With a VPN, or virtual private network, you can ensure that your data is secure on your network and hidden from prying eyes.
PureVPN has a large collection of VPN servers across the world, offering some of the best geographic diversity we've seen.
It could use some brushing-up in the UI department, however, and it has a dud of a dedicated streaming server.
We recommend Editors' Choice winners NordVPN or Private Internet Access as more full-featured alternatives.
What Is a VPN?
When you use a VPN, your web traffic travels through an encrypted tunnel to the VPN service's secure server before heading out into the wider internet.
This means that any bad guys monitoring your network won't be able to see your web traffic or trace your movements on the internet back to you.
The next time you use a public Wi-Fi network, such as the one at your local coffee shop, you might want to fire up a VPN to make sure no one is snooping on your movements.
VPNs protect your privacy, but they can also unlock restricted content.
In countries with oppressive internet policies, activists and journalists use VPNs to sidestep government censorship and contact the outside world.
VPNs can also be used to access region-locked content, such as BBC and Netflix streaming services, though many such companies are starting to fight back against VPN cheats.
More on this below.
While using a VPN is a great step toward better security, it's important to know the limitations of VPNs, too.
Although VPNs obscure your IP address, the Tor service is far better at providing true anonymization.
Also, if the site you're headed to doesn't use HTTPS, your traffic may be intercepted along the way, anyhow.
One thing a VPN can do is help secure your data from your ISP, lest it be sold.
There's a good chance that you may have never laid hands on a VPN before.
If that's the case, don't worry! We've got a whole feature on how to set up and use a VPN.
Pricing and Features
PureVPN currently offers neither a free version nor a free trial of its product.
There is, however, a seven-day money-back guarantee.
If you're unwilling to plunk down cash for a VPN, consider the numerous excellent free VPN services on the market.
TunnelBear and ProtonVPN, for example, have excellent (albeit limited) free products.
PureVPN costs $10.95 per month, though there are usually discounts on offer.
You can also opt to pay $59.00 for a one-year subscription.
Subscription payments can be made via just about every means you could desire: credit card, Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies), PayPal, and so on.
You can even pay with gift cards from popular stores.
If you ever dreamed of using your Starbucks gift card to buy a VPN service, this is your chance.
PureVPN has a reasonable monthly price, but one that is just slightly above the $10.50 average monthly fee I'm used to seeing.
NordVPN (Spring Special: $89 for Two-Year Plan With Bonus Gift at NordVPN) , costs only one more dollar per month, and offers unique specialized servers for specific needs.
Private Internet Access has many times the servers that PureVPN offers, and is far more affordable, at $6.95 per month.
When you go to complete your transaction, PureVPN gives you the chance to purchase add-on services.
These include an additional firewall and other extras, which I discuss in detail later.
Whichever plan you choose, you get five licenses to spread across all your devices.
PureVPN has clients for Linux, macOS, and Windows, as well as mobile clients for Android and iOS.
You can also secure just your browser traffic with the PureVPN Chrome plug-in.
There is also a business version of PureVPN, priced on a per-seat basis.
It's $8.00 per person per month, with additional plans that include more features.
PureVPN also offers software for routers and streaming devices, including the Amazon Fire Stick, Android TV boxes, and Kodi-powered systems.
TorGuard VPN sells routers and Apple TVs with its software preinstalled, as does Private Internet Access.
Running VPN software on your router can be a smart way to extend protection to every device in your house—including smart devices that can't run VPN software, like your fridge or your game console—at no additional cost.
Other benefits include PureVPN's allowing P2P file sharing and BitTorrent traffic on more than 200 of its servers.
Its Split Tunneling feature also lets you select specific traffic to go through the VPN, which is excellent.
That way, you can keep certain activities secure and allow more data-hungry but less sensitive functions to get all the access they need.
PureVPN doesn't do everything, however.
