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FastestVPN is a VPN service with a simple interface but limited features. Are any of the subscription plans worth the cost?
Your IP address is one of the most personal pieces of data, yet it’s easily accessible by both your Internet Service Provider (ISP) and every website you visit. Without logging into a website, you consistently and unwillingly identify yourself and your location. Using a VPN allows a web server provided by a company to act as the starting point for your internet activity, encrypting traffic between your devices and that server so websites can never trace it back to you.
FastestVPN is a VPN service without many features such as split tunnelling that are preferred by advanced users. There are advantages to its headquarters being in the Cayman Islands, but this allows the company to hide its executive leadership team and avoid accountability to its users. It does have an audited no-log policy, so the service can hopefully be trusted to protect privacy.
Rating: ★★★½
Our researcher finds it difficult to recommend FastestVPN given they experienced issues connecting to many of its servers and found the process of using the app to be confusing. But if you’re okay with limited server options in 28 countries where there is only a single server and fewer than five servers in 10 other countries, you’re probably going to be okay with this. If you want the ability to set the VPN protocol to auto, WireGuard, IKEv2, TCP, or UDP but no other custom settings, then FastestVPN may be good enough for what you need.
Our researchers are dedicated to bringing you the most accurate and up-to-date information so you can make an informed decision when it comes to buying a VPN. We will only recommend a provider after hours of research and testing, extensive head-to-head feature comparisons, and after taking into account verified customer reviews and the opinions of industry experts.
Our FastestVPN review score was determined by the following categories:
We research and test a total of 25 elements within these categories, including:
All of our VPN articles are verified by our in-house team of fact-checkers, so you can be assured our content is as accurate and up to date as possible. To find out more, read our article on how we review VPNs.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Simple to get started | Not many settings available to change in the app |
| A sufficient number of countries for most purposes | Windows app not available through the Microsoft Store |
| Supports the versions of operating systems used by most people | Far fewer servers available in our testing than the website claims |
| Allows installation on 10 devices, which is unusually high | Website and apps are riddled with spelling errors and layout issues |
| Supports multiple protocols, as well as an auto mode |
FastestVPN allows up to 20 devices (for an additional fee), which is more than ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and NordVPN. Although the website claims the company has 600 servers, there were only 66 servers available in the apps during our testing, which is far fewer than many of FastestVPN’s competitors. There are a range of protocols to choose from, but many streaming services don’t seem to work well with the service.
| VPN | Monthly price | Cheapest price | Free version | Number of servers | Maximum number of devices | Netflix | BBC iPlayer | Disney+ | Amazon | HBO Max | Audit |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| FastestVPN | $5 (£3.93) | $2.08 (£1.64)/m for 1-year subscription | No | 66 | 10 | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ | Yes |
| ExpressVPN | £10.19 | £5.25/m for 1-year subscription | No | 3,000+ | 5 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
| NordVPN | £10.39 | £2.79/m for a 2-year subscription | No | 5,400+ | 6 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
| Surfshark | £9.88 | £1.75/m for 2-year subscription | No | 3,200+ | Unlimited | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
| Cyber Ghost | £10.89 | £1.92/m for 2-year subscription | No | 9,773 | 7 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | Yes |
The 15-day money back guarantee is less than the 30 days offered by most other providers. There is a lifetime plan, which is unusual but not unheard of for VPNs. It’s worth pointing out that a user will need to keep using the service for nearly two years before the lifetime plan has a lower monthly cost than the annual plan. For users that keep the service for more than two years, it’s the cheapest plan there is.
| Subscription term | Price |
|---|---|
| Monthly | £3.93/$5 |
| Annual | £1.64/$2.08 (£18.50/$24.05 upfront) |
| Lifetime | £30.77/$40 upfront |
Card payments via MasterCard, Discover, American Express, Visa, JCB and UnionPay are accepted. It’s also possible to pay using a PayPal account.
For the privacy-conscious, there’s also the option to pay using cryptocurrency, including bitcoin and ethereum.
There aren’t a lot of features to this service.
As has previously been mentioned, the main setting that you can alter is the VPN protocol, allowing you to switch between auto, WireGuard, IKEv2, TCP and UDP.
You can change your subscription term (monthly/yearly/lifetime), add a server to your favourites so you can find it again later, or delete your account.
