Perfect Privacy Review

Perfect Privacy is one of only a few genuine no-logs VPNs we’ve reviewed. This means it doesn’t log browsing history, IP addresses, VPN connection timestamps, or individual bandwidth usage.

This was proven true in 2016, when Dutch authorities seized two of Perfect Privacy’s Rotterdam servers.

During this incident, it was confirmed that no customer information was compromised.

Perfect Privacy confirmed no user data was compromised during the server seizure.

The only information Perfect Privacy stores are usernames, passwords, and email addresses. But almost every VPN (apart from IVPN and Mullvad) require this information to set up accounts.

For further transparency, the VPN publishes a monthly warrant canary, announcing whether it has been subject to any court orders, warrants, or requests for backdoors.

Still, there are ways it can improve. We would like to see Perfect Privacy commission an independent audit to prove its no-logs policy in 2024.

Diskless Servers

We love that Perfect Privacy has an entirely diskless server network, preventing any intruders from stealing hard drives of information.

Diskless servers don’t have their own hard drive. Instead, its software and settings is loaded from another computer when it starts up.

This makes it more private and secure because there’s no data left behind on the server itself when it is disconnected from a power source.

In short, in the event of a server seizure, all the information saved on the server is wiped when the server is removed from its location.

German Jurisdiction

In 2023, Perfect Privacy changed its country jurisdiction from Switzerland to Germany — a move that was quietly revealed on the website’s German forum without broader notification to its English-speaking user base.

The only mention of this change outside the forum was an update buried in the service’s privacy policy and company information page (named ‘imprint‘).

From a privacy standpoint, this transition is significant. Switzerland is praised for its robust data protection laws. It operates outside major intelligence-sharing alliances like the 14-Eyes alliance.

Germany, on the other hand, is a member of this alliance, which can cooperate on surveillance and intelligence requests.

While Germany also has strong data laws and doesn’t require companies to store data on its users, Perfect Privacy could be subject to pressure for data requests in the future.

Given that streaming is a popular use-case for VPNs, we’re disappointed to see Perfect Privacy perform so poorly in our tests.

In its defense, the VPN never actually claimed to work with streaming services that block VPNs, like Netflix or Disney+.

But over the past 6 years, we’ve only seen it able to unblock one streaming service: Max. And even then, it doesn’t work consistently.

In our testing, Perfect Privacy was often detected and blocked by Max.

When testing Perfect Privacy with streaming services, we encountered higher-than-average amounts of CAPTCHAs on Google and Max, as well as frequent connection failures.

The worst thing was when a specific VPN server failed to connect but the only other server in the same country was down for maintenance.

At the time of writing, 15% of Perfect Privacy’s servers were down for maintenance reasons in countries like the US and Germany.

This wouldn’t be an issue if the VPN had thousands of servers like PIA does, but Perfect Privacy only has 46.

We also encountered problems with Perfect Privacy’s TrackStop feature (a domain filter that blocks ads, trackers, malware, as well as harmful content), which sometimes blocked our attempts to access BBC iPlayer’s homepage on desktop.

Overall, this made for a frustrating experience, so we won’t be choosing Perfect Privacy for streaming any time soon.

We’d much rather opt for a reliable service like ExpressVPN or NordVPN, which have much bigger server networks and work without fail with popular streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Disney+.

As our testing data shows, Perfect Privacy delivers inconsistent speeds across its server network. To put Perfect Privacy’s speed performance in context, it’s ranked 44th out of 61 VPNs for speed performance.

Connected to a nearby server in New York, we recorded a drop of 13%. To compare, the fastest VPN we’ve ever tested (Hotspot Shield) only dropped by 2% when connected to a local server.

Its fastest server was Canada, where it ranked 25th, but such a ranking is still underwhelming at best, especially for a VPN with such an expensive subscription.

The slowest location was Germany, where we saw a shocking 35% drop in download speed. A drop in speed to be expected when you’re connecting to another continent, but this is way more than an average slowdown.

