uses IKEv2 protocol.

For the control channel, PIA uses the same ciphers and hash authentication, with the inclusion of SHA384 for authentication. Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFE) is available via ECDHE+ECDSA.

Leak Tests

To ensure you receive strong security from both providers, I conducted a leak test. This process involved using 6 varied tools for WebRTC/DNS/IP address detection:

WebRTC and HTTP Request Leaks:

• https://browserleaks.com/webrtc
• https://www.doileak.com/

DNS Leaks:

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

IPv4/IPv6 and Torrent IP Leaks:

• https://ipleak.net/
• https://ipx.ac/run/

Unsurprisingly, both PIA and Surfshark passed the tests with flying colors, anonymizing all crucial personally identifiable information, keeping you protected 24/7!

Where Surfshark adopts a shared/static network infrastructure, Private Internet Access (PIA) follows a shared address allocation structure.

This is quite problematic, considering that static IPs are necessary for accessing sensitive banking information or accessing home LAN in different countries.

Luckily, Surfshark does offer dedicated IPs as an add-on. Though you do have to pay extra, you have 6+ locations available for instant connectivity.

The Winner: Surfshark

Undoubtedly, Surfshark wins this comparison, due to being better at unblocking streaming platforms, working in China, and offering dedicated IPs, all while being incredibly budget-friendly.

PIA is a good service too, but there are improvements required in several areas. Not to mention, the provider is based in a risky jurisdiction, which eliminates the whole purpose of leveraging privacy!