Speedify Review

Speedify is a VPN developed by Connectify. Though it’s a relatively young VPN, it has made a name for itself with its channel-bonding technology, which lets you use multiple internet connections at once to achieve faster browsing.

In fact, some people swear by the power of channel bonding so completely that they use Speedify without encryption, claiming it makes their internet connection faster than it would have been without a VPN. We already liked some things about Speedify (for example, it unblocks Netflix), so we decided to investigate it in more depth.

Our Speedify VPN review covers the ins and outs of the service, including its features, user interface, price, security record and more. We discovered several things we like, as well as a number of drawbacks that keep it off our best VPN list — though it’s a contender for our list of best free VPN services. If you’re looking for a strong alternative, make sure to read our ExpressVPN review.

Alternatives for Speedify

Strengths & Weaknesses

Features

Speedify is a virtual private network that connects to a worldwide network of servers to hide your web browsing activity from unwanted attention or internet censors. If you turn it on and browse as normal, third parties won’t be able to tell what you’re doing on the internet. Its extra features should impress any veteran VPN user, though a few are slightly lacking.

Channel bonding is the feature that makes Speedify different from all the other VPNs out there (at time of writing, it’s completely unique). Speedify lets you use multiple internet connections at once, creating a two-lane highway intended to help traffic move much faster.

You can choose one of three modes for channel bonding. Speed mode emphasizes speed. Redundant mode emphasizes reliability. Streaming mode, the recommended choice, balances reliability and speed.

Speedify has a kill switch available for Windows, Linux and mobile users. While active, the kill switch will automatically disconnect you from the internet if your VPN connection goes down, saving you from browsing unsecured. Check out our CyberGhost review for another example of that feature.

Speedify also offers limited split tunneling. You can’t freely decide which traffic goes through the VPN, but you can have certain streaming services bypass it if they’re known to block VPN connections. If you’re looking for a service with more robust split tunneling, try our NordVPN review or StrongVPN review.

Advanced users have the power to change their transport protocol, and they can choose a favorite DNS service instead of the one Speedify provides. You also have the option to auto-select the most torrent-friendly server when connecting.

Speedify Overview

Pricing

Speedify is an affordably priced VPN service with a generous free plan. Its individual and family plans are worth the money if you plan to stream a lot, but none of them can be used on unlimited devices.

The Speedify free plan gives you access to all its features, including its entire server network. Higher plans remove data limits and add more devices and users. The Family and Teams subscription tiers add a few extra features to help manage multiple users. Offering 2GB of free data per month puts Speedify in the middle tier of free VPNs, far better than TunnelBear (read our TunnelBear review), but not even close to Windscribe or ProtonVPN.

Speedify Free 2 GB Bandwidth 1 Included Devices	FREE
Speedify for Individuals Unlimited GB Bandwidth 5 Included Devices	1-month plan $ 9.99/ month 1-year plan $ 5.99/ month $71.88 billed every year Save 40 % 2-year plan $ 3.99/ month $95.76 billed every 2 years Save 60 % 3-year plan $ 4.50/ month $162.00 billed every 3 years Save 55 %
Speedify for Families Admin dashboard,5 users Details Unlimited GB Bandwidth 5 Included Devices	1-month plan $ 14.95/ month 1-year plan $ 8.95/ month $107.40 billed every year Save 40 % 2-year plan $ 6.00/ month $144.00 billed every 2 years Save 60 % 3-year plan $ 4.50/ month $162.00 billed every 3 years Save 70 %
Speedify for Teams Price per user,Pay per number of users,5 devices per account,$120 per month for a dedicated server; $900 per year Details Unlimited GB Bandwidth 5 Included Devices	1-month plan $ 9.99/ month 1-year plan $ 5.99/ month $71.88 billed every year Save 40 %

At the paid levels, Speedify has one of the lower per-month costs we’ve seen for individuals. This makes it a great option for people who aren’t yet sure about committing to a VPN.

Its yearly deals also makes its pricing competitive, though it’s about tied with its alternatives by the time you reach three years (if you’re looking for the absolute cheapest, try our Private Internet Access review instead).

Speedify is available on the website, the Apple App Store and the Google Play store. You can pay with a credit card, PayPal or a wire transfer in most territories. Amazon Pay is an option in some places. You can also use Sofort in some European countries and iDEAL in the Netherlands. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are not accepted.

Despite the fact that you can use the free plan without spending a dime, Speedify also offers a full 30-day money-back guarantee. 

Ease of Use

With its laser focus on connection speed, Speedify is less concerned with being pretty or easy to use. It’s not that this VPN service isn’t user-friendly; it just never goes out of its own way to be. The main interface has a lot of menus and a slightly steeper learning curve than some other VPNs.

You can download Speedify by visiting its website and clicking the button for your OS. We found the whole process to be fast and easy.

Speedify User Interface

Speedify’s main UI is cluttered compared to some VPNs, but it’s not hard to pick out the important elements. At the top, all your WiFi and data connections are displayed in bubbles. Clicking “add connection” opens the page in the knowledgebase that explains how to do this; just connect, and the connection will be available for bonding.

The connection button is configured to have you join the fastest available server. Clicking the gear takes you to the settings menu, which also houses the server list.

At the bottom of the main window, you can click through four different displays: traffic stats, speed, usage breakdown and connection quality. It’s mostly padding, though you can launch a speed test from the “speed” display.

The server location selection menu is dry. Before this, we didn’t know why other VPNs put each country’s flag next to its name, but looking at Speedify’s menu makes it clear that breaking up the monotony is important. There’s no search bar, so if you’re looking for your own country, you have no choice but to scroll through the whole alphabetized list.

Continuing down, you can change the settings for your various connections. Every option below that is a straightforward menu. We won’t go into each one in detail, but we do want to praise Speedify for letting you swap between a light and dark theme, making the whole UI easier on the eyes.

Speed

Speedify banks heavily on being faster than other VPNs, so we approached this speed test with even more interest than usual. Our results were not great.

Latency is good with a nearby server, but the drag on download and upload speeds was massive at any appreciable distance. We recommend one of our fastest VPN services instead, all of which will get you great speeds without having to mess around with personal hotspots and ethernet cables.

Speedify’s menu specifies which cities its servers are located in, so we included that information in the following table.

Connecting unprotected through a server in Portland, Oregon, gave us speeds about six times what we got through a protected server in Seattle, less than 200 miles away. By the time we were connecting to servers east of Europe, download speed had plunged so far it couldn’t be measured in Mbps anymore.

We didn’t think this could be possible, so we tried a couple of tricks. First, we bonded our WiFi connection with an iPhone’s personal hotspot. Although upload speeds shot into the stratosphere — jumping as much as 200 percent — download speeds remained abysmal.

Then we tried cutting out all the security features in order to coax extra speed from the VPN. In the “speed” bonding mode, with encryption turned off and connected to the fastest server, we got a latency of 39ms, a download speed of 2.12 Mbps and an upload speed of 2.33 Mbps.

We’ve had to conclude that Speedify isn’t speedy. It bets everything on black, and it loses. With enough ethernet, WiFi and 5G connections running in tandem, it might increase your connection speed, but average users frequently don’t have access to one or more of those. Still, if you live close to a server, it might be a decent VPN for gaming.

Security

Speedify is unusual for a VPN in that security is not its highest priority. Many of its customers use it to increase their connection speed, and security is a distant second concern. Case in point: you can turn off encryption if you feel that it’s slowing you down too much. (Check out our guide to VPN security if you’d like some context for this section.)

You can’t change your security protocol when using Speedify. The only protocol available is DTLS 1.2, a perfectly secure protocol based on the widely used SSL standard. 

You can change the transport protocol that DTLS is sent over, choosing between UDP, TCP or HTTPS, but that’s much more a matter of performance than security (for details, see our VPN protocol breakdown).

For encryption, Speedify relies on 128-bit AES encryption for newer devices and 256-bit ChaCha encryption on older ones. They’re both fast and reliable ciphers, even if AES-128 is not as secure as AES-256. (Never fear, if you’re not a cryptography nut, you don’t need to remember any of this.) 

We ran a test and found that Speedify’s VPN is free from IP leaks, DNS leaks and WebRTC leaks, which means it’s perfectly safe to use. Most VPNs manage at least that much, unless they’re going out on a limb with a new protocol (see our Hotspot Shield review to learn how that can work).

We have docked Speedify a few points, though, because any service calling itself a VPN should really prioritize security.