For instance, it doesn't provide access to the Tor network, in addition to its VPN protection, which NordVPN does.
The absence of such fringe features doesn't hurt PureVPN's score, however, though their presence can help boost the profile of the competition.
VPN Protocols
VPN technology has been around for a long time; as a result, there is more than one way to create an encrypted tunnel.
PureVPN supports several VPN protocols, including: IKEv2, L2TP, PPTP, OpenVPN, and SSTP.
All of these provide 256-bit encryption, except PPTP, which offers only 128-bit encryption.
Generally, I recommend that people use OpenVPN where possible, because of its speed, reliability, and open-source status.
I am, however, happy to see that PureVPN offers many choices, from legacy support to the latest standards.
Servers and Server Locations
It's safe to assume that a VPN company will add or remove servers as demand increases or slacks, but the number and location of servers are useful indicators of a VPN service's robustness.
The more servers there are, the more bandwidth is available to each user on each server.
The more server locations there are, the more likely you are to find a fast and reliable connection when you travel abroad.
Numerous server locations also means more choices for spoofing your location, too.
PureVPN currently offers users some 750 servers across 140 countries in 180 different locations.
The list includes servers in Africa, Asia, Australia, Central America, Europe, North America, and South America.
In fact, it offers some of the best geographic diversity I have yet seen among VPN companies.
Simply having VPN servers in 19 different African nations puts it leaps and bounds ahead of the competition.
But not everything is necessarily as it seems.
PureVPN told me that 54 of the 141 country locations are physical servers while the other 87 are virtual locations.
A virtual server is a software-defined server; basically, a physical server running multiple virtual servers that can be configured in different ways, including being made to appear to be in a country other than where they're actually located.
Virtual servers can be an issue if you want to know exactly which countries are handling your data.
That's difficult with PureVPN.
Although you can find out which servers are virtual, a representative explained to me virtual servers are placed "in a location nearest to the actual physical location." That's not an exact location, and doesn't go toward addressing the issue of knowing where data is at any given moment.
This might matter if you're concerned about your data passing through or being stored in specific legal jurisdictions.
Both NordVPN and Private Internet Access ($69.95 for Two-Year Plan + Two-Months Free at Private Internet Access) offer well over 3,000 servers.
These companies also do not use any virtual locations and own physical hardware in each of the countries they serve.
Note that PureVPN also offers servers in China, Russia, and Turkey.
That's particularly notable as these countries have oppressive internet policies.
While many VPN companies no longer offer servers in China or Russia in the face of restrictive local laws, PureVPN still does.
In general, I don't think it's possible to make a final judgment about the privacy powers of a given company based solely on the country in which it operates.
It is, however, important to know what the policies of the company are and the legal framework they operate within.
I suggest would-be consumers consider the facts and go with the company they feel most comfortable about.
Your Privacy With PureVPN
A VPN is intended to improve your privacy, but that only works if the company providing the service takes steps to make sure that your information is secure.
After all, if a VPN is keeping tabs on what you do, it's no better than a spy that you're paying for, or an ISP.
PureVPN recently update its privacy policy and the results are good.
It's very easy to read and understand.
It's not interactive, like TunnelBear's, but its bullet-pointed format makes for breezy reading, if you're into that sort of thing.
In the policy, PureVPN says that it does not log your activity or DNS requests.
It also does not log your true IP address or the IP adresss of the VPN server you use.
This is excellent.
It does, however, note when you connect to a server and the total bandwidth used during your session.
This kind of data gathering is not unusual among VPN services.
The records that are kept, the company says, could not "associate any specific activity to a specific user."
Since we first reviewed PureVPN, the company has come under fire for disclosing user information to the federal government in response to a criminal investigation.
While I am far from being an expert in law enforcement, the disclosure seems in line with the company's privacy policy.
Concerned readers should consider the case carefully.
A company representative for PureVPN told me that the company only gathers revenue from subscription sales.