The FastestVPN website claims there are more than 600 servers available, but there seemed to be substantially fewer in the app during our testing. The app appears to show about 39 countries, 28 of which only have a single server. The only country with more than five servers is the US with 13. The total number of servers offered on the countries tab is around 66 – far fewer than 600.
The provider advertises its servers as offering “10Gbps speeds of faster”, and our testing did return good results on most servers (more on that later). On the server selection, there’s a streaming tab, offering individual servers in the UK, Canada, Japan, Korea, India, the US and Italy, though it’s unclear whether these overlap with those shown on the main countries tab. It is unclear what makes these servers different from any of the others, as FastestVPN’s support page simply says they are dedicated streaming servers. There’s a decentralised VPN (D-VPN) tab that offers the UK via the US or France via the UK, and the last tab is servers that are optimised for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing. This offers Spain and Portugal servers, as well as two Finland and two Germany servers.
Assuming all servers on all tabs are unique, there are still only around 81 servers available in the app.
During our testing, there were a few servers the service could not connect to. The app was stuck in a loop of trying and failing to connect that was only resolved by choosing another server. This is a very bad issue for a VPN service to have, especially considering how many countries only had one server available.
Users have to hope the server in the country they wish to connect to does not have this issue.
The FastestVPN company is headquartered in the Cayman Islands, a self-governing British Overseas Territory, which means the UK remains responsible for its defence and foreign relations, but not its local laws. The territory is not part of the Five, Nine or 14 Eyes intelligence alliances, meaning they do not officially share data with any of the member states. The local government passed the Data Protection Law, which reflects many of the principles of the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
This law allows the government to fine the company up to $250,000 for mishandling customer data.
Despite the law, it remains somewhat unsettling for a company’s leadership team to be completely anonymous. On the service’s About Us page there is only information about VPNs and why you might need one. Its no-logging policy has been independently audited, but it is still in possession of the names, addresses and payment information of its customers.
Who are customers trusting with their data?
The CEO is called Azneem Bilwani according to Crunchbase and confirmed by a live chat with FastestVPN’s customer service. Potential customers may be alarmed to learn Bilwani’s other company Abtach Ltd was accused of a “disgusting fraud”, according to World Trademark Review (WTR). The US Patent and Trademark Office accuses the company of operating a number of allegedly fraudulent websites such as Logo Iconix, which allegedly defrauded one victim out of over £100,000.
The FastestVPN privacy policy explicitly says the company will share data to prevent fraud: “Protection of our rights – we are at liberty to disclose data if led to legal issues and to exercise our power of rights. This prevents fraud or other illegal notions that can harm the service.”
It’s important to note that many VPN providers have clauses around using whatever data they might hold on customers if they suspect their service is being used for illegal activities, so it’s not overly concerning to see this line in FastestVPN’s terms of use.
In addition, FastestVPN uses several third-party tools, all of which are listed in the privacy policy and have separate privacy policies in place:
A kill switch is a common VPN feature that allows you to ensure your connection is always secure. The tool will disable all internet access in the event of a problem with the VPN connection, so no traffic is ever sent over an unencrypted connection and no website can determine your true location.
FastestVPN’s kill switch is enabled by default. This means that as long as the service is active, access to the internet should be blocked unless the VPN is working.
Split tunnelling is a VPN feature that allows you to specify which apps should use the VPN connection. Other apps have the speed benefit of using a regular internet connection, and only the apps you care about have enhanced privacy and the ability to hide your location.
With FastestVPN, there does not appear to be the option of split tunnelling in the VPN app for Mac, but it is available on the VPN for Android. On the VPN for iPhone, there’s an option in settings that describes itself this way: “Smart Tunnelling enables VPN protection for added domains even when the app is not open.” This makes little sense as, after being enabled, any VPN will continue to function when the VPN app that enabled it is not open. Upon further research, this is not true split tunnelling but rather a setting that automatically turns the VPN on when you try to access the web domains you add to this feature.
There’s an “Add” button that allows you to “Add URL”, but it’s unclear what this achieves. When the VPN was disabled and browserleaks.com/ip had been added to the list, the VPN was not enabled by visiting the URL in Safari. No VPN icon appears in the status bar, and the IP address is not hidden.