Privacy

We don’t have much to talk about here. Speedify makes it clear in its privacy policy that it’s logging a lot of personal information. 

The privacy policy reads: “When you use Speedify to communicate over the Internet, we receive your Wi-Fi SSID, your IP address, and your Device ID. We also record at what time each connection begins, how long each connection lasts, and the amount of data used.”

Speedify tries to downplay this collection with the fact that it doesn’t log your DNS requests, which is, frankly, insane. The whole point of a VPN is to hide your identity, and Speedify actively monitors it. Worse, the company is based in the U.S., whose intelligence services are infamous for peeking into people’s information without warrants or subpoenas.

Furthermore, the privacy policy says that none of this information is shared with third parties (even capitalizing a few words to really drive the point home). This is smoke and mirrors, folks. Speedify logs your IP address and doesn’t even try to hide it. 

Streaming Performance

Speedify is good at getting around VPN blocks, but once you’re in, the shows load slowly and buffer even slower. It managed to unblock Netflix, but our show took several minutes to load. Once it started, it played without any lag, though the picture quality was poor. On Hulu, we got caught.

Next, we tried Amazon Prime Video, which went the same as Netflix: long load times and poor video quality. We rounded out our test by using a UK server to check out BBC iPlayer, and we were happy to see the geoblock gone. That earned it back a few points. 

However, the bottom line is that a VPN has to be able to both unblock platforms and efficiently stream shows to score well in this area. Speedify isn’t the worst streaming VPN we’ve seen (read our Hide.me review for that) but if you’re looking for streaming performance, try a service from our top VPN for Netflix list instead.

Server Locations

According to its website, Speedify has more than 200 servers spread out across 36 countries on six continents.

It’s a pretty good range, with promising signs of growing into underserved regions, including South America, Africa and Eastern Europe. 

It’s nowhere near as comprehensive as ExpressVPN (read our ExpressVPN review) or HideMyAss (read our HideMyAss review), but given Speedify’s mission of increasing internet freedom worldwide, we can see its network rivaling our favorite VPN someday.

Customer Service

Speedify’s customer service options are limited, but those few features shine. You have a couple of options for getting help from the desktop app. Clicking the question mark on the main page takes you to a new panel. From here, you can either go to the knowledgebase’s “getting started” section or its search bar.

Speedify also lets you generate help logs, which can make it a lot easier to get what you need from tech support.

The articles in the knowledgebase are excellent. They go into detail about every problem while managing not to be overwhelming. We looked over all the sections of the FAQ and couldn’t find anything passed over.

Your other option for getting help is to submit a ticket, which tech support will respond to via email. The form is comprehensive and user-friendly, and includes a button for attaching a log to help the support team better understand your issue (though they’ll still be able to help if you don’t do this).

There’s no forum, live chat or phone number, but Speedify replied politely and helpfully to our emailed question in less than an hour, so we didn’t miss those features.

The Verdict

Speedify markets itself as a groundbreaking speed enhancer as much as a VPN, yet it’s much more effective as a VPN than as a tool for getting a faster connection. A VPN where you can turn off encryption needs to leave your internet as fast as — or faster than — it would be unprotected, otherwise it makes no sense.

Speedify cut our download speeds by more than 80 percent on the fastest server. We’re left scratching our heads about what it’s actually supposed to be. We might have gotten better speeds with different protocols — like we did in our VyprVPN review — but this VPN doesn’t let you change its protocol.

By all means, download this service if you want a solid free VPN. Just don’t expect it to make your connection any faster. Channel bonding may truly be the wave of the future, but the technology isn’t there yet. 

Do you have experience with Speedify? Let us know in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.

Speedify FAQ

• Is Speedify Free to Use?

  Speedify VPN’s free service lets you encrypt 2GB of data every month on one device without creating an account. To stream more, or to use multiple devices, you’ll have to pay.

• How Much Does Speedify Cost?

  If you need more than 2GB every month, you’ll have to upgrade. A subscription for one user on up to five devices costs $9.99 per month, though you can cut costs by signing up for a year or more at a time. You can also go with a family subscription for $14.95 per month, which allows for five users with up to five devices each.

• What Is the Use of Speedify?

  Speedify is a virtual private network that routes your internet traffic through another server to keep interlopers from seeing what you’re doing online. To protect yourself, simply connect to the VPN, then browse the internet as normal.