AdGuard VPN review

AdGuard VPN is a freemium product that, like all VPNs, masks your identity by giving you a different IP address and therefore making you appear to be at a different location, and thus masking your internet activity.

Servers can be within your own country, or can be in another part of the globe, meaning you may be able to access content that isn’t available locally. For example, if you set Adguard VPN to a USA server, you’ll be able to see the wider range of Netflix content availability there, or watch live TV that has been “geoblocked” in your location. 

To be clear the ad-blocking service, which the company has successfully offered for many years, remains separate and requires an additional subscription.

The VPN service does offer ad-blocking, although on a completely different level and quality, as it’s done using DNS servers, which you must select in the apps. At the time of review, this was possible only on the Android and iOS apps, but not on Windows or macOS. The company says it’s working on adding the same options to the desktop apps though. 

Features

As a freemium product, you can download AdGuard VPN and use it without paying. However, the free version is limited. You can only use the free version for up to 3GB of data per month – which is barely enough for an HD movie, and it throttles your internet speed at 20Mbps.

That’s sufficient for most things, but if you are paying for a much higher speed from your provider, it will irk to use a product that slows your internet down. In general, we’d always advise paying for a VPN, but you might like to give the free version a try before deciding whether to subscribe.

From here, therefore, we’re looking solely at the paid product.

AdGuard VPN is available for Windows, Mac, iOS and Android as a standalone app, offering whole-system protection. Alternatively there’s a browser extension available for Chrome, Edge, Firefox and Opera. This limits the protection to your web browsing, but as with so many ‘VPN’ extensions, AdGuard still talks about the benefits of its VPN service and doesn’t make it clear enough (in our opinion) that the extensions are just a proxy service which doesn’t encrypt your connection like a VPN. The company says it will update this wording to address our criticism here.

A paid AdGuard subscription covers you for up to 10 simultaneous connections, but you can install the app / extension on as many devices as you like.

In the Android and iOS apps, you can choose from a list of AdGuard’s various DNS servers. These ensure your own ISP’s DNS isn’t used, which could reveal your activity, and possibly your location. There’s a choice of filtered and unfiltered, in case you’re setting up the app on a child’s device and want to protect them from adult and other inappropriate content when searching the web. There are other options, too, such as using Google’s DNS, CloudFlare and the ad-blocking DNS servers already mentioned.

By the end of April 2023, these options should be available on the Windows and macOS apps too.

There’s also an app specifically for Android/Google TV, which opens the door to streaming content from abroad on your TV, but it’s a shame there isn’t an equivalent for Amazon Firesticks.

AdGuard notes that it isn’t able to unblock content from the NBC streaming service Peacock. NBC content is notoriously difficult to access outside the US, and makes many VPNs stumble, but if that’s a deal-breaker for you, it’s worth knowing. It does, however, work with some of the main streamers – Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and HBO Max.

On the downside, for more advanced users, the company has chosen to use a bespoke protocol, rather than the more widely used OpenVPN or WireGuard. That means that you won’t be able to configure your router with AdGuard to offer protection to your entire home network, or unblock streaming on devices that don’t support VPNs such as games consoles and the Apple TV & Roku devices.

One advanced feature is split-tunnelling. This allows you to use both your regular internet connection and the VPN at the same time. Using a black- or white-list, you could, for example, set it to only use the VPN for Netflix, or set it to use it for everything except the BBC. It’s also possible to use split tunnelling to set up website exclusions: sites which bypass the VPN – useful if you find particular websites don’t load or work properly when connected to the VPN.

Privacy

Once you’ve chosen from the 1000+ servers in 50 countries, AdGuard VPN has a kill switch. This means that if it drops its connection, it will block internet access entirely, rather than suddenly expose your real connection. While we were testing, we didn’t experience any drops. 

From a privacy point of view, AdGuard VPN has a no-logs policy. That means that if the company was asked to provide information about who uses their service and when, they couldn’t, adding to the level of security and anonymity offered. Unfortunately, this haven’t been independently checked, so on this one, we have to take the company’s word for it that it really doesn’t log anything.

AdGuard’s jurisdiction is Cyprus, meaning all data is protected under European GDPR rules, offering greater protection than companies basing themselves in, for example, the USA.

AdGuard VPN doesn’t offer the option to run a “double VPN”, which services such as NordVPN do. This is where your connection is routed to one server and then another, so there’s even less of an audit trail and it prevents even the most determined from tracking you.

That’s not a huge loss for most people, however, and such features can often have a big impact on speed. The good news is that AdGuard does allow Bittorrent traffic, so if you’re trying to download, shall we say, “sensitive” files, you can do so anonymously. 

One thing that impressed us was that when we passed the account login to a colleague to run speed tests, AdGuard’s system spotted the login attempt from a different location and temporarily locked the account. This is the first time we’ve seen that happen and is a reassuring extra layer of protection.

Performance

AdGuard didn’t leak our IP or DNS during our testing: the first important hurdle to clear for any VPN.

In terms of unblocking, we had no issues watching content from the services it claims to unblock, except Prime Video. And it wouldn’t allow us to watch HBO Max or BBC iPlayer either.

AdGuard’s speed test results were less than stellar. Using a Gigabit connection in the Bay Area of the US, with a base connection speed of 773Mbps download and 945Mbps upload, we found that using AdGuard VPN significantly slows down your browsing – here are the results for four key servers:

• LA: 158 / 98
• NY: 78 / 57
• London: 96 / 55
• Tokyo: 8.5 / 9

Although you won’t feel a noticeable slow-down on many home broadband connections below 100Mbps, if you’re lucky to have Gigabit broadband, you will feel the difference. As we mentioned, AdGuard VPN deliberately throttles the connection to its free customers and these results were more or less as expected:

• New York: 21/10
• London: 21/22
• Turkey: 10/8

(We couldn’t test on the Tokyo/LA servers as these aren’t available to free users.)

Assuming that AdGuard doesn’t deliberately throttle its paid customers, we can only conclude that its performance isn’t that great. Now that fast broadband connections are becoming widespread, AdGuard needs to optimise its protocol or improve its infrastructure because, right now, it can’t compete with the best VPNs.

We also found a problem with the Windows app. When waking the test laptop from sleep, AdGuard VPN was unable to recover and required us to close down the program and relaunch it. There is an “Attempt to Recover” option, but it didn’t succeed in multiple attempts during our test and this became very frustrating. The company was well aware of this and assured us that the “nasty bug” was fixed shortly afterwards.

Price & Availability

VPNs tend to run special offers all the time, particularly if you’re prepared to pay for a year or two upfront. At time of review AdGuard VPN was advertising a deal for at $2.99 per month (approx. £2.52) for a two-year subscription. This is paid upfront, so costs $71.76 (around £60.50). Paying by the month is much more expensive, at $11.99 (£10). 

Compare this to our current favourite, NordVPN, and it’s about a dollar per month cheaper. NordVPN’s two-year plan costs $4.15 per month, which is $99.63 upfront.

However, given that NordVPN offers a much wider range of extras – including an adblocker(!) – and much better speeds, it makes AdGuard VPN seem like poor value, though it’s worth adding that Nord really hikes its prices at renewal after your subscription ends. AdGuard does not. 

For alternatives, see our roundup of the best VPN services.

Verdict

When NordVPN, Surfshark and Cyberghost all include adblocking as standard, it isn’t as if AdGuard has an advantage here. Ultimately, AdGuard VPN is difficult to recommend. It doesn’t excel in any particular area, and it costs as much as, or more than, other more capable services that offer better speeds, more apps and don’t exclusively use proprietary protocols.