Perfect Privacy Review

When a VPN provider has the word “privacy” in the name, the assumption is that it takes privacy seriously. Perfect Privacy isn’t the cheapest or most glamorous VPN provider on the market, but privacy is its biggest selling point — and it shows.

This Perfect Privacy review will work through its pros and cons. We’re going to test its speed, security and streaming performance and consider the features on offer. We’ll also look at pricing, server locations, customer service, privacy and ease of use before giving our final verdict.

Perfect Privacy is a good VPN, all things considered. The brand name gives you a taste of where its focus lies, but the price could make it a hard sell compared to the best VPN providers on the market.

Alternatives for Perfect Privacy

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

Many of the features on offer are designed to aid privacy, which is where Perfect Privacy really shines.

Perfect Privacy has a Windows desktop client and configuration files for other platforms, such as macOS, Linux, Android and iOS. It also comes with configuration files for routers that support OpenVPN. There are no separate mobile clients.

The Windows client isn’t going to win awards for its design, but it’s simple to use. It shows a list of servers with their current bandwidth usage. You can also ping servers to test latency within the client, which is a nice touch.

The client provides options for DNS leak protection, which is automatically enabled when you’re connected. You can take that a step further with options to permanently block DNS lookups that don’t pass through a VPN.

Perfect Privacy Multi-Hop

You also get the ability to use “cascading” or multi-hop connections, which routes your VPN traffic through several servers for additional security. Other providers, such as Surfshark (read our Surfshark review), offer the feature, so it’s good to see it with this privacy-focused service.

Perfect Privacy offers SSH tunneling (or “stealth VPN,” as the provider calls it) which helps users bypass internet censorship in China and other countries, so it’s another feature for additional privacy.

The client includes a killswitch (called a “firewall”) that helps block traffic if a VPN isn’t active. It’s unclear, but according to the help information next to each setting, the standard “activate while tunnel is active” setting blocks non-VPN traffic when a connection is active or if it drops.

You can increase the protection by activating the “while program is active” or “active permanently” options instead.

Perfect Privacy doesn’t offer split tunneling, which you’d find in a top-shelf VPN provider, such as ExpressVPN (read our ExpressVPN review).

You can’t enable all the privacy features in the client. Some require activation through the website. One such feature is called “NeuroRouting,” which expands on the service’s existing multi-hop feature.

According to the provider, “AI-based routing” is used to analyze your traffic to keep it in the network as long as possible before routing it to the nearest VPN server to its destination.

It chooses the quickest and most secure route for your traffic, with your IP address constantly changing as each new route is created. Each website you access or program you use will have a new route and IP address.

That is impressive and we’d argue it’s Perfect Privacy’s killer feature from a security point of view. Because it’s enabled in your account settings on the website, it’s activated account-wide across your devices.

There’s also “TrackStop,” a filtering solution with individual blacklists for malware, ads and social media websites. Because the feature is account-wide, the filters apply on all your devices.

Perfect Privacy Features Overview

Pricing

There’s no hiding the biggest downside to Perfect Privacy — the price. Other privacy-focused providers, such as Mullvad (see our Mullvad review), offer security at a much cheaper price.

Perfect Privacy Unlimited GB Bandwidth Unlimited Included Devices Bitcoin	1-month plan $ 14.79/ month 3-months plan $ 13.64/ month $40.93 billed every 3 month Save 8 % 6-months plan $ 12.51/ month $75.08 billed every 6 month Save 15 % 1-year plan $ 11.38/ month $136.61 billed every year Save 23 % 2-year plan $ 10.20/ month $244.72 billed every 2 years Save 31 %

There’s only one set of features on offer in the paid plans. The only difference is the length of time you get. Perfect Privacy’s monthly rate will set you back $14.79, or you can pay for up to two years for $244.72 to bring the cost down to around $10.19 a month.

There’s no free trial, so you’ll have to register for a month to try the service.

Even on the longer plans, Perfect Privacy isn’t cheap compared to some of its competitors. You’ll have to judge the cost for yourself, but you may prefer an all-rounder provider that takes privacy seriously instead, such as NordVPN (read our NordVPN review).

