2021 ExpressVPN Review

ExpressVPN Verdict | Review Summary

Company name: Express VPN International Ltd.
Jurisdiction: British Virgin Islands
Experience: 11 years

Commited for privacy, excellent for streaming

ExpressVPN is among the best VPN providers in the global market nowadays. Located in B.V.I, ExpressVPN is committed and executes a strict no-logs policy combined with superior security and privacy package.
ExpressVPN is perfect for streaming media consumption and P2P usage.

Although not the cheapest, still good value for money

It’s ‘easy to use’ platform, which makes it easy for a novice to explore and understand the power of VPN services. Although ExpressVPN doesn’t carry the lowest price in the market, ExpressVPN still is a good value for money deal because they provide a high level of specs in any of the essential aspects of VPN.

How much ExpressVPN cost?

ExpressVPN Pricing & Payment Method Overall (scores 85%)

ExpressVPN offers 3 plans: (i) a monthly plan without discount – $12.95 per month; (ii) a 6-month plan with ~50% discount – $6.99 per month; (iii) 15-month plan with a discount of 49% – $6.67 per month. Choosing the third plan (15 months) will give you the possibility to renew it in the end to another 12 months for $8.33 per month.

Although ExpressVPN offers impeccable technology, including an impressive amount of servers and excellent security and privacy-related technology, prices itself are not ExpressVPN’s strongest card. According to ExpressVPN, the company have strong brand recognition and customer trust that finds its pricing still attractive.

With what can I Pay ExpressVPN ?

ExpressVPN offers quite extensive payment methods starting from different credit cards, including Alipay, China UnionPay (CUP), through Paypal and ending with several alternative payment methods such as Bitcoin and other digital payments. By some of the payment methods, ExpressVPN is wisely appealing for the audience behind the Great Wall. ExpressVPN confident about its service by providing to all of its plans a 30-day money-back guarantee.

How to pay for a VPN anonymously?

One of the ways to track a person’s activity is to follow his financial behaviour, meaning, track his credit card purchases and study his or her behaviour. To pay anonymously, you will need to have a cryptocurrencies account. Paying with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin or Ethereum, allows you to stay anonymous online with no ability to track you. ExpressVPN offers you to pay with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and keep your identity totally confidential.

ExpressVPN Plans

Is ExpressVPN Secure?

ExpressVPN Privacy & Security Overall (scores 95%)

ExpressVPN Protocols and Encryption

ExpressVPN is using the highest level of encryption, known as AES-256. Without going too deep into boring technical details, we can explain it that by applying the 256-bit cryptographic cipher into their set of encryption, ExpressVPN aligns their encryption standards with organisations like CIA and FBI, these organisations and many others use AES-256 to secure the transmissions of high profile confidential data. Unencrypt AES-256 is literally impossible, and just for illustrating purpose it would take a ridiculous number of supercomputers in a million times human lifetime to unencrypt a single packet of data. All ExpressVPN servers use OpenVPN protocol, which supports both UDP and TCP ports. Unfortunately, only part of ExpressVPN servers uses L2TP/IPsec. IPsec and IKEv2 are available only with iOS devices. These conventional protocols such as OpenVPN (Windows and earlier OSX clients), PPTP and L2PT. IKEv2 is being used in iOS and new macOS app. For the tech-savvy users among you, ExpressVPN supports Split-Tunnelling, which allows a user to decide what part of the traffic goes through VPN and what doesn’t.

Does ExpressVPN keep logs?

Basically, ExpressVPN does not keep users logs in their database except important log files. A more detailed response from ExpressVPN was: “We only collect information that can be used to help our customers in troubleshooting any issues they will experience. We are advocates of internet freedom. We do not log any information they can expose a customer’s privacy and security when browsing the internet while using ExpressVPN.” Unfortunately, we cannot define ExpressVPN policy as a 100% no logs policy. A seemingly minor detail in VPN companies is the jurisdiction of the company, a derivation of it is the regulation that the company is under, ExpressVPN is registered in the British Virgin Islands, where the regulation is less strict and allows VPN providers act more unobstructedly outside of the 5/9/14 eyes alliance.

