SkyVPN Review

As you can see in the table above, SkyVPN logs a lot of identifying user data, including your IP address and VPN server IP address. The statement in its privacy policy that it’s a “no-log network” is completely false.

It also claims to be different to other free VPNs that track you, saying “SkyVPN never does like that [sic],” but it actually logs a lot of unnecessary information that can easily be used to track a users’ online activity.

We’re extremely disappointed to see how vague SkyVPN’s privacy policy is. In the list of data it collects, we found it also saves “other technical data” and “certain information”, which could include anything.

SkyVPN is also quite open about how: “Ads appearing on SkyVPN Software or any of our websites may be delivered to users by advertising partners, who may set cookies.”

SkyVPN also states that it will hand over your data to whichever court asks for it.

Worrying Ties to Chinese Companies

SkyVPN, Inc. is based in Hong Kong. Its corporate address is registered at Rm 2103 Futura Plaza 111 How Ming St, Kwun Tong, Hong Kong.

Our free VPN ownership research revealed that SkyVPN Inc. is owned by Tengzhan Hongkong Limited (騰展香港有限公司), which refers to itself as SkyVPN Inc, Secure Sentry Communications, and Dingtone, depending on where you look.

The Tengzhan Group acquired Dingtone in 2015, according to this Chinese language disclosure document. There is no other reference in English language media. 

Tengzhen Hong Kong Ltd incorporated in December of that year, with You Xiumie (游秀妹) as director and sole shareholder.

None of this information is easily available to find. There is nothing on SkyVPN’s website that alludes to its ownership or corporate history anywhere.

You can’t trust SkyVPN. By law, the Chinese government could potentially demand logs and information on any of its users whenever it pleased, and SkyVPN would have to cooperate.

SkyVPN Free fails to unblock any of Netflix’s global libraries. This means you can’t access the US, UK, or Japanese Netflix collections from overseas.

You might be able to access Netflix’s own content library of originals, but the VPN will disconnect after a couple hours due to its 600MB daily data allowance.

In our streaming tests, SkyVPN failed to unblock US Netflix or any other Netflix library.

We also tested SkyVPN’s single UK server to see if it could bypass geo-restrictions on BBC iPlayer. We found it doesn’t unblock the streaming service at all.

If you want to use a VPN for Netflix or BBC iPlayer, you shouldn’t waste your time with SkyVPN. That’s especially the case with SkyVPN’s one-server mobile app. It has no UK server and the single US one doesn’t unblock Netflix.

Great alternatives to SkyVPN for streaming include PrivadoVPN Free, which can access US Netflix, and Windscribe Free, which can unblock 5 global Netflix libraries.

SkyVPN’s Streaming Performance Compared to Other Free VPNs

Here’s a table showing SkyVPN’s speed test results on a 100Mbps baseline internet connection:

As the data above shows, SkyVPN couldn’t even reach 15Mbps on a local or international connection in our tests.

These speeds are absolutely awful and don’t even come close to matching reputable free VPNs like Windscribe Free. A 90% drop in download speeds is simply unforgivable.

The fact that the VPN performs similarly on lots of different servers suggests that SkyVPN might be throttling its download speeds, too.

Overall, we simply don’t recommend SkyVPN to anyone who’s going to browse the internet, stream video, or try online gaming. Its speeds are not fit for purpose.

SkyVPN’s download speeds are consistently below 15Mbps on our 100Mbps baseline internet connection.

The only upside to SkyVPN’s speeds are the decent local ping times (5ms), but even then the service is too slow for online games (or even downloading them).

To put its awful speeds into context, you can see how SkyVPN’s performance compares to other VPNs in the chart below:

Similar to other low-tier free VPNs such as SuperVPN, SkyVPN reveals hardly any details about security on its website or app. We are extremely concerned about the lack of information about the app’s security.

SkyVPN’s website claims that the VPN uses AES-256 encryption. However, when we used Wireshark to test whether SkyVPN encrypted our traffic, we found that our traffic while connected to SkyVPN was left unencrypted.

SkyVPN failed to encrypt our browsing activity.

As you can see in the screenshot of our test above, Wireshark was able to detect that we visited our test website, even when SkyVPN was active.

Essentially, SkyVPN fails to perform the basic function of a VPN service. Anyone intercepting your connection — including your ISP — will be able to see the web pages you visit and any other information you transmit online.

There’s also no public information regarding SkyVPN’s chosen VPN protocol, so we have no idea whether it’s OpenVPN, IKEv2, or possibly something far less secure, such as PPTP.

Combined, this lack of transparency and the total absence of functional encryption makes SkyVPN one of the most unsafe VPNs we’ve ever tested. For these reasons, we strongly suggest staying away from this appalling VPN service.

Kill Switch Stops IP Address Leaks on Windows

In our tests, SkyVPN successfully prevented our IP address from leaking when our connection dropped and when we switched between server locations.

Our kill switch test tool didn’t detect any issues with SkyVPN’s kill switch on Windows.

We’re glad to see SkyVPN’s kill switch works on Windows, but it isn’t available on any other platform. In comparison, Proton VPN Free offers a functioning kill switch on desktop and mobile, so your IP address will be protected on all of your devices.

No IPv4, IPv6, or WebRTC Leaks

In our VPN leaks test, we found no major red flags. We are slightly concerned that SkyVPN uses Google DNS servers, but this isn’t unusual for lower-tier or medium-tier VPNs.

The majority of VPNs that own first-party DNS servers are top-tier VPN services like ExpressVPN.

SkyVPN didn’t completely pass our VPN leaks test.

SkyVPN didn’t leak our IP address, geolocation, or WebRTC details, but we still don’t recommend using the VPN. While it might work to hide your IP address temporarily, it doesn’t encrypt your data, and it logs a lot of other personally identifying information.

SkyVPN has one US server to connect to when using the ‘Basic’ version on Mobile, including both iOS and Android.

Its desktop app, however, is much better, with a surprisingly reasonable spread of 13 server locations, two of which are in the US.

For a free VPN, this is a surprisingly diverse server list, with choices in South America, Asia, North America, and Europe. We’re disappointed to see SkyVPN removed its single server in the Middle East though, which was in Turkey.

SkyVPN’s premium servers on Android are available for free if you agree to watch ads.

Without city-level server choices, you’re stuck with just one server to cover large land masses like Canada, Australia, and the US, though. The app doesn’t tell you exactly where the servers are based, either.

We checked and SkyVPN’s Canada server is in Toronto, its US server is in New Jersey, and its Australia server is in Brisbane. If you’re not near these places and want to use a SkyVPN local connection, your speeds are going to be even worse than the ones we recorded.

SkyVPN’s mobile apps are simple, with a standard ‘Connect’ button in the middle of the screen and the server list just above. This is fairly standard, but it’s so basic that it’s essentially stripped of anything useful.

In our tests, we couldn’t download SkyVPN onto our MacBook Pro or iMac from the App Store. It didn’t work using the official website’s macOS app download link, either.

Windows & macOS

While using SkyVPN on Windows, we experienced lots of mysterious bugs and software issues. Firstly, the app doesn’t always give you 600MB of data per day (as specified in the Terms of Service). Instead, we often only got 500MB of data.

Windscribe Free gives you 10GB per month, while Proton VPN Free is completely unlimited.

Other times, the data limit never actually went down while we were connected to SkyVPN and testing the service. This meant it was difficult for us to judge how long we could use the VPN service for.

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to test out SkyVPN on macOS. The latest version of SkyVPN requires a Mac with Apple Silicon, which we currently don’t have in our testing suite.

It’s extremely unusual for a free VPN to require the best and latest devices in order to run.

None of the top-tier VPNs we used reduce their macOS user base with an Apple Silicon chip requirement.

Android & iOS

SkyVPN’s mobile apps are simple, but we encountered a lot of pop-up ads and notifications. We found that SkyVPN offers more “premium traffic” to users that agree to watch video ads, which makes for an annoying user experience.

SkyVPN’s premium traffic is supposedly faster and increases the daily data cap, but in reality it’s just as slow as the basic traffic.

We’re disappointed to find that SkyVPN doesn’t offer any technical features on mobile. There’s no kill switch, data leak prevention, or split tunneling available on either iOS or Android.

On SkyVPN’s mobile apps, like on Windows, you’re not able to switch between protocols or encryption.

P2P file-sharing is permitted on some of SkyVPN’s servers. However, it explicitly states in its Terms of Service that P2P activity is not permitted on some servers, including Canada, France, the UK, and the US.

We tried torrenting on a UK SkyVPN server and our traffic was completely blocked. SkyVPN’s 600MB daily data cap means the VPN will likely disconnect before you finish downloading a file anyway, risking exposure of your true IP address.

In our torrenting tests, our download was completely stalled while connected to a UK SkyVPN server.

We strongly suggest avoiding SkyVPN for torrenting because it also logs your original IP address and server IP address, which could reveal your torrenting activity.

Overall, SkyVPN is virtually unusable for torrenting purposes. Its restrictive daily data cap, slow speeds, and intrusive logging policy make it a bad choice and one of the worst VPNs for torrenting.

To download SkyVPN on Windows, we used a link on the VPN’s website. However, when we tried to download SkyVPN on our test MacBook and iMac, the software was incompatible with our devices because none of them have the latest M1 chip.

SkyVPN can’t be used on any games consoles, like PlayStation or Xbox, or on streaming devices like Android TV or Amazon Fire TV. The VPN service doesn’t even offer browser extensions for Chrome or Firefox.

On the free plan it’s only possible to use the VPN on one device at a time, so if you’re looking to protect multiple devices simultaneously then you’ll have to look elsewhere.

IP Leak Protection & Split Tunneling Available

SkyVPN does offer some other basic features on Windows, like IP leak protection and split tunneling (called Smart VPN). However, the majority of the time its 600MB data cap makes the app so unusable that these features aren’t worth it.

It’s worth noting that these are the bare minimum when it comes to advanced features in VPN services. There are simply much better free VPNs available with fully-featured apps.

Security Features We’d Like to See

SkyVPN is an unsafe VPN and needs to add a lot more features to its security suite. Here’s some absent features we’d like to see added to its apps: