Hola VPN Review

Hola VPN collects more data than the vast majority of VPNs we’ve reviewed. This includes your IP address and browsing activity, which can be used to easily identify you.

If you subscribe to Hola VPN through a social media account, Hola has access to even more of your personal information. This includes your home address, birth date, profile picture, and any publicly available information on your account.

Hola VPN’s logging policy is one of the worst we’ve seen. Your personal data is at risk every time you use Hola VPN.

Hola VPN Uses Your Personal Bandwidth & IP Address

Despite its name, Hola VPN is actually a peer-to-peer proxy service that uses peer-to-peer caching for quick access to blocked content.

To bypass geo-blocked websites, Hola VPN routes your internet traffic through other users’ IP addresses in non-blocked regions.

Each user functions as a ‘peer’ or ‘node’, in a similar way to how the Tor network works.

At the same time, your own IP address can be used by other Hola VPN users for whatever they wish. This includes accessing unlawful content, which would be tied to your online identity.

Hola VPN openly admits to using your IP address and bandwidth.

Free users also share their ‘idle resources’ (WiFi and cellular data) with the network, to save Hola VPN money.

This allows Hola VPN to sell your bandwidth to other users.

Troubling Ownership & Privacy-Unfriendly Jurisdiction

Hola VPN was founded by Ofer Vilenski and Derry Shribman under the company name Hola Networks Limited.

Hola Networks Limited provides a free consumer ‘VPN’ service, as well as a premium subscription and corporate service called Luminati.

Luminati uses free users’ bandwidth, which is charged per gigabyte, without reimbursing the free user. This practice has sparked criticism among cybersecurity professionals.

Hola VPN is based in Israel, which isn’t an official member of the Five Eyes (or Nine or 14 Eyes) intelligence-sharing alliance, but it collaborates with it.

Coupled with Hola VPN’s intrusive logging practices, it’s highly likely that Hola VPN will hand over user data if requested.

In fact its privacy policy seems to confirm this, stating that it will “comply with law, regulation, subpoena or court order.” It will also hand over your personal information if it has “good reason to believe that it is necessary to.”

In our latest tests, Hola VPN was able to unblock an impressive number of streaming services including US Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, and Amazon Prime Video.

Normally this would be an excellent result for a free VPN service, but due to Hola VPN’s unsafe peer-to-peer network, history of malware, and intrusive logging policy, we can’t recommend it for streaming.

The risk to your online privacy, safety, and security is not worth installing Hola VPN for watching geo-restricted content (or anything at all).

Moreover, the nature of Hola VPN as a peer-to-peer service means we can’t guarantee Hola VPN will work for you, or if it will continue to work in our tests.

It’s also worth noting that Hola VPN failed to unblock a single streaming platform in our previous testing.

It’s much easier, and safer, to sign up to a premium VPN service for streaming. We’d recommend using ExpressVPN for uninterrupted 4K streaming, its bespoke Smart DNS tool, and access to every major streaming service.

If you want a free alternative, we recommend downloading Windscribe Free. It can reliably unblock 5 international Netflix libraries, HBO Max, and BBC iPlayer.

Unblocks US Netflix, but Poor Video Quality

During our testing, Hola VPN was able to access US Netflix. However, the video loaded in poor quality and remained at that level throughout testing.

We also experienced constant buffering for a 25 minute video.

Hola VPN worked with US Netflix, but the video quality was poor.

Slow Load Times Unblocking Hulu

We were also able to access Hulu with Hola VPN but we experienced extensive loading times. The main Hulu webpage loaded incomplete, with several missing images and floating text.

It took several minutes for our Hulu video to load while connected to a US Hola server.

If watching Hulu is a priority for you, we recommend using ExpressVPN. It’s 17 US city VPN servers, fast connection speeds, secure encryption makes it the best VPN for bypassing Hulu blocks.

Struggles to Unblock HBO Max

Using Hola VPN, we couldn’t get past the login page for HBO Max.

All of Hola VPN’s US servers failed to unblock HBO Max.

We suspect that Hola assigned us a peer in a region where HBO Max is blocked, preventing us from accessing the streaming site.

This demonstrates the issue with using Hola VPN for streaming. Aside from its privacy and security risks, you can’t guarantee the IP address you’re assigned will actually be registered to the location you’ve chosen.

To evaluate Hola VPN’s speed performance, we tested the speed of the connection between our location and other Hola users around the world.

You can use the table below to see a breakdown of Hola VPN’s speed test results:

We saw average download speeds decrease from 100Mbps to 93Mbps when connecting to a peer in the same region as us.

This is a speed loss of just 7%, which is very fast, especially for a free service.

Hola VPN’s fast speeds are partly due to its outdated and insecure protocols.

However, Hola uses a peer-to-peer network with limited encryption. This results in faster speeds than some VPN services with stronger security, but considerably more risk.

