VPN Unlimited Review

VPN Unlimited is a virtual private network we wanted to like. Owned by KeepSolid Inc, a company based in both the United States and Ukraine, it’s part of a diverse slate of products. The VPN has some cool features, especially servers dedicated to streaming (though it isn’t alone with that — read our Windscribe review for another VPN that does something similar).

Although there are a few things to like, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited commits a staggering number of unforced errors. For example, it can bypass geoblocking and get around the Netflix VPN ban, but international download speeds decline sharply enough that you might not be able to do anything once you’re there.

In this VPN Unlimited review, we’ll try to get a handle on its many contradictions. We’ll be going over its features, pricing, UI, security, customer service and other points, before coming to a conclusion about whether it’s worth your money. If you’re looking for alternatives, we’ve also put together a list of the best VPN providers.

Strengths & Weaknesses

Alternatives for VPN Unlimited

Features

VPN Unlimited does what it’s supposed to. It gains a few points for the firewall, protocol options and the handful of good ideas that distinguish its server list, but there’s precious little else to set it apart from the crowded VPN field. If you want a service that offers a streamlined feature set without sacrificing functionality, try our ExpressVPN review instead.

You can download VPN Unlimited from its website. It’s available on macOS, Windows and Linux computers, as well as on iOS and Android mobile devices. You can also use it as a browser extension on Chrome, Firefox or Opera.

The most important job of VPN Unlimited is to connect you to different servers, and it offers you a few different ways to do this. You can have the app automatically connect to the best available server or choose from a standing list of servers, including some optimized for P2P file sharing and others geared toward specific streaming services.

Many VPNs have this list in some form, but VPN Unlimited’s list stands out in a couple of ways. The app tells you the approximate current traffic load each server is currently handling and gives you the option to run a ping test on the entire list at once. You can also connect automatically to the best streaming or torrenting server.

Advanced Features

Outside of the connection itself, VPN Unlimited lets you manage your account and switch between protocols within the app. It includes a DNS firewall that keeps compromised websites from stealing your information or downloading malware.

You can decide whether the VPN launches on device startup, choose whether to send bug reports to KeepSolid and reach customer support from within the app.

That’s about it. VPN Unlimited is one of the more feature-poor services we’ve seen recently. It used to have a kill switch, but that feature seems to have been removed because of poor performance. The same thing appears to have happened with split tunneling (if that’s a dealbreaker for you, StrongVPN offers a great split tunneling feature for free).

Paid Extras

In one of VPN Unlimited’s tabs, you’ll find a menu of extra features for premium browsing. In the Americas, Europe and Asia, you can buy your own private server for an average of $25 per month or a personal IP for $15. Note that the private servers have a data limit ranging from 1TB to 3TB.

VPN Unlimited Features Overview

Pricing

There is no free plan for VPN Unlimited, but you can get a free trial for seven days. To do this, you don’t need to click a link; just download the app and get started without entering a payment method. After seven days, you’ll be asked to cancel or pay.

Prices for KeepSolid VPN Unlimited sit right around the industry average. Any subscription nets you all the features available, along with unlimited bandwidth. The plan comes with major discounts for one-year and three-year purchases. The only twist is that each plan length has separate pricing tiers for different numbers of devices, as detailed in the table below.

One Month ($9.99 for 5 devices)($14.99 for 10 devices) Details Unlimited GB Bandwidth 10 Included Devices Bitcoin	1-month plan $ 9.99/ month Save 33 % 1-month plan $ 14.99/ month
One Year ($59.99 for 5 devices)($89.99 for 10 devices) Details Unlimited GB Bandwidth 10 Included Devices Bitcoin	1-year plan $ 5.00/ month $59.99 billed every year Save 33 % 1-year plan $ 7.50/ month $89.99 billed every year
Three Years ($99.99 for 5 devices)($149.99 for 10 devices) Details Unlimited GB Bandwidth 10 Included Devices Bitcoin	3-year plan $ 2.78/ month $99.99 billed every 3 years Save 33 % 3-year plan $ 4.17/ month $149.99 billed every 3 years
Lifetime Unlimited GB Bandwidth 10 Included Devices Bitcoin	$ 199.99

The lifetime deal is one of VPN Unlimited’s most welcome perks, but if you start from the pricing page on its website, you might miss the deal completely. 

To see the lifetime deal on your browser, you’ll have to visit the pricing page in an incognito window — even if you’re currently connected to VPN Unlimited, which is downright bizarre. However, it’s clearly visible in the app itself. Most other VPNs confine their lifetime deals to easily missable windows, so VPN Unlimited still comes out ahead here.

We’re happy to see the extensive variety of payment methods VPN Unlimited accepts, which is leagues ahead of the average VPN service. Along with credit cards and PayPal, you can use bitcoin, Amazon Pay, Mint, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, Alipay or Qiwi Wallet.

The actual pricing page lists these all as unspecified “other methods,” making it hard to tell exactly how many ways you can pay. This variety of payment methods is another big selling point, and we’re not sure why VPN Unlimited is hiding it.

Ease of Use

A VPN service without many features isn’t always a bad thing. We don’t mind that VPN Unlimited doesn’t distract from its core functions with unnecessary frills. However, the lack of control combined with the inescapable upselling is galling. 

