Due to the popularity and interest in our last VPN roundup , we're reviewing five more VPNs this week to see which of them is the best, and have expanded our speed and ping tests. For a beginner's guide on what a VPN is and why you should care, read our introductory article Everything You Need to Know About VPN

TigerVPN is a VPN with cute tiger-based iconography that bills itself as a "global" service good for unlocking geo-restrictions and enhancing privacy, like other VPNs essentially. Let's see how it stacked up to the competition.

Pricing

Features

TigerVPN offers three payment plans. The price of the month-to-month plan of $11.99 is the highest monthly cost of the five VPNs I reviewed this time around. Like other the services -- PureVPN, NordVPN, TorGuard, and TigerVPN -- TigerVPN offers discounts if you sign up for six months or a year. The monthly price drops to $8.33 a month if you signed up for six months or $6.67 a month if you sign up for a year. This annual price is closer to average, but still slightly more than several of Tiger's competitors. The plans feature a seven-day, money-back guarantee. The plans allows five simultaneous connections and you can earn hokey “Karma points” by following or mentioning TigerVPN on social media to earn extra connections. Payment options include credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, and Paymentwall, but you can’t pay anonymously with a gift card as you can on other services. TigerVPN has apps for Windows and Macs as well as Android and iOS devices. I used the Windows and Mac apps for my tests.TigerVPN installs a desktop shortcut but when you click on it to launch the app, it makes you chase your tail a bit and find the app’s icon in your system tray to launch the app. The app lets you connect to a recommended server, which is the fastest servers TigerVPN can find based on your location. You can also browse an alphabetical list or search for a server. In settings, you can uncheck a box to sort by name, which reorders the list I assume by ping but the app doesn’t show you the estimated ping of each server. You can mark servers as favorites, which makes it easier to return to the servers you found to be the faster or most reliable.TigerVPN has 300 servers in 63 locations across 43 countries, which is considerable fewer than the other VPNs we evaluated this week. Although there are exceptions, in general the more servers a VPN service offers, the better your chances of finding an uncrowded, fast connection. PureVPN, for example, has 750 servers in 141 countries, TorGuard has 1,600 servers in 50 countries, and VyprVPN has 700 servers in 64 countries.TigerVPN supports OpenVPN, IPSec L2TP and PPTP protocols, but you’ll need to follow the instructions from TigerVPN’s knowledge base to set up a manual connection in Windows to use either IPSec L2TP or PPTP. The only protocol change you can make within the app is checking a box for TCP override, which uses TCP instead of the default UDP protocol. (UDP is faster but is blocked more frequently in countries such as China.)

TigerVPN's privacy policy states that it does not log your Internet traffic and allows P2P traffic. In my testing it did not block Netflix, at least from my location in the U.S. Unlike the other services I reviewed, TigerVPN does not feature a kill switch that shuts down your Internet connection if the VPN gets disconnected.

Performance

“ Throughout my testing TigerVPN had difficulty establishing a connection.

Purchasing Guide

Before we get to the test results, I must begin by stating that throughout my testing TigerVPN had difficulty establishing a connection. Some afternoons, I was able to connect with no issues. Other times, it refused to connect. In the evening, my odds of establishing a connection were worse. I disabled the Windows Firewall, thinking that might be causing a problem (even though it didn’t with the four other VPNs we recently tested), but the problem persisted. I had better luck with the Mac app but it, too, frequently refused to connect. I filed a ticket with TigerVPN support and heard back within 24 hours with instructions to create a manual setup in Windows with a particular TigerVPN server. The solution worked -- I set up a manual connection to TigerVPN’s New York server using L2TP, but it’s still not as simple as launching the app and connecting to my server of choice as I could with the other VPNs I’ve tested. Still, it’s a useful backup strategy for when the app refused to connect.To test the performance of TigerVPN, I ran SpeedOf.Me tests to measure download and upload speeds and also played League of Legends, Overwatch, and Team Fortress 2 to check the VPN’s effect on my ping in real-world multiplayer gaming. Because the speed of an Internet connection fluctuates throughout the day, I ran each test twice -- once in the afternoon and another time in the evening. For the tests, I simply hit the connect button to let TigerVPN choose the fastest server. I live in southern New Hampshire; for each test, TigerVPN selected a server in New York.On SpeedOf.Me, TigerVPN had quite fast upload speeds but slow download speeds in the afternoon tests and slipped even farther in the rankings on the evening tests.Next, I ran three games in the afternoon to test latency. On League of Legends, my ping on the game’s Americas server was so good (40ms) that I choose instead to connect to its “EU Nordic and East” server where my ping was higher to see if the various services could improve my latency. On the afternoon tests, TigerVPN showed mixed results. It tied for first on Team Fortress 2, finished second on Overwatch (using the game’s Asia server), third on League of Legends, and fourth on Overwatch (Americas server). The differences in ping were so slight that I couldn’t feel any difference in gameplay. That’s bad news for the afternoon tests where TigerVPN lowered my ping and good news for the evening tests where slower pings were more evident with TigerVPN and the other services.TigerVPN was the only service to lower my ping on the evening Overwatch (Asia server) test but it fell to fourth place for League of Legends and Team Fortress 2.TigerVPN offer three payment plans that are a bit pricier than average, but do get cheaper as with other VPNs when you sign up for a larger package:

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