TotalVPN is another VPN provider who claims their pizza (VPN) is the best. In this TotalVPN review, we go over the pepperonis (features), crust (speed), cheese (applications), and sauce (servers) of the pizza (VPN) so you can know if it’s worth eating or not.

Pricing 8/10

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TotalVPN is one of the few VPN providers out there to provide a free plan. This free plan is ideal for testing out the service in a limited fashion with a few limits (data limit, server limit, and only one device connection). The free plan is pretty self-explanatory, but things get a little confusing when you consider the pricing plans and how the website is laid out.

In one introductory landing page, the next plan, the total premium plan costs $5.99 a month–which covers everything with 30+ locations, and unrestricted access. It’s not clear from this page that this means you’d have to sign up for the annual subscription. I might give TotalVPN some slack if they said, “as low as $5.99.”

When you navigate and create an account, you get a different landing page that tells you can get 50% off a standard month which costs $14.98, or $7.49 billed monthly or get it for the initial $5.99 that is an annual subscription as seen before on the original landing page.

While this might be conducive to larger sales for the annual commitment, I would have preferred a standard pricing page at the beginning which clearly lays out the plans one by one–free, monthly, and then annual–instead of just listing the free version while making the annual price seem monthly.

Overall, $7.49 is still a decent cheap monthly price, while $71.82 is average for a yearly subscription.

Unfortunately, as far as payment goes, Bitcoin or gift cards aren’t an option. However, there is a 30-day refund guarantee.

Software 7/10

TotalVPN has a decent software suite (both mobile + PC). It’s very easy to get up and running with a simple login, and then server selection on the side. Connection speeds are decent, and the overall look and feel of the app mirrors the minimalist flat design of the website making for a pleasant user experience.

As far as configuration, TotalVPN has a few options to set up auto-launch features, but we were disappointed that there aren’t any kill switches, DNS leak protection, or IPv6 leak protection features.

You also can’t change the cipher rate, but you can configure the protocol. However, I would like it for TotalVPN to default to OpenVPN, not PPTP.

Mobile Software 10/10

TotalVPN has a mobile app that works well. It’s very easy to setup and looks and performs similarly to the PC version. Simply install, allow VPN configurations, and connect!

Extra Services 5/10

Beyond their simple VPN app, TotalVPN doesn’t offer much else extra yet. They’re working on a proxy, but besides that they don’t sell extras like dedicated IPs, push forward services for censored countries, support encrypted email or a few other extras we’ve seen before. Regarding connections, three simultaneous connections are pretty good. They do offer some upgrades and an ebook, if you’re interested.

If you love VPN extras, check out TorGuard VPN.

Website 5/10

On one hand, TotalVPN’s flat designed website with plenty of graphics is a joy to behold. On the contrary, the site’s aggressive “lock” you to a web page design is completely infuriating. Let me explain.

So say you’re checking out the website and perusing it a bit. Then, you want to see the prices and think about signing up for a plan. If you click on “get a plan” the website redirects you to “https://secure.totalvpn.com/”, which makes it so you can’t go back to the original website and look at anything. You’re stuck on a payment page.

Try clicking back, and then navigate again to locations, or any other tab, and it won’t work. To look at the site without paying, you’ll have to clear cookies or use another browser. Another thing is that you have to log in or create an account to see more details about pricing plans.

If this issue (more like design) got fixed, I’d like to see some more feature tables and listing to differentiate TotalVPN from the pack.

Overall, TotalVPN’s website left me more frustrated than informed–which is bad for customers.

Servers 6.5/10

TotalVPN has a smaller list of servers, but the servers nearby to our location gave us some impressive speeds. All that TotalVPN needs to do is increase the amount of servers in places besides NA and Europe.

Privacy 5.5/10

While hard to find this info, TotalVPN supports AES-128 bit encryption with a 4096 authentication certificate. AES-128 isn’t the best for privacy (that’s AES-256) but still good for decent security and good speeds.

TotalVPN does collect some usage logs:“we collect the following log files: when you logged into the Services, the IP from which you logged in, and your username. We maintain authentication records which include source IP address, VPN username, and VPN protocol, but we do not collect information concerning the content you transmit through the Services or the specific websites that you visit.”

Speeds 8/10

We tested a few different VPN servers here, and some provided excellent rates, while some others weren’t as impressive. Here is the San Jose server:

Here is the LA server:

It seems like TotalVPN might overload some of their servers since we did not some latency with the LA server as well as a heavy load on their server information page.

Support 5.5/10

TotalVPN has plenty of support guides, but their live chat seemed to be not operating or AFK. We waited over 20 minutes but after promising a 3 minute wait time, we walked away without any answers or responses.

Verdict

In the end, TotalVPN is a decent VPN with a lot of rough spots. We would have liked to see more security features inside the application offering, as well as more servers to choose from outside of the EU and the United States for international users. The website is strangely aggressive, the pricing a bit confusing, and the logging policy a bit extensive. You can get some good speeds with this VPN, and it’s pretty easy to use once you get it set up–so you could do worse!