That's good, as some VPN companies have intercepted user web traffic to insert ads.
Still, others have sold anonymized user information, a practice by ISPs that many use a VPN to prevent in the first place.
Note that PureVPN is headquartered in Hong Kong.
This is a bit ironic, given how repressive some of China's internet regulations are.
Hong Kong doesn't have mandatory data-retention laws, though, so PureVPN is not required to store data on users or their behavior.
However, the Chinese government has been working to ban VPNs that don't comply with certain restrictions.
I invited representatives from PureVPN to explain in detail what steps the company takes to protect user data while operating in China.
PureVPN representatives pointed out that Hong Kong has a special legal relationship with the rest of China.
Indeed, the city is actually an "autonomous territory" within China.
As such, a company representative described it as the, "best place in the world to keep anything hidden."
I'm not a legal expert, but PureVPN's representatives explained that Hong Kong maintains its own "legislative, judiciary [...], sets its own rules on immigration, public order, education, civil aviation, and monetary system." The practical upshot, PureVPN's representatives explained, is that, "PureVPN does not have to comply with the laws stipulated by [the People's Republic of China], instead, there are no such restrictions on doing a VPN business in the autonomous jurisdiction of Hong Kong."
As a rule, I don't think it's possible for me to make a judgment on a VPN company's privacy practices based solely on the location of its headquarters.
To do so would be xenophobic at the least.
What I do know is that PureVPN's legal situation is more complicated than that of the average VPN service.
I also know that its privacy policy lays out strong protections for consumers simply by not collecting the most sensitive information.
Again, I cannot claim to be a well-versed in the law (especially not international law).
My advice, as always, is that consumers consider the facts and make a decision that feels comfortable to them.
See How We Test VPNs
Hands On With PureVPN
For this review, I installed PureVPN on a Lenovo ThinkPad T460 running Windows 10.
Installation on my test system was quick, but it did require a separate installation of Microsoft Visual C++ 2013.
When you create an account for billing purposes with PureVPN, you enter an email and a password (a mere 12 characters, with no special characters—hardly secure).
But this isn't the password or login information you use with the actual PureVPN app.
Instead, you receive an email with the password and username in plaintext.
Other VPNs also handle user logins this way.
The logic is that it separates your usage and payment identities, allowing for greater anonymity.
I'd like to see PureVPN handle this more elegantly—and more securely.
First-time customers may be confused, wondering why the login credentials they used to purchase a subscription don't work in the client.
When you launch PureVPN, a screen prompts you to select one of five options: Stream, Internet Freedom, Security/Privacy, File Sharing, and Dedicated IP.
Depending on what you select, PureVPN delivers a customized experience.
This is clever since it elevates features users might not be familiar with by presenting situations they probably understand, but I wonder how helpful it will be for someone who just wants to get online.
I much prefer the approach of NordVPN or TunnelBear, which have a simple button to activate the VPN under default settings.
Clicking any of these buttons activates the VPN, but the idea is to give you access to the best tools for whatever you're trying to accomplish.
Privacy, it turns out, is what I would consider to be the default experience for a VPN client, letting you search the available servers and select one for connection.
Stream, on the other hand, is meant to let you quickly start using services like Netflix.
Ironically, I found that I wasn't able to use Netflix when PureVPN was active.
There are other settings buried within the app.
The Protocols pull-down menu lets you choose from the available VPN protocols, as well as PureVPN's custom Stealth protocol.
Each option is accompanied by a rating for speed and security, which is certainly helpful.
By default, PureVPN is set to Auto and chooses the protocol it thinks best.
Many VPN companies are grappling with potential leaks, where your information may be briefly exposed.
PureVPN addresses this with its Gravity option, which taps into the company's secure DNS servers.
The Global Map tab on the left lets you bypass PureVPN's recommendations and simply select one of the company's servers.
Personally, I prefer this kind of interface, and I wonder why PureVPN decided not to...
