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price
Surfshark has three price tiers to choose from: Starter, One, and One+. Prices vary significantly from day to day to stay competitive, but tend to hover around the same ballpark. At the time of writing, a 24-month subscription to the Starter tier costs £45.63, which works out to £1.69 per month. If that sounds like too much of a commitment, a twelve-month subscription costs £38.85 (that’s around £2.59 per month), while a regular one-month subscription will cost you £12.29 per month.
The month-to-month plan is quite expensive, it costs even more nordvpn And expressvpnHowever, both the six-month plan and the 24-month plan are competitively priced. Surfshark is one of the cheapest VPN subscriptions at these price levels. For those who are extra cautious about their financial privacy, you can pay via credit card, Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Pay, Amazon Pay or even crypto.
Surfshark offers a seven-day free trial on iOS and Android apps, but it doesn’t offer one for desktop applications. However, there is a risk-free 30-day money-back guarantee if you are dissatisfied. Essentially, when your 30 days are about to be up, you can email Surfshark’s support team or log in to live chat and request a refund and cancellation, and you’ll get your money back, no questions asked. This is a bit of a hassle, especially if you just want to try out a VPN.
You can also add subscriptions to Surfshark Search, Surfshark Antivirus, Surfshark Alerts, and Alternative IDs. Search is like a Google search engine, with no ads or logs and only organic results. Providers call this “real incognito mode”. If your email is found to be in a data leak, Surfshark Alerts sends you a notification, alerting you to change your password for that specific account. It suggests antivirus, a lightweight monitor to avoid and remove viruses. Alternative ID creates a complete set of fake personal information with an email address and phone number, which is used when browsing sites you do not trust with your data.
We don’t know if we were taught very far into Google’s ecosystem, but we missed the news carousel and FAQs inside Google Search. That said, Surfshark Search isn’t really going to give you all the bells and whistles of a traditional search engine – it’s meant for private search with unbiased organic results.
The biggest advantage of Surfshark is that it is not only cheap, but it is available on multiple operating systems including Android TV and Fire TV. Even better, it supports an unlimited number of devices, so you’ll be able to connect to Surfshark on as many platforms as you want. That’s a big bonus when you compare that to NordVPN’s six tools or ExpressVPN’s five.
confidentiality
Surfshark includes all the standard privacy features you’d expect from a half-decent VPN, plus some neat extra features. It uses AES 256-bit encryption, which is said to be military-grade, and masks your DNS and IP address, so you know your data won’t be leaked when connected to the VPN. We ran a series of privacy tests while connected to different Surfshark servers to check the company’s claims Ipleak.net And dnsliketestWe found that Surfshark was indeed obscuring our identity.
It uses the fast WireGuard protocol as the recommended default, but you can switch to OpenVPN or IKEv2 if you prefer. If you connect using the OpenVPN protocol, obscurity will automatically take effect (what Surfshark calls camouflage mode). This hides all traces that you are connected to the VPN.
It has an in-built kill switch, but it’s not on by default, so you’ll have to turn it on manually in Settings. A kill switch prevents your device from accessing the Internet if your connection goes down, acting as the last line of defense so that your data is never exposed.
A really interesting security measure is that Surfshark uses a completely RAM-based server, which essentially means that no data can be physically taken over like a hard drive server, and all data can be remotely wiped if necessary. This is something that not many VPN providers have switched to yet.
Surfshark also has a feature similar to NordVPN’s Double VPN, which routes your traffic through two different servers for added security. Surfshark calls this “multi-hop”, and you can select from a range of different servers to route your traffic through two different servers. It is available on both mobile and desktop applications and comes in a list-based interface similar to a single server.
It also has a handy split-tunneling feature – Surfshark calls this feature Whitelister, which is actually a more accurate name for split-tunneling if you ask us. But you can access it only on Windows and Android. This prevents an application or website from using the VPN, so for example, your speed won’t slow down if you’re playing a game. The annoying thing is that it is not available on Mac or iOS devices.
Surfshark also has a CleanWeb option – said to “block annoying ads and trackers” to save network data. But during testing, we were still getting ads all over the internet. It says it blocks adware and malware, but we didn’t test that.
logging
A no-log policy simply means that the VPN does not store any data about your activity while using it. This also means that, if Surfshark were forced by a court to hand over data about its users, it would have no data to share. Surfshark’s no-logs policy was independently audited by Deloitte in 2022 – the results of which are freely available view site – and found in relation to the VPN’s claims.
The fact that Surfshark only uses server RAM will put your mind at ease as well. RAM-only servers can be wiped as many times as the provider wants, meaning no trace of your data will fall into the hands of any bad actor.
performance and speed
We’ve tested Surfshark several times since 2018, and we basically found it to be a bit sluggish. But eventually it was caught. Using the WireGuard protocol, Surfshark’s UK servers only saw about a five percent drop in download speeds, and even servers further away saw only an 11 percent drop. Streaming of UK content on Disney+, iPlayer and Disney+ was seamless with no buffering or lag.
It is also one of the best VPNs in terms of simplicity. On the left is a neat alphabetical server list and a button to quickly connect to static IP addresses and multi-hop servers.
We also tried the browser plugins for both Chrome and Firefox, and they work exactly like the desktop apps – although you won’t get access to a kill switch or whitelister. The extension appears in the top corner, just like any other plugin you install. If you can, we’d recommend using the desktop app.
Streaming Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and Hulu
Using a VPN to access region-specific shows and movies is not illegal, but it is usually a violation of the streaming platform’s terms of service and may lead to your subscription being terminated. That said, it’s important that you can still access things like Netflix, Prime Video, Disney+ and iPlayer as normal in your country, or access your streaming services at home while traveling abroad, while still connected to your VPN.
Surfshark performed admirably in our Netflix testing on desktop, iOS and Android across all UK servers. We also didn’t experience any buffering issues, which was a nice bonus. It performed equally well on Disney+, where we could access the platform without any issues.
You can watch Prime Video using Surfshark, but you’ll need an Amazon Prime account in the appropriate location as accounts are linked to regions through billing information. If your account is UK-based and you try to access Prime Video from New York, for example, Amazon will mark you as traveling in the US and you’ll either see limited content or be redirected to the UK site.
iOS and Android
In terms of mobile apps, we found that the Android app is much better than the iOS app. Like the Mac app, there’s no split-tunneling feature on iOS, but the Android app is packed with features.
Your phone’s GPS can give away your actual location, so the Surfshark Android app gives you the option to spoof the GPS location relative to the VPN you’re using. You also get the option to turn on smaller data packets, which can improve connection speeds.
We like the GPS spoofing feature in theory. This is a feature that we don’t really come across. However, using it was a different story. Attempting to spoof our location on a geo-based game like Pokemon Go (which is against the terms of service and can get you banned) resulted in a GPS error, so we’re not sure how effective it actually is.