It is important even for small businesses to protect their data. Imagine this. You are a sole trading accountant. Your IT security probably isn’t great. The same for independent law firms. In these high earning industries it does not take much money for a competitor to decide to pay for someone to hack your system.
If you are on the hunt for security that is cost effective, then a new VPN that offers you private browsing, the ability to get past geo-restricted content and possibly download a few torrents, then this is the best place for you. This is a review of one of the better VPNs on the market are current: the TunnelBear VPN.
TunnelBear is a highly used VPN, primarily due to its ease of use. This TunnelBear review will walk you through all aspects of the VPN, allowing you to make an informed decision as to whether to choose it over some of its biggest rivals.
Our TunnelBear review will discuss the finer technical aspects of this VPN, helping you to see if it is worth giving it a go. Due to a free version being readily available, having a test drive of the Bear is incredibly easy compared to some of its competitors. So, after reading this review, if you are thinking of dipping your toe in, there’s nothing at all stopping you.
Key Features
- Number of countries where servers are located – 20
- Does VPN keep activity logs? – No
- Is there a kill switch feature? – Yes
- How many devices can be used per license? – 5
Usability
As we said at the beginning of this TunnelBear review, this VPN is possibly one of the easiest to use. This makes it perfect for beginners who are not accustomed to VPNs and who just want to get everything set up and rolling in a matter of minutes.
Price
If you were to compare this TunnelBear review to reviews of other different VPNs, you would see straight away that it is not particularly expensive, but it is nowhere near the cheapest either. This moderate price leaves the ball in your court for testing it out and seeing if the price is worth it in terms of its benefits, features, and specs compared to other available VPNs.
Free Version:
The free version is essentially the full version with some limitations. You will be able to use all of the same features of the full version, connect to their entire range of VPN servers and connect a maximum of five different devices to the TunnelBear VPN at one time.
The problem is that you will only receive a monthly allowance of 500MB of bandwidth, which gets used up very quickly. You will not be able to download torrents or even watch a movie on streaming sites for a long time. You can only really do some light surfing.
Full Version:
If you want to do some heavier downloading and streaming, then you will need the full version of TunnelBear, where your usage is unlimited. You can pay for the subscription either monthly at $9.99 or at $5 a month if you pay for the 12 months up front. If you are planning on using a VPN regularly, then saving 50% by paying annually is definitely the best option.
Features
Using TunnelBear will give you access to a VPN network across 20 different countries. You will have the luxury of one of the highest levels of encryption with AES 256-bit encryption. There are many protocols that this VPN supports too, such as OpenVPN, IKEv2 and IPSec.
On top of this, you will also enjoy:
- No Logging – TunnelBear does not keep a record of anything you do while using the VPN.
- VigilantBear – This is kill switch that protects you if you were to ever lose connection. If your VPN were to lose connection, your computer would try to default back to its original internet connection, which is not as provate. VigilantBear automatically stops your computer from doing this until TunnelBear reconnects.
- Ghost Bear – This feature is essentially a double VPN, offering an extra layer of security and making it much harder for an ISP to track what you are doing. However, this feature does lower your VPN’s speed.
- Closest Tunnel – This is what makes TunnelBear so user friendly. If you do not care what country you are connected to and just want a private connection, this feature offers you just that, connecting you to the best available server automatically.
Reliability and Support
When conducting our TunnelBear review, we found that when compared to other VPNs, TunnelBear was not the most responsive when needed. In saying that, using their ticketing system did offer solutions to any issues in a matter of hours. And, there are plenty of guides and FAQs on their website, which should make finding answers to any of your queries quite simple.
In terms of reliability, we did not find any real issues connecting to the servers on their network and it was all very fast and secure the vast majority of the time.
Conclusion
In summary, our TunnelBear review found that this is an excellent product for people who are new to the world of VPNs. It is very user friendly and even though it does not offer as many countries or servers as other products on the market, it does have enough features for most users to be able to enjoy.
