OVPN VS VyprVPN: Which VPN is Best?

Choosing between two VPN providers can be daunting, especially if you only look at each provider’s marketing. To really know whether a particular VPN provider will suit our needs, we have to go beyond marketing. We need to test each service and compare the results, and that’s exactly what we’re doing in this post. We’ll examine each provider’s ins and outs to determine which one to recommend.

This post compares OVPN and VyprVPN to see which one comes out on top in a number of key areas.

Highlights

OVPN VS VyprVPN pricing

Considering the above, we can see there isn’t much difference between these two providers’ prices, although OVPN’s monthly pricing is slightly higher. For the rest, it’s pretty much the same. VyprVPN will make a bit less of a hole in your wallet on a monthly plan.

The difference is in the money-back guarantee. VyprVPN offers the industry standard 30-day money-back guarantee, whereas OVPN just provides a ten-day refund period. Although I feel that ten days is enough time to test the service and see if it’s for you, OVPN really should align with the rest of the industry and offer a 30-day refund period.

OVPN VS VyprVPN features

Regarding platform support, OVPN goes the extra mile here and supports more devices than VyprVPN. They both support the usual suspects (macOS, Windows, iOS, Android). But OVPN also supports Linux, NAS devices, and routers, while VyprVPN’s only additional supported devices are routers.

Other differences include the fact that OVPN provides an ad/tracker blocker with its subscriptions. And it also brings browser extensions to the table, providing extensions for Firefox, Chrome, and Vivaldi.

Only VyprVPN supports split tunneling. But the feature is only supported in its macOS and Android apps. Split tunneling ets you choose which apps or URLs go through the VPN and which go to your ISP gateway. It’s a practical and flexible feature. Let’s hope VyprVPN extends support to its other apps.

VyprVPN allows for five simultaneous connections in all its subscriptions. Whereas with OVPN, the number of simultaneous connections varies according to your subscription. On its one-month plan, OVPN supports up to four simultaneous connections. On its yearly plan, it goes up to five. And it’s pushed to six on its two-year plan.

Speed

It isn’t difficult to see that VyprVPN’s speeds are more than double those of OVPN most of the time. So it clearly takes it as far as speed is concerned. OVPN’s speeds aren’t terrible, but they’ve been better in the past, so hopefully, OVPN will be able to up its connection speeds in the near future. For now, it can’t compete on speed with the likes of VyprVPN.

Streaming capabilities

OVPN supports streaming fairly well insofar as it works with a decent number of streaming services. It worked with Netflix US, Germany, and Sweden. It also worked with Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and ITV Hub.

VyprVPN’s streaming support goes significantly beyond what OVPN can offer. It supports many more streaming services than OVPN – and popular ones at that. VyprVPN provides an excellent streaming experience and understandably takes it in this category.

If streaming over VPN is important to you, have a look at our recommended VPN providers for streaming.

China

Only one of our two providers works in China, and that’s VyprVPN. VPN providers that can legitimately claim to work in China are becoming few and far between, so VyprVPN’s support is welcome. You may have to jump through a few hoops to get it working, but many VyprVPN users report it to work from China. VyprVPN also provides a guide on how to get it working.

The reason so few VPN providers work in China is because it’s getting more and more difficult to bypass China’s censorship. So many VPN providers would rather invest their resources elsewhere. And that includes OVPN – there are no references to China in its marketing.

Take a look at our post listing the best VPN providers that work in China.

Setup and interface

OVPN and VyprVPN both provide desktop apps that are well-designed and easy to understand. But they both tend to use a mobile app design philosophy, so the UIs are pretty small for desktop apps. This is especially true with OVPN’s app, which uses a smaller font and crams in more settings per page.

VyprVPN’s app is somewhat easier to navigate because it exposes fewer settings to users and uses a bigger font, so the app is much less cramped.

I would prefer a “real” desktop app that uses the available screen real estate computers have. Still, I don’t think either app degrades the user experience. In the end, it’s just a personal preference.

As you can see, OVPN’s app is busier and less intuitive. But again, it’s still simple enough to understand – even by new users. Server selection is list-based. You can search for servers by region and city. The app can also connect you to the fastest server in your selected region automatically.

Both providers’ apps have a Settings page where users can customize the settings to fit their needs. As mentioned, OVPN exposes many more options than VyprVPN, rendering the app a bit more complex. VyprVPN’s app layout is more spaced out and uses a larger font, resulting in a more intuitive experience.

There will no doubt be many users who will appreciate OVPN exposing more settings to its users. It just comes down to a delicate balancing act between convenience and complexity.

OVPN and VyprVPN both provide mobile apps for iOS and Android. And both are easy to understand and navigate. They’re also both designed adequately for smaller screens.

Servers

OVPN’s network is pretty small. Some users (like me) prefer that, as it feels like more care goes into each server’s configuration. Nonetheless, others legitimately prefer having a large selection of servers. VyprVPN’s network is roughly seven times larger than OVPN’s network in terms of the number of servers. So if having a large set of VPN servers to choose from is important to you, VyprVPN will be the one to go for.