In our personal experience, Perfect Privacy’s failure to deliver fast speeds resulted in noticeably slower page loads and blurry video quality on YouTube.

With a limited server network and sluggish performance, Perfect Privacy is also a bad choice for gaming. We had to suffer through annoying stutter and lag with fast-paced games like CS:GO because of its high ping times.

You can use the chart below to see how Perfect Privacy’s local and international speeds compare against top-rated VPNs:

As the chart above shows, Perfect Privacy doesn’t hold a candle to the fastest VPN services we’ve tested. It doesn’t even keep up with free VPNs, which are always slower than their paid versions, like Windscribe Free.

To fix the slow speeds, we’d like to see Perfect Privacy implement WireGuard, which is the fastest VPN protocol to date, instead of relying on OpenVPN.

Moreover, we’d welcome an increase in the number of servers and countries, to spread out its users more effectively and avoid server congestion.

Perfect Privacy is one of the most configurable VPNs we’ve tested; it does the basics very well and provides loads of advanced features for more experienced users.

Encryption & Tunneling Protocols

Using Wireshark (a data packet analyzer), we were able to inspect Perfect Privacy’s OpenVPN traffic to assess the strength of its encryption. Fortunately, the VPN successfully encrypted our traffic beyond recognition, meaning our ISP was unable to see our browsing activity.

By default, Perfect Privacy uses OpenVPN AES-256 encryption, which is extremely safe. The protocol has been open-source for decades and thoroughly inspected by security professionals for weaknesses and bugs.

There is the option to customize your encryption to AES-128, but this is an unnecessary step-down from the default settings.

We’re disappointed to see Perfect Privacy still hasn’t added WireGuard to its apps. This missing protocol is the fastest we’ve tested, and also uses the least amount of data, which is great if you are data roaming between WiFi networks.

Effective Kill Switch

As cybersecurity enthusiasts, we love Perfect Privacy’s customizable kill switch, which blocks your internet traffic in case of an unexpected VPN disconnection.

Perfect Privacy passed our kill switch test, meaning it didn’t leak our real IP address when we switched servers or disconnected from the internet.

However, most users will find this level of customization overkill. The default kill switch, Tunnel, stops your internet connection only when your VPN has an active connection.

The Program kill switch is active whenever your VPN is running, even when you’re not connected to a server. We recommend using this one as it’s the norm for most VPNs we’ve reviewed.

The strongest kill switch, Permanent, works even when Perfect Privacy is not running. This should be reserved for people relying on a VPN for the utmost privacy and security, and isn’t really applicable to most people.

Leak Protection

Perfect Privacy also comes with DNS leak protection and supports IPv6 traffic, which is an uncommon but very welcome addition.

There are loads of options with Perfect Privacy’s kill switch and leak protection.

When we first reviewed Perfect Privacy in 2018, we were disappointed to find its server network was tiny, covering only 26 countries.

Unfortunately, Perfect Privacy hasn’t expanded its server network since then. It’s actually decreased in size from 26 countries to 23 and 57 servers to 46.

To compare, Proton VPN has more than doubled its countries in the same period from 33 to 112, and its server count has increased more than tenfold from 420 servers to 6,587.

Perfect Privacy’s lack of server expansion is likely due to the fact it exclusively uses physical servers (going so far as to renounce virtual servers).

From a customer-standpoint, physical servers offer better performance, but most VPNs use a combination of both physical and virtual servers to offer bigger server networks.

Only using physical servers has greatly hindered Perfect Privacy’s server network growth, as they require a physical data center to store them in each country, and it can become costly for the VPN provider.

Overall, we think the benefits of virtual servers outweigh the cons. This is evident with a VPN like Perfect Privacy that only has servers in 23 countries.

Whereas competitors like ExpressVPN and NordVPN can cover almost five times the amount of countries (106 and 111 respectively).

We used Perfect Privacy’s ‘All Servers’ tab most often.

Our testing team found it difficult and time-consuming to install Perfect Privacy’s desktop apps. The installer was flagged as malware by Windows and macOS proprietary antivirus software.

So we had to manually add Perfect Privacy to the Windows firewall allowlist and officially accept the risk on macOS prompts. This was needlessly frustrating and isn’t the case for most VPNs.

The fact that Perfect Privacy doesn’t have a custom iOS app in 2024 is absolutely shocking. You have to manually install a VPN profile in phone settings, which is way too nerve wracking for a beginner.

Perfect Privacy said it doesn’t offer an iOS app because Apple doesn’t allow its TrackStop feature. But we’d prefer to have an iOS app without one feature than no iOS app at all.

Perfect Privacy has come a long way when it comes to usability. The first few iterations of the desktop apps had completely different looking interfaces. Now there’s a consistent design across desktop apps.

However, the VPN hasn’t gone far enough in recent months to improve the design of its product.

We found it needlessly difficult to start a VPN connection. You can’t just click a server location to begin the connection, like with most VPNs, instead have to add the server to the home screen first.

The VPN does this, so you can create custom multi-hop connections from the home screen. However, the design feels lazy, like the VPN couldn’t be bothered to create a new mechanic for the multi-hop feature.

Most VPNs display settings in a separate window, where you can click through different tabs.

Perfect Privacy instead displays every feature in one long, scrollable screen, indicating a new feature with a different color. There’s also a sidebar to jump to each feature, including TrackStop, Stealth, and Port Forwarding.

We haven’t come across any other VPNs with a scrollable home screen, and we’d prefer if Perfect Privacy removed it. We scroll enough through social media apps and long webpages in our day-to-day, having to scroll through a VPN client is annoying.

The app has Simple, Advanced, and Expert views, which we found adjusts the number of features you can configure. For example, Simple lets you switch between VPN protocols, whereas Expert view allows you to switch between AES-128 and AES-258 encryption.

In theory, this kind of layout is great for beginners. But in reality, Perfect Privacy is so complicated that we wouldn’t recommend it at all for beginners.

Perfect Privacy is a high maintenance VPN. Simply navigating the app takes way longer than its competitors. We found ourselves accidentally creating multi-hop connections with its confusing home screen.

The app itself looks outdated and garish: a kitschy combination of purple, blue, red, and green that’s embarrassing to pull out in public. It’s no way near as sleek or modern as NordVPN or ExpressVPN.

The absence of an iOS app makes it a terrible VPN to use while out and about. Forget quickly opening an app and tapping connect, instead we had to install a VPN profile before we even walked out the door.

Overall, using Perfect Privacy was not smooth sailing. Everything with the VPN felt like it required forethought. There’s just too much tweaking, double-checking, scrolling, adding, and removing of servers for us.

In our P2P tests, we noticed a slight drop in download speeds while connected to Perfect Privacy. Without a VPN, we could download a 20GB movie in 32 minutes. While connected to a nearby Perfect Privacy server, it took us 41 minuted to download the same file.

This is a good result, but still doesn’t compete with the best torrenting VPNs, that deliver no speed loss at all.

We used port forwarding to maximize Perfect Privacy’s P2P speeds.

Disappointingly, Perfect Privacy doesn’t allow unrestricted torrenting on all of its servers. To avoid DMCA requests, it blocks BitTorrent traffic on servers in the US and France.

American users may find Perfect Privacy’s torrenting speeds subpar, as their nearest P2P server is in Canada.

Port Forwarding Tool

Previously, Perfect Privacy limited automatic port forwarding to its Windows app, but this has since been addressed.

You can now enable automatic or manual port forwarding in either of Perfect Privacy’s desktop apps. To access this feature, switch to the Advanced or Expert view in the top-left of the dashboard.

During our testing, we found port forwarding easy to set up and saw an immediate improvement in our file-sharing speeds.

We’re particularly impressed by Perfect Privacy’s adoption of this feature when many top-rated VPNs, such as NordVPN, are yet to include it.

