US-based safety agency McAfee purchased Tunnelbear in March 2018 and confirmed that “TunnelBear will function as a separate workforce inside McAfee, persevering with to develop the bear-filled merchandise”.

VPNs can appear a sophisticated know-how, filled with low-level geeky particulars that hardly anybody understands, however examine the TunnelBear website and you will shortly realise this service does issues in a different way.

The Canadian-based firm does not drown you in jargon. There isn’t any speak of protocols, no point out of encryption varieties, barely any technical phrases in any respect. As a substitute the location focuses on the basics, corresponding to clearly explaining why you may wish to use a VPN within the first place.

This strategy will not work for everybody. We ran some searches and located the phrase ‘DNS’ appeared 10 instances on Tunnelbear.com, for example, in comparison with 1,130 on Expressvpn.com – should you’re an skilled person and want to know extra in regards to the underlying service, you are prone to be disillusioned.

Nonetheless, the essential service specs are interesting. TunnelBear now gives servers in 20 nations unfold all around the globe: Europe, US, Canada, Hong Kong, Mexico, Japan, Singapore, India, Brazil, and (for paid plans) Australia.

Setup is simple, due to customized shoppers for iOS, Android, Mac and Home windows, in addition to a browser extension. TunnelBear helps as much as 5 simultaneous connections, too, so you possibly can combine and match these as required.

Whereas the usual free account restricts you to a horribly restricted 500MB of visitors a month, TunnelBear’s particular TechSwitch plan gives a much more beneficiant 5GB. That provides you a lot extra shopping choices, and for example might let you watch 20 minutes of streaming 480p video day by day, and nonetheless have some shopping time left over. 

In case you want extra, upgrading to a paid plan will get you limitless information beginning at an affordable $5 (£four) a month, paid yearly.

Privateness

TunnelBear’s web site proudly shows what appears like a really clear no-logging coverage: “TunnelBear does NOT log any exercise of shoppers related to our service. Interval. Your privateness is paramount.” Nearly each different VPN service says the identical, although – can we actually belief what the corporate says?

No outsider can ever be utterly certain how a VPN operates, however what we are able to say is TunnelBear’s privateness coverage is way extra clear than absolutely anything else we have seen. Whereas others speak vaguely about capturing ‘some’ information for operational causes, TunnelBear lists each merchandise, explains what it’s and why it is wanted. 

There aren’t any nasty surprises, and even something mildly disagreeable. The corporate shops your e mail handle, first (not final) identify, plus the whole quantity of knowledge used this month. It additionally shops the OS model of your machine, which you may not count on. However we are able to see why it may be useful to know that, and a supplier realizing that you just’re operating an iOS 10.three machine actually is not a privateness danger.

What’s extra attention-grabbing is the checklist of knowledge the corporate does not accumulate. Not solely does it not file any details about the web sites and companies you entry when on-line, it does not even file the session information typically logged elsewhere (your incoming IP handle whenever you provoke a connection, and the IP handle you are assigned).

Some corporations attempt to bury sneaky clauses within the phrases of service pages, however once more TunnelBear may be very totally different. Not solely is the doc comparatively brief (1,500 phrases), however every part has a quick and plain English abstract that can assist you perceive it.

In case you do not wish to learn a 200 phrase block of textual content which kicks off with: “TunnelBear is offering this service on an ‘as is, as accessible’ foundation with out illustration or guarantee of any type”, for example, simply look to the best for the abstract line. This merely states: “Generally issues break. We do our greatest.”

We drilled down into the main points, anyway, however did not spot any important points. The closest we got here was a clause forbidding you from taking “any motion that leads to an unreasonable load on TunnelBear’s infrastructure”, which is so imprecise as to be nearly ineffective. However even there, most VPNs have an analogous ‘acceptable use’ clause someplace, and also you’re very unlikely to run into any points with a bandwidth-limited free account.

Efficiency

TunnelBear’s setup course of is fastidiously designed to be as fast and hassle-free as doable. We clicked the ‘Get began’ button on the prime of the location, then a easy type requested us to enter a username and password, and the location robotically downloaded the best consumer for our system. Straightforward.

You want one other consumer? Log in utilizing your credentials on another machine and you will find hyperlinks to Home windows, Mac, iOS and Android shoppers, in addition to browser extensions for Chrome and Opera.

Utilizing our Home windows consumer was simply as easy. After a normal set up, we have been capable of log in by selecting a server location on a map. We clicked Germany, have been allotted a brand new IP handle inside seconds and will browse in privateness. Tapping one other button turned the safety off once more.

TunnelBear is not fairly as fundamental because it appears. Our consumer blocked DNS leaks robotically. It permits utilizing TCP connections for better reliability. There’s an extra-stealthy GhostBear choice to make your actions appear extra like common web visitors, and the consumer can robotically kick in should you connect with something apart from a trusted community. Even some supposedly ‘superior’ shoppers cannot all the time try this.

We accomplished our assessments by operating varied efficiency benchmarks*. Native downloads have been speedy at 30Mbps or extra, whereas UK-US connections have been an affordable 10 to 20Mbps, relying on the server.

Switching to a far-distant location corresponding to Singapore noticed obtain speeds fall to 2Mbps, however that is common, and it is nonetheless nearly usable for fundamental shopping. General, TunnelBear’s free plan delivered very acceptable efficiency – we have seen paid merchandise which might be considerably worse.

Closing verdict

Exceptionally easy-to-use, TunnelBear is a superb free VPN for networking newbies.

Try out TunnelBear VPN for free here.

*Our testing included evaluating common efficiency (shopping, streaming video). We additionally used speedtest.internet to measure latency, add and obtain speeds. We then in contrast these outcomes to different VPN companies we have reviewed. After all, do word that VPN efficiency is troublesome to measure as there are such a lot of variables.