Avast SecureLine
£49.99 per year for one PC, £64.99 for five devices avast.com/en-gb/secureline-vpn
Avast SecureLine does things differently from most VPNs. For a start, there’s no monthly subscription – the company only offers annual licences, covering either a single PC or Mac, a single smartphone/tablet, or five mixed devices.
It’s an unusually basic service, with precious little in the way of hand-holding or secondary features. There isn’t even a kill switch, which could be a deal-breaker for those who genuinely need privacy. On the flipside, it makes SecureLine both very lightweight and straightforward to use. If, therefore, you’re just looking for a VPN to protect your data when you’re using public Wi-Fi, it could be all you need.
SecureLine’s Windows app is simplicity itself. A dropdown menu lists available server locations and a few configuration options let you tell SecureLine what to do when you connect to an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot, and set the interface language. That’s it, though: if you’re looking for a choice of protocols or a choice of server types, this isn’t the VPN for you.
Still, SecureLine does a decent job. The initial VPN connection is quick and painless, and the service feels solid while browsing or streaming video. The only real stumble is that you need to manually disconnect before switching to a new server, which is something other VPNs handle in one step.
SecureLine offers 41 server locations in 33 countries around the world. Rival VPNs do far better when it comes to geographic diversity; if you’re a regular traveller, we recommend you double-check that SecureLine meets your needs.
It isn’t the speediest VPN, but it’s reasonably nippy on UK-toUK VPN connections, and (oddly enough) even faster when connecting through nearby European servers – a Netherlands connection gave us 95.5% of our regular download speed. It’s also pretty good over longer distances, maintaining 52% of our normal download speed over a VPN connection to Boston in the US and a credible 37% when hooked up through Hong Kong.
Streaming capabilities are limited, however. We were able to watch NBC and Comedy Central via US servers, but SecureLine failed to get past Netflix’s proxy-detection systems.
SecureLine uses the secure OpenVPN protocol, and it seems to do the job on the privacy front: doileak.com certainly didn’t spot any DNS or IP leaks. Moreover, Avast SecureLine doesn’t log the websites you visit, the data you transfer or which IP addresses are accessed.
Avast is a decent VPN that’s very easy to use, but it doesn’t stand out from the pack. It’s a viable contender if you only want to secure a single laptop or desktop, but other VPNs give you more for a similar monthly fee.