Plus, the node you’re connecting to can also affect your connection speeds. If the peer you route your traffic through has poor internet speeds, yours may suffer too.

Inconsistent over Longer-Distances

On far-away connections, Hola VPN’s download speeds decrease slightly. We registered an average download speed loss of 12% connecting to Germany and 19% connecting to Japan.

These are great results for a free VPN but compare poorly against paid services.

Hola VPN’s upload speeds decline substantially on international connections. We experienced an average upload speed loss of 90% connecting to the US West Coast and 69% connecting to Australia.

The discrepancy between Hola VPN’s download and upload speeds demonstrates the inconsistencies of a peer-to-peer network.

As such, it’s likely your speeds will fluctuate if you connect to a peer outside of your local region.

We recommend referring to our list of the fastest VPNs for a complete breakdown of the quickest and safest VPNs available.

Unsafe Peer-to-Peer Network

Hola Free VPN routes your internet traffic through other users’ devices to spoof your IP address and bypass website blocks.

In turn, other users can use your IP address as they please. This is dangerous as your IP address can be used for criminal activity, which would be tied to your identity and home address.

A website named Adios, Hola!, created by security researchers, states that Hola is “harmful to the internet as a whole, and to its users in particular” and labels it a “poorly secured botnet” with “serious consequences.”

The researchers at Adios, Hola! discovered various vulnerabilities within the Hola VPN architecture, one of which reportedly allowed anyone to execute programs on your computer.

According to the website, Hola fixed some of the vulnerabilities, but others still remain.

An example of this happened in 2015, when 8chan founder Fredrick Brennan claimed that his website had been DDoS attacked by users exploiting the Hola network. This was later confirmed by Hola VPN co-founder Vilenski.

Hola VPN is also vulnerable to IP address leaks and has facilitated data scraping, according to cybersecurity firm Trend Micro.

Hola VPN Lacks Basic Security Features

Hola VPN’s mobile apps use the outdated and insecure PPTP and provide no encryption. Your internet traffic is left unencrypted and encased in an easily hacked tunneling protocol.

Put simply, it’s not safe to use Hola VPN on mobile.

On Windows, Hola VPN defaults to the IKEv2/IPSec protocol, but its website states that the app may switch to PPTP to overcome specific geo-blocks.

We also found a drop-down menu for different encryption ciphers, with AES-256 listed as the default.

We verified this using Wireshark: a packet-sniffing tool. All of our data packets displayed incoherent symbols encased by the IKEv2/IPSec protocol, rendering our browsing activity private.

Hola VPN only encrypts traffic on its PC app.

Although this is an improvement on its mobile apps, the IKEv2/IPSec protocol is closed-source and has known security vulnerabilities.

We’d like to see Hola VPN introduce secure and open-sourced tunneling protocols such as OpenVPN or WireGuard. This would improve trust and ensure that your personal data remains private.

We couldn’t test the macOS app as it blocked our internet access. However, we find it unlikely that it uses proper encryption or tunneling protocols, as we couldn’t locate either within its settings menu.

Faulty Kill Switch With Limited Availability

Only Hola VPN’s Windows app comes equipped with a VPN kill switch. Hola users on mobile and macOS are left unprotected in the event of a VPN disconnection.

We ran the Windows kill switch through our in-house kill switch testing tool and found that it leaked our real IP address, too:

We experienced an IP leak while reconnecting to the internet.

Technical Features We’d Like to See Added

Hola VPN fails to include basic technical features that we expect all VPN services to have. Here’s a summary of the most important ones it’s missing:

Hola VPN Free does not have a conventional server network like other VPNs. Instead, it uses a peer-to-peer network to reroute your internet traffic, meaning there are no fixed number of locations you can connect to.

Every time you tell the app to connect, you are being given another real user’s IP address.

Despite this, Hola VPN will not communicate when a location is unavailable due to a lack of online peers.

As a result, our real IP address frequently leaked as we ‘connected’ to non-existent servers. The app continued to indicate that we were connected to a country, despite our IP address remaining unchanged.

Hola VPN displays a server list in its app but it’s made up of other peers.

We’d like to see Hola VPN introduce a proper VPN server network on its free plan or, at the very least, block your connection when no peers are available in a location.

It’s easy to get started with Hola VPN on iOS — the entire process took less than two minutes in our testing. Simply download the app from the app store, accept the prompts, and you’re finished.

For Windows and macOS, the process is slightly more complicated. Clicking on the download button installs both an app and a browser extension. We found this initially confusing as it wasn’t clear which software we should be using.

You’ll also be required to verify your email address during the registration process, which is odd for a free VPN.

Below, we’ve outlined our experience of using the Hola VPN apps in more detail:

Desktop & Laptop (Windows & Mac)

Hola VPN’s desktop apps are similar to its browser extension and visually almost identical. They both use a simple white background with a large central power button. It’s easy to use and switching between platforms feels seamless.

