TigerVPN Review

Founded in 2011, TigerVPN is a service based in Slovakia. In 2016 it was relaunched, with a bunch of alterations and improvements to the service. New apps, a new website, and better encryption implementation gave TigerVPN a much-needed facelift. Now, four years later, the VPN is still successfully attracting a customer base. So, is this service providing a reliable service that is worth investing in?

On the whole, the VPN seems adequate for most people's needs. It has apps for all platforms, and it provides reliable encryption. However, it keeps some connection logs, and it has relatively few advanced features when compared to many of its biggest competitors. It also seems a little slow when compared to other services in its price range – and it has no live chat support.

Our Score
4.1 / 5
Pricing
$4.16 - $11.99
Simultaneous connections
2
Server locations
42
Jurisdiction
Slovakia
ProPrivacy.com SpeedTest (average)
26 Mbps
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Features

TigerVPN operates from the Slovakian capital, Bratislava. Slovakia is a great country for a VPN to operate from because the Slovak Constitutional Court previously ruled that the mass surveillance of citizens is unconstitutional. TigerVPN is a well-rounded VPN with the following premium features:

Does TigerVPN unblock Netflix?

Unlike many VPNs, which make accessing the Netflix US catalog their priority, TigerVPN only provides access to three international Netflix catalogs – and the US is not one of them.

This is unfortunate, because the US catalog has more titles to stream. On the plus side, TigerVPN will work with the Spanish, Italian, and Brazilian Netflix catalogs, which may be of interest to some consumers.

Speed and Performance

We conducted all speed tests from a location in Central Europe, and tested servers five times in order to ascertain an average. Our average speed without a VPN registered at the 70 Mbps mark on the day of our tests. German, US East coast and UK servers were tested using an online testing tool (testmy.net).

The German server performed best, providing average download speeds of 32 Mbps. Both the UK and US servers averaged out at around 15 Mbps, with the UK slightly faster (probably due to its proximity). 

All servers performed well enough for me to stream in HD. However, a drop of 40 to 50 Mbps is a pretty massive and people with a slower internet connection to start with, may find they are left unable to stream without buffering.

Upload speeds remained fairly stable and dropped by only a small amount compared to my base test. In addition, I discovered no IP leaks, DNS leaks, or WebRTC leaks when testing Tiger VPN, which is great news.

However, please remember I did not test for IPv6 leaks because I don't have an IPv6 connection at this time. This may mean that you need to disable IPv6 manually if you have this connection type at home, because IPv6 is known to cause issues for many VPNs.

Pricing and Plans

 

TigerVPN is comparable to most other premium VPNs when it comes to its subscription options. However, it is worth noting that customers who opt to pay annually are rewarded the most – because they receive access to Shimo VPN manager (worth $50 per year) and a free Sticky Passwords (password manager) account as part of the bundle. These features are not available with either the single month or 3-year plans.

Other than that, potential subscribers can choose between a single month, 12-month, or 36 month contract. The single month contract costs a whopping $11.99, this is pretty expensive when you take into consideration the fact that this plan only provides two simultaneous connections to the VPN.

Fortunately, the provider offers discounts to consumers willing to commit for a longer period of time. The yearly plan costs the equivalent of $6.67 per month, paid in a single installment of $79.99. This still feels a bit pricey when compared to competing services like Surfshark – which costs only $4.98 per month on the annual plan.

The one saving grace is that the yearly plan comes with the previously mentioned extras, and it can be used on up to 5 devices simultaneously. This may sway you, if you actually need a password manager. However, where the Shimo VPN client is concerned, we would really expect all users to get access to a premium custom VPN client at these costs, negating the need for Shimo altogether (you do with other VPNs).

The three-year plan reduces the cost substantially to just $2.75 per month. This is a much better price point, but it leaves you committed to this service for an inordinately long period of time, which generally leaves us stone cold because of our understanding of how much better competing services are.

On the plus side, a 7 day money-back guarantee is available. This will, at least permit you to test the VPN to see how it works, and you can always get your money back if you aren't happy. Payment options include credit and debit cards, PayPal, Payment wall, and Bitcoin.

Privacy and Security

OpenVPN is the default protocol. This offers the most security for users and is our preferred encryption protocol, which is great. TigerVPN also gives users the option of switching to L2TP, which is another secure protocol. However, we would generally recommend steering away from PPTP, which although available, is no longer considered secure for privacy purposes.

TigerVPN implements industry standard AES-256-CBC encryption with the OpenVPN protocol set as default. It also claims to implement it with RSA 4096 and SHA512 for the handshake and authentication. This is robust OpenVPN implementation.

Unfortunately, however, TigerVPN doesn't support Perfect Forward Secrecy, which we would expect all VPNs to support nowadays. This creates some questions surrounding the security of the protocol, which may bother the most security conscious.

Where the privacy policy is concerned, TigerVPN clearly states that no usage logs are stored. However, some connection details including time stamps and bandwidth are "temporarily stored". Considering Slovakia has no mandatory data retention laws this is frustrating, because the VPN could opt to retain nothing. On the whole, however, these kinds of logs will not be an issue for the vast majority of people.

For those wondering about torrenting, TigerVPN permits file-sharing and has servers optimized for it. This VPN allows P2P torrenting on most servers, although they do ask to refrain from this activity on their US servers, which again raises some concerns surrounding its logging practices.

All in all, TigerVPN uses pretty decent encryption, although it still falls short of the security levels you get with ExpressVPN, for example.