You can pay for Perfect Privacy via over 60 payment methods, including credit and debit cards, PayPal and cryptocurrencies, such as bitcoin. You can even pay with cash if you’re willing to send it to an address in Latvia, but we don’t recommend doing so.

Perfect Privacy offers a seven-day refund policy for some payment methods — it excludes cryptocurrencies and gift cards — so that’s something to consider if you’d like to do a trial of the service.

Ease of Use

Perfect Privacy doesn’t sacrifice ease of use for privacy in the way that other hardcore privacy-focused services, like cryptostorm (read our cryptostorm review), do. For the most part, the balance between customization and keeping it simple is about right.

Signing up to Perfect Privacy is easy. There are three sections on the checkout page, which is where you first get to see the cost of each price package rather than their monthly averages.

You’re only required to give a username and email address, and you choose the payment provider you want to use before you continue to payment.

It’s unclear what information the payment providers record, but in keeping with the privacy mantra, Perfect Privacy doesn’t ask for personal information on sign-up.

Once you’ve registered, you’ll be sent an email with your account information, along with links to the account area and a how-to guide. The password is pre-generated, but if you’re worried about privacy, you should generate a stronger password and change it once you’re logged in.

The member dashboard is simple to navigate. It gives you information on your service length and shows which features are enabled on your account.

There’s no obvious link to download in the initial email, so once you’ve logged in, just go to the “download” area in the top right menu of the website. For Windows devices, you’re given an easy-to-use installer.

Download and installation take a few minutes. The client is named “VPN Manager,” rather than Perfect Privacy, which might be confusing when you’re trying to find it.

You’ll need to go to “settings” to log in. It should pop up automatically, but if it doesn’t, look for the red tray icon (a globe with a padlock) in your Windows taskbar, then right-click and hit “settings”. You can type your username and password in the “save credentials” area and hit “close” to save.

The client isn’t made to look appealing, but it’s easy to navigate.

In the client menu, you’re given a list of servers. Select one you like and hit the symbol that looks like an electrical plug to connect. You can find your connection information by clicking the magnifying glass symbol next to it.

You can ping servers, access the settings menu again, quit the VPN client or minimize it, so it’s all straightforward.

Returning to the settings menu, you get a choice between two types of encryption: OpenVPN or IPSec. Both have a description underneath to help you choose which is best for you, which is helpful.

That helpfulness can be seen next to most options. As you navigate around the settings menu, you’ll see that anything that isn’t obvious has a question mark next to it, which you can click to see further information.

Not every VPN feature is obvious, especially when they’re given brand-specific names, so that is a nice touch. It explains each setting without dumbing it down and strikes a good balance for users of any skill level.

The “firewall and DNS” section lets you modify the killswitch and DNS leak protection settings, with minimum protection enabled by default.

“Cascading and stealth” deals with the SSH tunneling and multi-hop protection, which lets you select how many servers you’d like to pass data through.

If you run into trouble, the “other” section allows you to reset your networking and view a debug log for additional troubleshooting.

Going back to the website, you’re able to customize additional features. They are listed under the “config” area of the members section. Each feature has a slider to turn it on or off, as well as helpful descriptions.

From sign-up to setup, Perfect Privacy strikes a reasonable balance between complicated jargon and ease of use. Where necessary, both the client and website have information to help users understand what a feature does.

The client won’t win a style award, but it works. Installation is straightforward and connecting to servers is easy. Basic privacy features are pre-enabled, and additional features are on offer for those with tougher requirements.

Speed

Perfect Privacy might be focused on privacy, but it also claims to be quick.

We wanted to see how it performed compared to the fastest VPN services on the market, so we ran speed tests on several international servers from our location in the UK. The results are shown below.

Speeds on the nearest international server in Amsterdam were around 90 percent of the unprotected speeds, with near-identical latency. The results were mixed when other servers were tested, with a curious variation in speeds that didn’t match distance, but it wasn’t much.

A server in Frankfurt, Germany, tested at around 25 megabits per second download and had good latency. A server in Montreal had higher speeds than the much-closer Frankfurt, but also higher latency, which is understandable given the distance.

Two locations that were even farther away, Los Angeles and Hong Kong, also had higher latencies but respectable speeds. At 154 milliseconds and 318 ms, connections to Los Angeles or Hong Kong wouldn’t make Perfect Privacy a contender for our list of the best VPNs for gaming.