We particularly liked being able to resize both desktop apps. This was especially useful when we needed to use the VPN on a smaller screen.

The main difference is that the Windows apps come with several additional settings, whereas macOS is limited to a server list and connect button.

On Windows, you can select different encryption ciphers from a drop-down menu and designate apps for its kill switch. By ticking ‘manual server selection’ you can view the percentage server load of individual nodes. This is great for avoiding congested peers and maximizing your connection speeds.

The overall user experience is far worse on macOS. You are made to accept a prompt for “VPN settings change” every time you connect to a new server. We found this frustrating and a significant hindrance.

Hola VPN’s macOS app frequently failed to load web pages. We weren’t given an explanation for this and it prevented us from conducting our full testing process.

Mobile (iOS)

Hola VPN’s iOS app is identical to the macOS app in both function and design.

The app is sleek and well-designed. Its white background is better suited to the dimensions of an iPhone, whereas on desktop it felt too stretched.

Similar to macOS, there aren’t any settings or advanced features. This includes a VPN kill switch, encryption, and tunneling protocols.

Hola VPN limits you to one hour of free VPN usage before it asks you to either upgrade to premium or wait one minute. We found this frustrating and our testing process was continually disrupted.

We’re also concerned about the security and privacy risks of the VPN connection suddenly ending after an hour for users who are unaware of the time limit.

We’d like to see Hola VPN follow IPVanish’s iOS app design and introduce mobile-only features. For example, IPVanish supports Siri shortcuts that allow users to quickly start and stop the VPN connection.

Apple TV

Hola VPN’s Apple TV app uses the same stripped-back design as its desktop and iOS counterparts, with a central connect button imposed on a white background.

While we appreciate the neat and streamlined UI, Hola VPN’s Apple TV app is frustrating to use.

Each time you connect to a server, a pop-up appears asking if the VPN is working, which can’t be disabled. You can select Yes to remove the message but it’s difficult to move your cursor to this button as it often brings up the server list by accident.

Similarly, there’s a permanent upgrade to premium button in the top-left of the screen which you can easily activate by accident as it positions itself between the home button and the connect button.

On its website’s FAQs, Hola VPN openly states:

“The use of torrent apps on our network is not allowed, and we are blocking torrents traffic.”

As a result, Hola VPN is incompatible with all popular torrent clients, including qBittorent and uTorrent.

Hola VPN crashed our qBittorrent client immediately.

Even if Hola VPN did permit torrenting, we’d recommend avoiding it at all costs.

Hola VPN fails to provide basic privacy and security features — all of which are torrenting essentials. This includes VPN encryption, modern tunneling protocols, and a kill switch.

Using Hola VPN, your real IP address would be visible to everyone while torrenting, including your ISP and law enforcement.

Moreover, Hola VPN logs and stores your web activity. This means any copyrighted content you torrent, even accidentally, can be passed over to the authorities.

If torrenting is a priority for you then consider subscribing to Private Internet Access. It uses secure WireGuard and ChaCha20 encryption to keep your real IP address and web activity hidden.

Hola VPN’s Android app has been removed from the Google Play Store due to claims it contained malware.

Hola VPN has responded by releasing custom apps for Samsung and Huawei, but this still leaves many Android users unaccounted for.

This is unheard of for most VPN services and indicates Hola’s poor level of device compatibility. Even free VPN services usually provide apps for both iOS and Android.

Browser Extensions

Google removed Hola VPN’s Chrome extension from the Chrome Web Store in September 2021 due to concerns about malware.

Although it’s since been reinstated, we advise against installing Hola VPN on Chrome.

Hola’s extensions work at a browser level, so they won’t change the IP address of any traffic linked to apps outside of your web browser and they don’t use encryption.

According to Hola VPN, its browser extensions “operate as a standard VPN service.” This means they aren’t part of the peer-to-peer VPN network, so at the very least your IP address isn’t being used by strangers.

Unhelpful FAQs & Email Support

Hola VPN’s customer support consists of a ticket system via email and a help center full of FAQs, troubleshooting guides, and setup instructions.

We found the written support varied in quality: its setup guides offer useful information, but its general FAQs function more as a disclaimer for Hola’s unsavory business practices.

All of its guides are littered with typos and awkwardly phrased sentences, making them difficult to read.

It isn’t immediately obvious where the support hub is located on the website, either.

We found the email support team to be initially unhelpful, with most of our queries redirected to the help center. However, continued correspondence led to us getting some useful and informed responses.

This is a massive improvement from our previous experience with Hola VPN, where most of our testing team’s queries were ignored.

To improve further, we’d like to see Hola VPN introduce live chat support to facilitate faster responses and more in-depth correspondence.

The top VPN services, such as NordVPN and CyberGhost, implement 24/7 live chat support for immediate solutions at all times.