Reading ExpressVPN privacy policy, they do not and will never collect any information like customers real IP address, IP addresses that customers connect to through the VPN, browsing activity history, traffic destination or metadata and DNS queries.
Only a fraction of connection and diagnostic data gathered anonymously by ExpressVPN to assist technical matters and enhance their service, yet they do not correlate any information to a particular customer.

ExpressVPN Security

Those who are using location-specification specific activities such as gamble online, ExpressVPN presents a very usable Kill Switch that will automatically eliminate any software or websites you were using if your VPN service just dropped.

Can I watch Netflix with ExpressVPN? or any other media streaming service?

Definitely, YES! ExpressVPN unblocks sites with a VPN and frees you online to consume any content such as watching Netflix. And you can do much more than this using ExpressVPN, for example:

Using Tinder with VPN

Everyone is already familiar with the go-to app for singles everywhere. Yet, Tinder is blocked in some countries. Not any more, by using ExpressVPN, you can access Tinder from anywhere in the globe.

Watching Amazon Prime with VPN

Amazon Prime’s growing video streaming service let you access to content such as international movies and TV shows. With the US or UK-based Amazon Prime account and a VPN, you can relocate your internet connection as you watch thousands of titles from the UK or U.S. video libraries!

Watching BBC iPlayer with VPN

With ExpressVPN you can securely watch all your favourite TV Series on BBC with its excellent news coverage, children’s programming, and drama series with channels like BBC One, BBC Two, CBeebies, and more.

Using ExpressVPN, you can enjoy much more streaming content like listening to music with Spotify, watching TV series with Kodi, watch all your preferred sports online with DAZN and more.

Can I torrent with ExpressVPN?

ExpressVPN is absolutely ideal for torrenting. With its 160 global locations and more than 3,000 servers spread and the fact that ExpressVPN supports P2P connections for all of their servers, ExpressVPN is a perfect solution for torrenting anonymously.

ExpressVPN Privacy & Security Components

ExpressVPN Speed Rating

ExpressVPN Speed Overall (scores 95%)

How Fast is ExpressVPN?

ExpressVPN definitely happens to be one of the leading VPN providers when it comes to download and upload speed. Our routine check under 100Mbps provided us with a ‘net speed’ of 98.4 Mbps without connecting to VPN servers. Connecting through ExpressVPN server in Austria (EU) provided a remarkable download speed result of 81.43 Mbps, upload speed of 51.64 Mbps and 42ms ping. We checked in more locations as follows:

ExpressVPN Servers Speed

Checking ExpressVPN servers across some prominent continents reflected a download speed lose between 17%-70% depending on the location, this good result is a bit impaired by the wide range differences due to different ExpressVPN servers that we tested, yet still, good result when comparing with other providers in which we experienced a 65-80% speed drop. We did not experience any disconnections, yet, we noticed slight buffering in streaming.

ExpressVPN Servers

ExpressVPN operates its VPN services through over 3,000 servers in more than 94 countries. This fact put ExpressVPN among the top VPN providers in terms of the number of servers, the coverage and the spread of it. Only less than 3% of ExpressVPN servers are virtual servers, whereas the physical server and the registered IP address are not located in the same country. For example, choosing to connect to Indonesia, you will be routed through a server in Singapore and assigned an Indonesian IP address so that your traffic seems to come from Indonesia.

General Remark about VPN Speed

Please bear in mind that the speed is a result of cumulative factors such as your actual internet connection if you are using LAN or Wi-Fi connection, your exact location, the device you are using, whether it is a laptop, desktop or mobile phone, it all have different specifications that influence your speed.

ExpressVPN Speed Components

ExpressVPN User-Friendly Rating

ExpressVPN User-Friendly Overall (scores 97%)

ExpressVPN is a prominent player when it comes to the user-friendly scope, meaning, ExpressVPN provides solutions for most users based on their devices. You name it; dedicated apps for macOS, iOS (iPhone, iPad), Windows, Android (Android Pie, Oreo, Nougat, Marshmallow & Lollipop), secure APK for Android 9, Android 8, Android 7, Android 6 and Android 5 with manual setup guides, plus Linux (Ubuntu, CentOS, Debian, Fedora, Raspbian and Arch). ExpressVPN provides as well, browser add-ons (extensions) for Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, and a dedicated solution for media streamers for consoles and smart TVs.