Perfect Privacy’s results are good, but the spread of servers is unusual and could affect your performance, depending on which city you connect to.

The best area connection we tested was Amsterdam, where Perfect Privacy has five servers available. By contrast, Frankfurt has two and the other locations only have one. You can’t manually choose which server in a city you connect to because the client does it for you.

You can ping test each area and see available bandwidth in the client. None of the servers we tested seemed overworked. Latency seemed to be more of an issue in cities with only one server. Consider Amsterdam versus Frankfurt, for instance.

You can’t expect near-native latency in servers thousands of miles away, so the latency from Los Angeles and Hong Kong seems reasonable. Perfect Privacy’s download speeds are good, making it a contender for the best VPN for torrenting, and its upload speeds are close to the unprotected connection for each server we tested.

If you’re looking for another VPN provider that combines privacy with performance, TorGuard could be a good alternative (read our TorGuard review).

Security

Perfect Privacy offers major VPN encryption protocols such as OpenVPN and IPSec as standard. It also offers PPTP, which isn’t recommended, as we explain in our PPTP vs. OpenVPN showdown. The provider also makes it clear on its website that PPTP isn’t a secure option, so you can’t fault it for its honesty.

Perfect Privacy also offers SSH tunneling, along with SOCKS5 and Squid proxies for traffic forwarding in certain VPN-unfriendly environments or countries.

Basic settings for a killswitch and DNS leak protection are enabled by default when connections are active, but they can be configured so that they’re permanent, meaning no data can pass through your unsecured connection without a VPN connection.

We tested the service for DNS and WebRTC leaks to be sure, and it passed with no issues.

There’s a setting to “allow GUI to download traffic data without VPN” prior to connection, such as bandwidth data and to ping servers. It is pre-enabled and could identify your connection if an internet service provider or government agency was watching for it. It’s a minor point, but it’s worth remembering.

Thanks to the “NeuroRouting” feature, you can hide your location and route traffic to servers that are close to your destination. For example, if you connect in London and visit a website hosted in Moscow, it’ll route the traffic through the Moscow server. If you visit a website in China, it’ll route your traffic through the server in China, hiding your identity behind it.

You also get “TrackStop” blacklists as extra protection against malware.

As far as security is concerned, Perfect Privacy is covered well.

Privacy

Because the VPN is called Perfect Privacy, privacy is an important section for us to review. It’s the main selling point, and for good reason. There are caveats to consider, however.

As you’d expect from a service like it, Perfect Privacy doesn’t log data. Its privacy policy specifically says that no data is recorded that can identify a user. The only data the company holds is the user’s email address and the expiry date of their subscription.

Perfect Privacy warns that its primary payment provider, Paymentwall, will record payment data that could identify you. If that’s a concern, Perfect Privacy offer more anonymous methods of payment, such as bitcoin or mailing cash to a Latvian address.

Perfect Privacy’s parent company, Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company, is listed as being based in Switzerland on the Perfect Privacy website, but a quick Google search shows a Wyoming business registration with a head office in Panama and a UK mailing address.

That was potentially a big red flag, so further digging was required. A post by a staff member on the Perfect Privacy forum in 2016 about the issue confirmed that:

• The company is primarily based in Panama, which has great privacy laws.
• Vectura Datamanagement Limited Company’s Switzerland holding is “for accounting.” Given Switzerland’s stringent financial privacy laws, that also makes sense.
• The company’s U.S. holding is “for handling.” The post we linked to references PayPal, so it seems likely that some payments are handled through this subsidiary.

Perfect Privacy is not forthcoming about any of that on its website, which is unfortunate, but the U.S. business registration does seem to confirm that Panama is the primary office for the company and the mailing address appears to be a UK law firm that handles legal requests. All in all, it’s convoluted, but it’s no Buffered VPN, thankfully.

If you’re interacting with any company that deals with U.S. customers or U.S. payment methods, you’re going to have to deal with Uncle Sam. If you’re worried about that, use Perfect Privacy’s anonymous payment methods instead of PayPal or Paymentwall.

The only unexplained element in all this is the Latvian address for cash transactions. It’s likely it’s a virtual office, judging from the listing for the address, where any mail can be collected or forwarded, so, again, we don’t recommend sending your cash there.

