Since the day it has been launched, Betternet has established itself as a decent free VPN. Later, the service introduced a premium subscription but did it improve its functionality enough to be worth the money? In particular, is Betternet VPN good for torrenting in terms of security, speed, and usability? Or maybe it doesn’t allow P2P file sharing at all as a risky and excessively data-consuming activity? We’ll answer all these questions below, so make sure to read this post further.
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Does Betternet VPN Allows Torrenting and P2P?
The majority of free and even some commercial VPNs restrict or prohibit P2P traffic for two simple reasons:
- They don’t want to face responsibility for illegal actions of their clients;
- They don’t have the capacity to increase bandwidth to make torrenting possible.
When it comes to Betternet VPN, it surprised us with totally unrestricted torrenting even for free users. The only limit you’ll have is 500Mb of free data per day but you can increase it with a premium subscription.
We always recommend connecting through countries where torrenting is absolutely legal for personal use. Although Betternet has servers in only 10 countries, you can find a safe locations for torrenting, for instance, the Netherlands.
Betternet VPN Main Features
The ultimate torrenting experience is more than just the fact that torrenting is allowed. There are many factors that impact your overall judgment, from speeds to security. Below, is a brief breakdown of the most useful features for torrenting Betternet VPN should supply.
- Speed. Since Betternet is a free VPN, its connection speed is awful, to put it nicely. It promises to deliver better performance with the paid version yet we experienced more than a 60% speed drop. Since there are not many servers in its network, we tried them all out and found more or less the same slowdowns.
- Convenience. Betternet apps are rather unremarkable – they are intuitive and simple but not flexible enough due to the lack of features. The major issue with free Betternet apps is annoying advertisements. If you opt for a premium subscription, you can get rid of ads but your functionality won’t get any better.
- User protection tools. Betternet keeps its security features at the absolute minimum. On the bright side, it carries out the military-grade AES 256-bit encryption combined with OpenVPN and AES 128-bit with IPSec tunneling protocols. On the other side, it lacks many important security features such as IP, DNS, and WebRTC leakage protection or Kill Switch.
- Security. A few years ago, massive research revealed numerous security risks associated with VPNs. The researchers listed Betternet among 10 the worst services due to tracking libraries and other vulnerabilities.
- Jurisdiction. The service is registered in Canada, and this is another security-related downside. Since Canada is one of the founding members of the Five Eyes Alliance, there is a chance that Betternet’s clients are monitored.
- Logging. According to the service’s privacy policy, they don’t store, log, or share user IP addresses. They may retain this information as long as your connection is running but when the session is over, it will be automatically removed. Nevertheless, Betternet shares certain (it doesn’t go into details) personal data with affiliated third-parties. It makes us believe that there is some logging going on, otherwise, where do these personal details come from?
- Pricing. The pricing starts from $0 to $2.99 per month (the yearly plan). For such a limited and slow service, we believe that even $2.99 is too much.
Best Alternatives for Torrenting
Betternet doesn’t seem to be a good VPN for your torrenting needs. If you want to download files fast, secure, and easy, you need a better solution. Here are the alternative VPNs we recommend using. They are reliable, trustworthy, and pack all the necessary features for torrenting or general use.
- Provider
- User Rating
- Our Review
- Price
PureVPN- 4807 Votes
- $3.24 / month
ExpressVPN- 3795 Votes
- $6.67 / month
Conclusion
Betternet isn’t a good VPN for torrenting by any means. It is too slow, leaky, limited on features, and with poor jurisdictions. Worse still, it may be dangerous for your privacy due to possible data logging and malware infection. If you want to enjoy torrenting with no hassle, we recommend the services found in this post.