CyberGhost VPN Review 2022
| CYBERGHOST VPN SPECS | |
|---|---|
| Block Ads | Yes |
| Simultaneous VPN Connections | 7 |
| 500+ Servers | Yes |
| Server Locations | 90 Countries |
| Geographically Diverse Servers | Yes |
| Free Version | No |
| Free Version Data Limit | No Free Version |
By directing your web traffic through an encrypted connection to a distant server, a VPN shields your personal information and makes it more difficult to monitor you online. It’s a potent tool, and we think CyberGhost is one of the top VPNs out there. It offers the biggest VPN server network we’ve ever seen and permits a generous seven connections at once. Beyond VPNs, it has extended its influence to other security products. However, the service is pricey, hasn’t undergone a third-party audit, and lacks all of the VPN capabilities that we’ve come to expect from top-tier goods.
How much does CyberGhost cost?
The first month of a CyberGhost subscription costs $12.99. That’s considerably more expensive than the $9.96 monthly industry average as well as Editors’ Choice winner Mullvad’s €5 ($5.99 at the time of writing) monthly fee.
CyberGhost provides a discount for extended memberships, similar to the majority of VPN providers. The cost of a CyberGhost subscription is $47.88 a year, $83.76 for a two-year subscription, and $87.75 for a strangely timed three-year, three-month subscription. CyberGhost’s plans are very alluring, especially in light of the fact that the average yearly plan cost among the VPNs we evaluated is $72.33. However, to assess how effectively the VPN works for you, we usually advise starting with a monthly plan. While CyberGhost occasionally modifies its charging structure, it should be noted that any introductory rates are displayed alongside the future rate as well.
Keep in mind that access to CyberGhost’s NoSpy high-security servers costs an extra $59.88 per year for monthly users. NoSpy servers are provided without charge to customers who sign up for any subscription lasting longer than a month. We go into more depth about these specialised servers below.
How a VPN Works
Keep in mind that access to CyberGhost’s NoSpy high-security servers costs an extra $59.88 per year for monthly users. NoSpy servers are provided without charge to customers who sign up for any subscription lasting longer than a month. We go into more depth about these specialised servers below.
Major credit cards and PayPal make it simple to buy a CyberGhost plan, but Bitcoin can also be used to make an anonymous payment. However, more on that later, paying with Bitcoin means foregoing the opportunity to purchase some of CyberGhost’s add-ons. Both Editors’ Choice winners, IVPN and Mullvad VPN, accept cash payments to their respective corporate offices if you’re interested in a strictly cash transaction.
Seven devices can be used concurrently with CyberGhost, making a subscription an excellent value for a household with many gadgets. Five devices is the industry average for VPN providers, however this trend seems to be steadily shifting in favour of customers with several devices. Five devices is the industry norm for VPN providers, however this number appears to be slowly shifting in favour of customers. There is no restriction on how many devices you may connect simultaneously with Atlas VPN, Avira Phantom VPN, IPVanish VPN, Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN.
Although a VPN is an effective tool, it cannot guarantee your safety from all threats. We strongly advise utilising a password manager, standalone antivirus software, and multi-factor authentication wherever it is offered.
What Do You Get for Your Money?
NoSpy servers are ones that CyberGhost VPN offers, claiming that they are carefully tuned servers located in a high-security server facility in Romania, the nation where CyberGhost is based. This has heightened physical security, just like the Secure Core servers from ProtonVPN. Contrarily, CyberGhost does not offer multi-hop connections; ProtonVPN employs its Secure Core servers for this purpose. We were unable to test NoSpy servers this time since access to them cannot be added to an existing membership. Once we have a chance to test the NoSpy servers out for ourselves, we will update this review.
CyberGhost advertises that it offers malware and ad filtering in addition to VPN security. Although we haven’t tested the effectiveness of these capabilities in any VPN packages, we usually suggest that readers use antivirus software and independent tracker blocks. Although a VPN is not required to utilise Tor, CyberGhost VPN is unable to send your traffic over the Tor anonymization network, unlike ProtonVPN and Editors’ Choice winner NordVPN. Split tunnelling is, however, a feature of CyberGhost. This enables you to prevent a certain set of URLs from using the VPN connection.