It is worth noting that a true split tunnelling feature is impossible to implement on iOS except when an organisation’s IT administrators lock down their devices using Mobile Device Management.
In other words, iOS users who own their devices will not be able to use split tunnelling with any VPN service, and that includes FastestVPN.
The FastestVPN website claims the service uses 256-bit Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption, but this is difficult to verify directly. This type of encryption uses an encryption key made up of 256 binary digits (ones or zeroes). The total number of combinations that is possible with this kind of key is approximately a one followed by 77 zeroes in our regular decimal number system. This makes it impossible for any computer ever invented to guess a specific key even given thousands of years, by which point the VPN connection will have been disconnected for a very long time.
Instead of verifying that FastestVPN uses 256-bit encryption, it’s possible to make assumptions based on the protocols it supports. The provider makes a big deal of supporting the WireGuard protocol, as it is the only protocol mentioned on the landing page of the website. However, WireGuard actually uses ChaCha20, which is a different kind of cipher to AES. ChaCha20 still uses a 256-bit key size, so it is just as secure as AES.
However, the provider also supports IKEv2, which can be configured with AES-256.
The speed of a VPN is tested using an Ethernet connection in order to eliminate the variable of wifi interference or signal from the test. The Speedtest by Ookla is one of the most commonly used tests, and it was used as the basis of these measurements.
| VPN configuration | No VPN (Mbps) | UK to UK (Mbps) | UK to US (Mbps) | UK to Aus (Mbps) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Download speed | 47.82 | 44.6 | 38.16 | 4.01 |
| Upload speed | 18.57 | 17.29 | 14.76 | 13.34 |
| Latency ping ms (idle/download/upload) | 12/14/0135 | 28/29/259 | 221/221/360 | 602/601/603 |
| Download % of base | 100% | 93% | 79% | 8% |
| Upload % of base | 100% | 93% | 79% | 71% |
It’s unclear why the Australian download speed was so bad when our researcher tested it, especially considering the upload speed is relatively normal. This may not be the best VPN service if you plan on accessing Australian content and services. Other servers are fast enough for streaming, but the claim made by the name FastestVPN did not seem to ring true in this particular instance. However, the UK and US servers returned speeds that our researchers believe to be decent.
Other services such as NordVPN and ExpressVPN were faster across all server locations in our tests.
WebRTC stands for Web Real-Time Communication, and it’s used for audio and video calling using a browser. There’s a possibility that the real IP address of a user can be leaked when using WebRTC, but the WebRTC Leak Test determines if this is realistically true. Unfortunately, when using FastestVPN on macOS, our researcher’s real IP address appeared to be leaked. This also happened when using the VPN for Chrome and Brave, which is based on the open-source version of Chrome known as Chromium.
Most desktop browsers are Chromium-based, except Safari and Firefox.
Safari was the only browser we tested that did not leak the IP address, as even Firefox caused the same leak as Chromium-based browsers when connected to a FastestVPN server.
There have been no known data breaches of FastestVPN.
There was a VPN audit on its no-logs policy by Altius IT on 29 January 2023. This company was given access to a target sample of FastestVPN’s servers and inspected a target sample of its server logs. The conclusion was that “Altius IT did not find any evidence of system configurations and/or system/service log files that, independently or collectively, could lead to identifying a specific person and/or the person’s activity when using FastestVPN service.”
The data provided by FastestVPN was found to be consistent with its privacy policy.
This audit can be accessed by anyone with a FastestVPN account, but it is not publicly available to anyone on its website. Although there’s seemingly no free tier to the service, it does seem to be possible to create an account without paying for a subscription, although the website strongly encourages you to subscribe during the account creation process.
FastestVPN has apps for or is otherwise compatible with the following devices and operating systems:
The FastestVPN client for macOS is available on the Apple App Store, which ensures the software has been checked for security and stability by Apple. The minimum supported macOS version is 10.15 Catalina, which is being used by more than 90 per cent of Mac users, according to statcounter.
The macOS client resembles the iOS and iPadOS apps. The macOS app is easy to set up and use due to its simplified interface designed for mobile devices. Once logged in, the user simply has to select a server and macOS will prompt them to allow the installation of a VPN profile. This is all it takes to get the VPN up and running, which is similar to how it works on iOS or iPadOS.