Below is a list of countries where each provider hosts VPN servers:

Security

Both providers support secure VPN protocols. But OVPN only supports secure protocols – OpenVPN and WireGuard for OVPN (IKEv2 is also very secure). VyprVPN, for its part, supports WireGuard, OpenVPN, IKEv2, and ChameleonTM. Chameleon is VyprVPN’s in-house custom VPN protocol. It’s based on OpenVPN but has been modified to scramble the packets (obfuscation) to circumvent DPI inspection. It’s likely to work quite well, given that VyprVPN is one of the few VPN providers to work in China.

The downside is that It’s a proprietary protocol that hasn’t been publicly peer-reviewed. So there’s no way to tell how secure or insecure it is. So unless you really need to use Chameleon, I’d stick with WireGuard, OpenVPN, or IKEv2.

Both OVPN and VyprVPN use 256-bit AES encryption with 4096-bit RSA keys for OpenVPN/IKEv2. WireGuard, for its part, uses different ciphers that are also very secure.

Both providers include a kill switch in all their apps (mobile and desktop). And as is the industry standard, they use their own no-logging DNS servers inside the VPN tunnel by default.

Both OVPN and VyprVPN own their entire infrastructure – which is quite rare. You just don’t see that every day. Having a VPN provider own its infrastructure is a great boon to security and privacy as it eliminates the risks that come with third-party handling.

Privacy

OVPN is based in Sweden, and VyprVPN is based in Switzerland. Sweden is part of the 14 Eyes Alliance, an intelligence-sharing network for member States with the US as the head of the organization. So that may be off-putting to some, compared to neutral Switzerland.

However, OVPN has an excellent privacy policy. And its no-logging claims were tested in 2020. Film companies sued OVPN to compel the VPN provider to disclose user data after the film companies found that some of their copyrighted content had been illegally downloaded using an OVPN IP address. But the court ruled in OVPN’s favor, stating that It found no evidence to contradict the claim that OVPN never collected the requested data in the first place. It hence ruled that OVPN could not be compelled to disclose information it never had.

Turning to VyprVPN, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. Before 2018, its privacy policy made it clear that it collected a lot of user metadata, including “the user’s source IP address, the VyprVPN IP address used by the user, connection start and stop time, and total number of bytes used.”

The big one here is the source IP address… But in late 2018, it overhauled its privacy policy, which now states that it doesn’t collect user data. It also submitted itself to an independent audit to prove that it delivered on its claims.

So while both providers now have excellent privacy practices, OVPN still gets the edge here for its willingness to stand up for user privacy in court.

Configuration

Shared IP addresses are more private than dedicated IP addresses, and it’s pretty easy to understand why. With a shared IP address, all the users of a given VPN server share the same IP address: the IP address of the VPN server. So all the web traffic of all those users appears to be coming from the same source. That makes it much harder to tie any of that traffic to a specific user.

OVPN and VyprVPN both assign their users shared IP addresses by default. OVPN also offers the option of obtaining a dedicated IP address as a paid add-on. That can be useful if you’re hosting servers that should be accessible from the internet, but you want those servers to benefit from the VPN’s enhanced security.

OVPN is the only provider of the two to offer an ad and malware blocker. The way it works is by using DNS blackholing. DNS blackholing works by checking your DNS requests against a list of known ad networks and malware domains. If any of your requests match the list, they’re blocked. If they don’t, they go right through. It’s a great feature that I hope more VPN providers will support.

Customer service

OVPN and VyprVPN provide email, and they both provide a searchable knowledge base on their websites. But only OVPN supports live chat.

To test each provider’s response time with customer service emails, we sent each provider three questions in three distinct emails. The first two questions are common and questions that shouldn’t be difficult to answer. The third question is purposefully more challenging because we wanted to see if the support reps properly understand VPNs and networking. And note that each provider’s third question is different since they support different features.

The results are below:

Both providers’ answered my questions in a polite and informative manner. And while I wouldn’t call OVPN response times blazing fast, they were significantly lower than VyprVPN’s response time. It took VyprVPN 48 hours on average to answer my emails. That can be a long time to be stuck in a rut. OVPN answered all of my emails within 13 hours with more detail and a better understanding of the topics at hand.

So OVPN takes the win for customer service.

I’m going to give VyprVPN a narrow victory. It isn’t perfect – and OVPN has better privacy practices/features and support. But in general, VyprVPN will be the better choice for most. As for me, I’d go with OVPN because my primary reason for using a VPN is enhanced privacy and security. But most VPN users want more than that today, and to get that, you’d have to choose VyprVPN. Its speeds are very good, as is its streaming performance, and it works in China.

VyprVPN’s biggest downside is its customer support. It isn’t that its responses are bad; they just take a long time to get to you. So VyprVPN should really try and up its game in the customer service arena. At the same time, it provides a longer money-back guarantee of 30 days, compared to OVPN’s meager ten days.

Here’s what puts VyprVPN over the edge:

1. VyprVPN has significantly better speeds than OVPN.
2. It provides excellent streaming support.
3. It works in China.
4. VyprVPN supports secure VPN protocols alongside its proprietary Chameleon protocol. Proprietary protocols are problematic, but you can stick to IKEv2, OpenVPN, and WireGuard.
5. VyprVPN is cheaper or the same price on most subscriptions.

VPN on!

See also: