Windscribe vs AirVPN

Two services with no corporate parent between them, run independently, and with almost opposite records on the thing independence is supposed to buy. Windscribe scores 4 for privacy against AirVPN's 2, and Windscribe scores 5 for value against AirVPN's 4. The gap is not about features. It is about what each company did when something went wrong.

Where Windscribe wins

Windscribe publishes a transparency page reporting, continuously, that no law-enforcement or copyright request has ever been complied with, for lack of relevant data. Independent review attributes its no-logs claim to a demonstrated inability to produce user traffic in court. That is evidence of behaviour under pressure, which is the only kind that really counts.

It allows unlimited simultaneous connections against AirVPN's five. Its kill switch was tested and holds after a reboot and a lost connection; AirVPN's leaks unencrypted traffic after a reboot. It measured 221 Mbps against AirVPN's 192, and added 78 milliseconds of download latency against AirVPN's 251 — which is why Windscribe scores 4 for speed and AirVPN scores 2.

Windscribe also takes no email address and no password, and its build-your-own plan charges for the countries you actually use rather than the whole network.

Where AirVPN wins

Its terms are the most legally specific in this directory, naming Regulation 593/2008 and the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice and the Italian courts. Most services here say only where they are registered.

Italy is a Fourteen Eyes member and Canada is in Five Eyes, so AirVPN is marginally further from the centre of that arrangement. Its software is open source, it takes no email address either, and you can buy three days for two euros, which suits an occasional traveller better than any monthly plan.

Which should you choose?

Choose Windscribe if you want either evidence or generosity, which here are the same choice. Pick AirVPN if the three-day plan is precisely what you need and you are content to take its word for everything else.

AirVPN has never published an independent audit of any kind. It did not disclose a 2015 server seizure until 2023, then deleted its own announcement of it and did not answer users asking why — the post survives only in web archive captures. Open-source software lets you read the client; it tells you nothing about the infrastructure, and nothing at all about what a company will say when a server is taken.