With dedicated IP addresses from CyberGhost, your traffic will always appear to originate from the same IP address and may appear less like VPN traffic. The business takes pride in its tokenized approach for allocating dedicated IP numbers without keeping track of who uses which IP address. In addition to CyberGhost’s monthly subscription charge, dedicated IP addresses are also available in Canada, France, Germany, the UK, and the US for an additional $5 per month.
Some VPN providers are starting to broaden their selection of goods. For instance, a Hotspot Shield VPN account gives access to a number of different security and privacy services, and NordVPN provides a password manager and an encrypted file vault. You can add a CyberGhost password manager for an extra $2 per month. If an email address turns up in a data breach, ID Guard (Opens in a new window), a free email monitoring service, will let you know. With subscriptions lasting a year or more, CyberGhost is also bundling a licence for the cloud storage file encryption provider Boxcryptor. These other services were not assessed throughout our assessment.
The most important upgrade to CyberGhost’s toolkit is CyberGhost Security Suite for Windows (Opens in a new window), which adds $5.99 per month to the cost of a VPN subscription. The total cost is dependent on how long the subscription is for. The Security Suite for Windows’ internal components include Intego’s antivirus defence, a Microsoft information-protection tool called Privacy Guard, and a Security Updater that keeps track of your apps’ required updates. Anyone with a CyberGhost VPN account can access this tool, however it only works with Windows 7, 8, or 10 machines.
The fact that Intego, a Mac-exclusive antivirus provider, powers the antivirus for CyberGhost VPN caught us off guard. Intego’s Mac software did very poorly in detecting Windows malware in third-party lab tests, as we found in our 2017 assessment. That’s a little concerning for it to be in a Windows-only antivirus programme, but we’re holding off on making a final judgement because we haven’t evaluated CyberGhost Security Suite for Windows’ effectiveness.
VPN Protocols
There are several ways to protect a VPN connection, and WireGuard is now the hottest method. Compared to existing VPN protocols, this one offers faster speeds and more advanced encryption technologies; yet, because it is so new, it isn’t yet widely used. Additionally, it is open-source, allowing anyone with the desire to examine it for potential flaws. One of the few products, CyberGhost VPN, supports WireGuard on all of its platforms, which is already an amazing list: Android, Android TV, iOS, Linux, macOS, Windows, as well as a number of routers
On all of its platforms, with the exception of macOS, CyberGhost supports the superb and open-source OpenVPN. IKEv2, another popular VPN protocol, is supported by Windows, Android, Android TV, iOS, the Amazon Fire TV Stick, and macOS.
Servers and Server Locations
You have more options for selecting the ideal server and for disguising your location the more server locations a VPN offers. Large server networks can also increase your chances of locating a server nearby, regardless of where you are.
CyberGhost is one of the biggest and most diverse services we’ve assessed, with around 7,000 servers spread across 91 nations. Even though the vast majority of its servers are in the US and the UK, it still has a good global distribution, with better-than-average representation for South America and Africa, two areas that VPN providers sometimes overlook. CyberGhost does provide servers in places like China, Hong Kong, Russia, Turkey, and Vietnam that have strict internet regulations. CyberGhost is only surpassed in terms of geographic spread by ExpressVPN, which has servers in 94 nations.
However, not all VPN servers are created equal. Since virtual servers are software-defined, many virtual servers can coexist on a single hardware server. Virtual locations are created by configuring any type of server to appear to be somewhere other than its actual location. Virtual locations and virtual servers are neither intrinsically good nor bad, but we prefer VPN providers that are open about where your data goes and how it’s handled. We appreciate that CyberGhost VPN provides a list of all of its server locations that makes it apparent whether they are virtual locations (opens in a new window).
According to a company official, some of the server infrastructure for CyberGhost VPN is rented, but some servers—like its NoSpy servers—are personally owned. No matter who owns them, CyberGhost VPN’s servers are encrypted and only operate in RAM, so no data is kept on a hard disc. There wouldn’t be any data to look at even if the server were physically removed by the attacker.