The ExpressVPN Router App

With ExpressVPN, you can use a VPN which is configured and installed on your router, by doing so, you can modify your home Wi-Fi network to an anonymous and protected with all of your traffic encrypted. You just go online with any of your devices (PC, iPad, Kindle, mobile phones etc.) which will remain behind the router (meaning connected to your Wi-Fi through your router with ExpressVPN installed on it), you don’t have to wait to connect each time you start a device because you are always connected through the front main shield – the router. 

ExpressVPN extensions for Chrome browser and Firefox browser

Both Chrome and Firefox Express VPN extensions interfaces are clear, easy to configure and operate. Kill Switch option prevents internet data to flow out of the VPN tunnel and in case VPN suddenly drops, internet data will immediately stop. Express VPN browsers extensions prevent unapproved entities like your ISP or DNS service from watching your online activity. In addition, WebRTC blocking keeps your privacy by blocking websites from seeing your exact IP address and location. With ExpressVPN browser extension, you can spoof your location and set your geolocation data in the Chrome browser.

ExpressVPN Mac Apps

The easy to use ExpressVPN app comes with all ExpressVPN features like OpenVPN as standard, split tunnelling, optimised for speed, network lock kill switch, advanced leak protection, browser extension compatibility and smart location. ExpressVPN Mac app provides a solution to the majority of today’s Mac devices like MacBook, MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Pro and Mac mini. It is compatible with a wide range of MacOS from macOS Snow Leopard (10.6) till macOS Mojave (10.14). If you happen to use iPhone devices as well, you can share a VPN connection over Wi-Fi with your Mac.

ExpressVPN Android App

The Android app works with ALL Android mobile devices. You can enjoy a clear interface that even a novice can set up and operate. If you are using Android TV, you can find all the advantages of a VPN when you go through your favourite streamed content.

ExpressVPN MediaStreamer solution for consoles and smart TVs

ExpressVPN provides a great solution for enabling you to use VPN over smart TVs and consoles using Dynamic DNS service (DDNS). By creating a free DDNS hostname (in case of ExpressVPN, the company offers https://www.dynu.com as a free dynamic DNS service provider. Whether you use Sony PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch or Streaming media providers like Apple TV, Amazon Fire TV or Samsung Smart TV, you can easily install VPN service using a computer through a short process.

In addition, ExpressVPN enables you to use VPN services with more devices like Chromecast, Roku and Nvidia Shield.

ExpressVPN User-Friendly Components

ExpressVPN Support Rating

ExpressVPN Support Overall (scores 100%)

ExpressVPN offers various methods to reach and use their support platform. ExpressVPN’s customer support is available 24/7, which is done by a web form or by emailing them. There is comprehensive information in ExpressVPN’s support centre that is being present in a clear structure, divided to topics, everything that will make beginners feel confident with installing the apps, using it and exploring the technologic possibilities deeply.

We chose the live chat alternative for checking ExpressVPN support feedback, and it came out quite quick and efficient. We poked numerous times ExpresVPN’s live chat with all sort of matters regarding their best servers for using torrents and media streaming, installing issues, and we got professional explanations that could be clear even for novice ones. ExpressVPN support centre holds within a well-defined way of presenting and categorising their knowledge based on users experience, for example, account issues which include billing and all other financial matters when contracting with ExpressVPN. There is a clear separation based on platforms, which is an excellent starting point for technical issues.

Guides and walkthrough tutorials are very informative and mostly includes videos that can be followed by anyone with a zero technical know-how. For the more technical experienced persons, there is a step-by-step solution for different errors. We liked the intuitive ‘Jump to Section’ bottom part in the ‘Setup Tutorials’ which makes it easy to jump to a nearby issue that can appear while facing a current issue.

ExpressVPN Support Components