Perfect Privacy offers apps on most popular devices, like Windows, macOS, Android, and Fire TV.

However, we’re shocked to find the VPN still hasn’t developed an app for iOS.

Fortunately, Perfect Privacy supports OpenWrt, Tomato, Asus, dd-wrt, and pfSense routers. Perfect Privacy’s site has detailed tutorials for installation on all of these devices.

Unlimited Simultaneous Connections

You can use Perfect Privacy on an unlimited number of devices simultaneously. It’s rare for a VPN to offer this with most services limiting its users to five concurrent connections.

Split Tunneling

The VPN offers split tunneling only on Android, though it’s not clearly labeled in the app.

In settings, you can set the VPN tunnel to include all apps, include certain apps, or exclude certain apps.

Much like Perfect privacy’s other features, this offers a great level of flexibility, much more than a majority of VPNs.

We only wish that Perfect Privacy would label the feature more clearly and implement it on more devices, like Windows and macOS.

NeuroRouting

Perfect Privacy’s flagship AI program ‘NeuroRouting’ continually analyses your web traffic to work out the fastest possible route to your desired website.

This keeps your web traffic encrypted for as long as possible, with NeuroRouting ensuring that your final destination is at a VPN server as close as possible to the website you’re visiting. For longer connections this may even include hopping through multiple VPN servers which NeuroRouting carries out automatically.

A shortened tunnel ensures that there are fewer access points for attack and the cascading connection makes you harder to track. This feature is not intended to increase your internet speeds.

Although we have no way of testing this feature, it is certainly a welcome bonus which adds an extra layer of security to your web traffic. It isn’t helpful in all contexts; we recommend torrenters or those looking to connect to a specific server disable NeuroRouting.

Multi-Hop VPN Servers

If you think double VPN isn’t far enough, you’ll be pleased to know Perfect Privacy offers quadruple-hop VPN connections. This feature allows you to chain up to four servers, routing your traffic through each one in sequence.

You can completely customize the connection, which is already rare among VPNs. Only a few major VPNs, like Hide.me and Surfshark, offer this level of flexibility.

However, we tried out quadruple VPN ourselves, and to be honest, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Our internet speeds took a complete nosedive, comparable to using the Tor browser, which sends your traffic through three hops.

Establishing a quadruple VPN connection took around 3 minutes for all four servers — longer than any other VPN we’ve tested. Even Surfshark double VPN only takes up to 20 seconds, and Tor usually takes around 1 minute or less.

We also encountered occasional connection failures, which suggests the feature could use further refinement.

A basic Google search took around 2 minutes to load. More complicated pages with multiple elements, like an IP test tool, took around 4 minutes to load, or failed to load entirely after 7 minutes.

We tried out a quadruple VPN connection in our hands-on testing.

While services like Surfshark and Hide.me let you clearly choose entry and exit servers, Perfect Privacy simply allows you to add up to four servers without indicating which one provides your final IP address.

During testing, the server locations connected top-down, so our final IP address was from the last country we added to the lineup.

To change the order, we had to remove all the servers and add them again. We would’ve preferred the option to drag and drop the servers into order.

Also, during our testing, connecting and disconnecting several times from multi-hop connections caused Perfect Privacy to actually stop responding on our MacBook Pro.

In short, while the idea of a quadruple VPN might sound impressive, it’s not particularly practical or beneficial for everyday use.

Ad & Tracker Blocker

Perfect Privacy has a feature called TrackStop, which provides protection against tracking cookies, certain types of malware, phishing sites, and more. This feature has to be activated from your account on Perfect Privacy’s website, though, not through the app.

We found TrackStop to be a little hit-and-miss in our testing with the ‘fake news’, social media, and ad filters working as intended, but the child protection filter allowing us to access numerous gambling sites.

The Android app doesn’t include the option of multi-hop or kill switch, but the TrackStop filters will be applied once they’re activated through the website.