Your Privacy With CyberGhost
Any security or privacy programme that you use must have your faith that it won’t put you in risk. This is crucial for VPNs since they may have the same level of knowledge about your internet actions as your ISP. One of the main motives for using a VPN in the first place is to protect those actions. CyberGhost seems to do a decent job of preserving user privacy in general. Below, we’ll try to summarise.
What information CyberGhost collects, how it uses it, and what information it does not collect are all described in its privacy statement (Opens in a new window). Although the policy’s prologue is great and simple to grasp, it suddenly transitions into something much heavier and more challenging to read. Editors’ Choice winner TunnelBear produced an easy-to-understand policy for its users, so CyberGhost should do the same.
CyberGhost does not save user IP addresses, DNS requests, browsing histories, connection/disconnection timestamps, session length, bandwidth, or the VPN server you connect to, according to the company’s documentation (opens in a new window). That’s really great. Although only in aggregate, it appears that the corporation does gather data on connection attempts and results. According to a company official, CyberGhost not only doesn’t record user behaviour, but it also has no way of knowing who is connecting to a specific server.
We were assured by a company representative that CyberGhost exclusively makes money through user subscriptions. We want to hear that since a VPN should protect your information, not use it for profit.
Knowing where the VPN provider is based and under what legal authority it operates is crucial since issues concerning law enforcement and VPN providers can be complicated. CyberGhost, on the other hand, is based in Bucharest, Romania, and is governed by Romanian law, while having offices all around Europe. According to a company spokeswoman, the business is unable to respond to legal requests for information because it lacks personal user data. The company’s transparency report, which is currently compiled periodically, supports this.
The entire name of the organisation, which is held by parent business Kape Technologies PLC, is CyberGhost S.R.L. (Opens in a new window). In addition to owning many other privacy and security companies, including ExpressVPN and Private Internet Access VPN, Kape was formerly known as Crossrider, an adware business. In a new window, click here
CyberGhost has not undergone a third-party audit aside from an assessment by AV-Test (Opens in a new window), although a spokesman claims the business expects to do so this year. The organisation should do a comprehensive audit that is made available to the public and looks at every component of the service. In contrast, TunnelBear has agreed to yearly open audits. We hope that CyberGhost and other VPN providers discover fresh approaches to present themselves as respectable to the general public.
Speed and Performance
Your internet speed will almost surely suffer if you use a VPN. Using the internet speed test (Opens in a new window) tool from Ookla, we conducted a number of comparative tests in an effort to determine the extent of that impact. For additional information on our technique and the boundaries of our testing, read our feature on how we evaluate VPNs.
This year, CyberGhost VPN outperformed most of its rivals in speed tests with fantastic results. The results of our download and upload speed tests were both decreased by 13.3% and 26.7%, respectively, by CyberGhost VPN. It caused an 11.2% latency increase.
Our ability to access has been restricted by the current COVID-19 epidemic, prompting some adjustments to how we assess VPN speeds. We switched to a rolling testing strategy this year, and we’ll keep you updated on the most recent findings all year long. The most recent data available at the time of publication is shown in the chart below.
Although the findings of our tests are helpful for comparison, they should not be interpreted as a comprehensive assessment of each service. The same experiments conducted at various times or locations will undoubtedly differ from ours. Additionally, we advise against selecting a VPN solely on the basis of speed. Much more significant factors are the service’s price, features, and privacy safeguards.
A Solid Chance
CyberGhost is ideally suited for someone who requires a VPN for particular activities due to its enormous server list. That may be video streaming, a highly accurate location fake, or anything similar. Its outstanding results on the speed test might make those activities possible. We appreciate that CyberGhost has incorporated WireGuard fully and that its UI has received a much-needed visual update.
CyberGhost aims to provide users more for their money by adding to its arsenal of protection solutions. We’d like to see it match some of the capabilities of rival systems, including multi-hop or split tunnelling for app traffic, even though it mainly works. Although we think it’s reliable, the business has to update its privacy policy and finish a third-party assessment.
Although they can’t compete with CyberGhost’s scale, Editors’ Choice winners IVPN, Mullvad VPN, Proton VPN, and NordVPN often outperform CyberGhost in terms of price, functionality, or both.