Perfect Privacy has had legal trouble in the past, with servers seized in the Netherlands in 2016. The servers were taken from a third-party host, but the VPN provider assured customers of its no-logging policy at the time.

The company didn’t attempt to hide the issue, which was promising, and it seems to have continued being open and honest with a warrant canary that’s updated monthly. Typically, countries put legal restrictions on companies like Perfect Privacy to stop them from alerting customers to legal requests for data.

A warrant canary gets around that. Perfect Privacy’s canary confirms that no legal requests for data have been received in the last month. If the warrant disappears, customers can assume that the situation has changed without Perfect Privacy breaking the law.

It’s a nice legal loophole and it demonstrates that, though Perfect Privacy isn’t immune to legal threats, it takes its privacy policy seriously.

Streaming Performance

Let’s shatter your expectations right away. When it comes to streaming from Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, BBC iPlayer or Hulu, Perfect Privacy isn’t the VPN for you. It couldn’t stream, so it won’t be joining our best VPN for streaming list.

None of the servers are listed as media-friendly, and Perfect Privacy doesn’t claim to be on its website or in its documentation, so this might be an unfair point. That said, it’s another black mark, given the price.

We tested Perfect Privacy from the UK, but once we connected to another UK-based server, the BBC iPlayer website knew there was a connection to a VPN in place. If you want your Top Gear fix, you’ll need to pick an alternative from our list of the best VPNs for BBC iPlayer.

Netflix returned similar errors, so Perfect Privacy won’t be a contender for the best VPN for Netflix, either.

It’s likely that Perfect Privacy’s servers have already been blocked by these media services, so look elsewhere.

Server Locations

We counted 55 servers in 23 countries on the Perfect Privacy website, but it confirmed to us that it actually has 59 servers. Compared to other providers that offer thousands of servers to their customers, such as Private Internet Access (read our PIA review), that doesn’t seem like much.

The servers are also mostly in Europe, with only six in North America, four in Asia and one in Africa. There are no servers in Central America or South America.

The spread of servers is poor, and with so few U.S. servers, it isn’t going to be the best VPN for the U.S. When you consider that there are no bandwidth limits, if you’re in an area with fewer servers, you’re going to be competing more for bandwidth.

Perfect Privacy might be a good option if you’re in Europe. The choices are limited if you live elsewhere, though, so you should consider other options.

Customer Service

Customer service isn’t a great selling point for Perfect Privacy. Neither live chat nor phone support is available if you want to get in touch.

Perfect Privacy offers a support email address and a contact form for users to ask questions. There’s also a support forum, with German and English language areas. We tested the customer service email with some technical and pricing questions:

1. Does Perfect Privacy have a killswitch?
2. Does it support split tunneling?
3. What’s the total cost of the 12-month package?
4. How many servers are available to connect to?

The company responded within 14 hours with a breakdown and answered each question clearly, but the responses to more technical questions — such as the question about split tunneling — were blunt and unhelpful.

There’s also an FAQ page with a detailed list of technical and pricing questions for users, with information on Perfect Privacy’s no-logs policy at the top. There’s also a how-to guide that explains how to install and configure the VPN.

Each section comes with pictures and step-by-step instructions. The guides are consistent and informative, and the instructions given are easy to follow.

The Verdict

Perfect Privacy is a good but not exceptional VPN for those who want something that focuses on privacy. There are a lot of features that focus on protecting users from having their identity leaked online and shielding them from malware.

Our speed test showed that it’s fair to call it a quick service, but we tested from Europe, where the majority of servers are located. Users in North America or Asia may have a different experience. Its privacy features are backed up by a stringent no-logs policy, a base in Switzerland and a warrant canary page that’s updated on a monthly basis.

There are downsides, though. Pricing is poor and, though the features are good, Perfect Privacy isn’t competitive with some of its top-shelf rivals. The client is simple and easy to use, but, like the website, it feels outdated. The customer service on offer isn’t brilliant, either.

If you’re looking for a strong, quick and privacy-focused VPN, however, Perfect Privacy is a good option.

Do you have thoughts on Perfect Privacy to share? Drop them in the comments section below, and thanks for reading.