Final thoughts

TigerVPN is an average VPN that suffers from slow speeds, overpricing, and a lack of advanced features that the best VPN providers supply.

A three-year subscription makes the cost of the service fairer. But, we find that a hell of a long time to subscribe to a service that is lacking in nearly every area of its service. Many VPNs provide their service at a similar cost with a two-year subscription, which gives you the opportunity to shop around again sooner if you want to.

Admittedly, the encryption is fairly decent, and the VPN works well on all the popular platforms. It also has Okay customer care, if you don't mind the lack of 24/7 live chat support. Though, again we have to wonder why anybody would pay for this when they could get something that does everything (and has a kill switch and obfuscation) – for less money.

The one saving grace in terms of streaming is that TigerVPN did successfully unblock iPlayer outside the UK at the time of writing. However, the connection logs and the lack of torrenting in the US cause concerns, which, depending on your personal threat model, may be enough to make you want to shop elsewhere.

Finally, slow speeds are enough to sink the last nail in the coffin, and while there is nothing disastrous about this service, the fact is that it is very much lacking when compared to its competitors. All taken into account, we must conclude that it is better to look elsewhere.

Visit TigerVPN »

2 User Reviews

gravatar profile picture
Adz Lee
on 2022-12-08 08:40:02.
Overall score: 1
TigerVpn dishonoured hundreds of customers that had paid for lifetime subscription deals, their subscriptions all got cancelled with zero warning or explanation. Not trustworthy.
gravatar profile picture
Jac
on 2021-08-17 19:43:42.
Overall score: 1
TigerVpn is death and does not work anymore, , program and app does not work , there is no help at all, chat does not work, email address does not work, and that is since end 2020

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Written by: Ray Walsh

Digital privacy expert with 5 years experience testing and reviewing VPNs. He's been quoted in The Express, The Times, The Washington Post, The Register, CNET & many more. 

9 Comments

Trefilov22
on April 22, 2017
I purchased a lifetime license from stacksocial because of the amazing prices of $29.99. I had never used TigerVPN prior to that, but I figured for that price, it was worth a shot. Make sure you read the fine print! You only get access to 15 of their servers, none of which has any sort of speed. The fastest I could get was one of the servers that were the furthest away from me in the Netherlands, and that was only about 8Mbps... I use Charter Spectrum here in the US, and without VPN I get about 135Mbps. HUGE speed loss over TigerVPN. I have used other VPN's and can get about 45-50Mbps... Now this is through an Asus RT-N66U router using PPTP. I have yet to try their Apps, but in other instances I have noticed higher speeds than going directly through the router. Granted, my router has not been updated from the stock firmware, so I am not sure if that has anything to do with it. Maybe the service will improve over time, but for now, it is extremely difficult to stream with it, which was my main purpose of using it. *UPDATE* I decided to try the Windows App while I was writing this article, and I am getting much improved speeds of nearly 30Mbps down and 6Mbps up (which is faster than without the VPN). Why can't I achieve anything near these speeds when I configure my router? Am I missing a setting somewhere? In my router I go to the VPN section, then VPN Client, then I add a Profile, PPTP, I enter the server, username and password, and set the security to AUTO. Is there something I should change? Any help is appreciated...
Jac replied to Trefilov22
on August 17, 2021
TigerVpn is death since end 2020, so your lifetime subscription is gone !!
Donald replied to Trefilov22
on December 21, 2017
Because your router has much smaller processor and way less RAM to efficiently process AES-256 encryption.
https://cdn.proprivacy.com/storage/images/2024/01/douglas-crawfordpng-avatar_image-small.png
Douglas Crawford replied to Donald
on December 22, 2017
Hui Donald, Yes, routers often struggle to process strong OpenVPN encryption, but if I understand correctly, Trefilov22 is only using PPTP on his router. PPTP has much less computational overhead, and should be well withing the capabilities of an Asus RT-N66U touter to handle at speed...
https://cdn.proprivacy.com/storage/images/2024/01/douglas-crawfordpng-avatar_image-small.png
Douglas Crawford replied to Trefilov22
on April 24, 2017
Hi Trefilov22, Hmm. An Asus RT-N66U should have no problem processing a PPTP connection at speed. I have never encountered the problem before, but I'm wondering if the issue might be the PPTP connection itself, as the Windows app uses OpenVPN. Try configuring Windows manually connect via PPTP and see what speed results you get.
James
on April 2, 2017
Hi, I think you've made a mistake either in the download speed graph or in your writing. You said, "I didn’t experience much of a drop in speeds when connected to the Germany or UK servers," but your graph shows a drop from around 70Mbps to around 35Mbps and 18Mbps for German and the UK respectively.
https://cdn.proprivacy.com/storage/images/2024/01/thomas-ujjpng-avatar_image-small.png
Thomas Ujj replied to James
on April 3, 2017
Hi James, Thanks for catching this error in the review. I've corrected my writing accordingly. Cheers
https://cdn.proprivacy.com/storage/images/2024/01/thomas-ujjpng-avatar_image-small.png
Thomas Ujj
on October 10, 2016
Have you tried out TigerVPN? I'd love to hear your feedback!
Tudor Kirman replied to Thomas Ujj
on October 14, 2016
Honestly, they are really good. While I do believe the mac app they provide should be updated soon (they said it will be done before christmas) there is nothing I can say that would not match the review given above. I noticed really good speeds in general.

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