App installation is more complicated on Windows and is only supported for versions 7, 8, 10 and 11. Instead of using the Microsoft Store, allowing the OS provider to ensure the app is stable and secure, FastestVPN is provided as a Microsoft Software Installer (MSI) directly downloaded from its website. This increases the chance of the latest version containing malware or bugs, as it has not been checked or verified by a third party.
During the first installation, the user is asked if they would like to install the OpenVPN TAP driver. This driver allows the creation of a virtual ethernet switch that can be combined with a physical ethernet switch in a single interface. This prompt is presented in a confusing way, as it does not appear to give the user a choice and clicking the close “X” still attempts to install the driver regardless.
Luckily, there’s a Windows system prompt that asks for admin permissions and you can simply click “No” to this to prevent installation. Clicking the “Yes” button pauses the FastestVPN installation while a separate installer for OpenVPN TAP is downloaded and requires you to click “Next” a few times to complete the process.
If you choose to install TAP, you should be aware that it exists as a separate Windows app and must be uninstalled separately from FastestVPN, if you wish to uninstall both.
The iOS app is available for operating systems from iOS 13 onwards; the app can easily be downloaded from the Apple App Store. The experience of using the app is much the same as on macOS. Unfortunately, the iPadOS app utilised the same interface as the iOS app, meaning much of the design is warped.
The Android app requires Android 5 and above. It is available for download from the Google Play Store.
Many VPN services allow you to install custom software on your router so all devices on your network can share the same VPN. The router counts as one device no matter how many devices are connected to the network, meaning you can protect countless devices at home and save the other nine devices for times when you’re not at home. FastestVPN provides setup tutorials for the following routers: Asus, DD-WRT, TP-Link, GL-iNet, OpenWRT, Sabai, Lynksys, D-Link, Tomato, Keenetic, Huawei, Tenda, NetDeuma, TRENDNet, Belkin, MikroTik and Netgear.
The company claims to have more than 20 customer support agents. There are options for 24/7 live chat and email support. The live chat allows you to speak to a human without wasting time with a bot, and you should be able to get a response in a few minutes. With email support, you should expect to get a response within a day or two.
On Trustpilot, FastestVPN is currently scoring four out of five stars, with 68 per cent of customers giving the service a five-out-of-five star review. The 24/7 support is regarded as “fast and fairly responsive”. Many users praise the lifetime plan as a cheap way to sign up, as well as the fact its headquarters are located in the data-secure Cayman Islands. However, 19 per cent of users gave the service a one-star review, calling out the company for trying to charge them for services after they purchased a lifetime plan.
“[A customer service representative] did an awesome job answering my questions and responding with solid answers and providing excellent customer service. FastestVPN also continues to be a great VPN. It is not, if I’m being honest, the ‘best’, but it certainly does the things it says it does. I have seen it run slower than other VPNs, and I’ve had some servers fail to connect, but in the end, I was still able to get done what I needed to and felt confident that I was being protected.”
“I bought a ‘lifetime’ subscription, but the company has now limited access to my so-called lifetime subscription by introducing new restrictions. Now my paid subscription is totally unusable.
“Avoid this company like the plague. Your subscription will work for a while, but be warned, they will start internet restrictions gradually and before you know it, you will have to pay a fortune to ‘subscribe’ to a newer, [more] expensive plan to use any of their services, despite your purchase of a so-called lifetime plan.
FastestVPN is a service that works okay for UK, US, and Australian servers but sometimes has issues connecting to others. There’s no split tunnelling for some apps, despite this being claimed in some online reviews. Our researcher found the apps to be very basic, with few options to customise the VPN experience. During testing, we found it difficult to connect to some servers. If you’re looking for a basic VPN and are only worried about masking your IP address online, this could a provider to consider. For anything more advanced, we recommend looking elsewhere.
Score: ★★★½
| Reputation | ★★½ |
| Privacy | ★★★★ |
| Performance and features | ★★★½ |
| Plans and pricing value | ★★★ |
| Customer experience | ★★★½ |
The data in this review is reported from a neutral stance and should be used for informational purposes only. We review VPN services from the perspective of:
Independent Advisor does not endorse the streaming of content from regions other than where the subscription is held, nor does it endorse the downloading or consumption of illegally pirated content.