For VPN services that are fun to use and keep the sales pitches to a minimum, check out our TunnelBear review or Hide.me review instead.

Downloading VPN Unlimited was incredibly fast. After confirming our payment on the website, we downloaded the client and created a user ID. Opening the app prompted a helper tool to download, but this also happened very quickly.

VPN Unlimited’s main control panel and server list are easy to navigate. You can scroll through the list, search it or just connect to the optimal server. The list displays each server’s workload, which will be in yellow if it’s over 50 percent and red if it’s over 80 percent.

Each server can be favorited with a single click. The streaming-specific servers include another button, which takes you directly to the home page of that streaming service. You can theoretically connect to the Disney+ server, then jump to the Disney+ site and start watching Moana just 30 seconds after opening the VPN Unlimited panel (see our article on how to watch Disney+ to learn more).

There are a couple of drawbacks to the main UI, like that the map doesn’t do anything. We expected it to be another way to choose a server, but it’s just a chance for the VPN to brag about how many servers it’s got. We also wish the banner space at the top of the window wasn’t devoted to upselling.

Preferences

Everything else is located in the preferences window at the top right of the main control panel. The first menu, “my account,” lets you control your account without opening a browser window. You can log in and out, change your password and decide whether the VPN app will ask for a password when it opens.

You can also make purchases. Extra time can be added to your VPN Unlimited subscription from the app; to buy the other KeepSolid products this page advertises, you’ll need to go into your browser. Some of them — like Private Browser, SmartDNS and KeepSolid Sign — make sense, but the goal and chore organizers don’t fit the security theme at all.

On the “settings” tab, you can change your protocol manually or have VPN Unlimited select the best one for your current situation. You can also toggle the DNS firewall on or off, choose whether to send bug reports, set the VPN to launch on system startup or uninstall VPN Unlimited.

The “information” tab lets you send feedback to KeepSolid, but it opens your mail app to do so, which can be annoying if you use browser mail. This tab also tells you what version of VPN Unlimited you’re using and lets you check for updates.

The “support” tab gives you the welcome ability to toggle whether you’d like the VPN to ask for feedback about your connection; it’s great to be able to send that info, but you don’t always want to deal with it. From here, you can submit a support ticket within the app or go to the FAQ in your default browser.

Speed

We tested VPN Unlimited by connecting to a series of increasingly distant servers and using speedtest.net to check the download and upload speeds and ping for each. Our results weren’t great. These tests were conducted from an IP in the United States.

Our results for everywhere outside the United States were so bad we assumed the problem must have been on our end. Getting a few second opinions revealed mixed results, with some reviewers getting good speeds and others getting the same slowdowns we observed.

The internal ping test showed better speeds than we got, with VPN Unlimited increasing latency by a range of about 80 to 400 percent, which is actually not awful when compared to the whole VPN field. It’s also important to note that speeds within the United States were exceptional, with one of the smallest cuts to download speed we’ve ever seen.

We also tested a few of the P2P servers. As you can see in the table, they gave us pretty much the same results as the general servers, with decent-to-great speeds within the U.S. and steep performance declines everywhere else.

Finally, we tested some of KeepSolid VPN Unlimited’s streaming-specific servers. These were the ones that most needed fast download speeds and, thankfully, they delivered. Netflix recommends a minimum of 5 Mbps for streaming, and all of these blow that limit out of the water.

We’ve been careful about marking VPN Unlimited down for speed because there are so many outside factors that can influence connections. We’ll just tentatively say that it’s a great VPN for spoofing servers within your country but a poor choice for international work.

If speed is your biggest priority, we recommend choosing from our list of the fastest VPNs instead to be safe.

Security

KeepSolid VPN Unlimited secures users’ data with AES-256 encryption, which it insists on calling “military grade.” The website is right that this encryption is used by the U.S. government to protect state secrets, but it’s also used by almost everybody else at this point (read our piece on how secure VPNs are). AES-256 is essentially uncrackable, so we can’t fault VPN Unlimited for relying on it.

The VPN allows you a choice of several protocols. It doesn’t do a great job of distinguishing between them, though. OpenVPN and IKEv2 are both described as “high performance & data protection,” and the blurbs below the menu don’t help differentiate them (see our VPN protocol breakdown if you want to know more).

You can also go with KeepSolid’s own UDP or TCP protocols, or use WireGuard, a new open-source protocol that’s still in beta. We don’t recommend using WireGuard, though. Its main selling point is that it has a smaller codebase than OpenVPN, and small, manageable codebases don’t tend to last long in open-source projects with thousands of contributors.

We used ipleak.net to test for IP, DNS and WebRTC leaks, and we found no vulnerabilities. VPN Unlimited gets high marks for good encryption and protocols, but it loses points for a lack of clear in-app information about what those protocols mean. It’s not acceptable that choosing “optimal” doesn’t tell you what protocol the VPN has selected.

For VPNs with security we’re more sure about, take a look at our NordVPN review or our CyberGhost review.

Privacy

The privacy policy for VPN Unlimited is the same as that of its parent company, KeepSolid. It’s spelled out on KeepSolid’s website in a page that’s definitely extensive, but pretty impenetrable to the everyday reader. There’s also nothing like, for example, the helpful section summaries you get with Surfshark’s privacy policy (see our Surfshark review for more details).

KeepSolid does save personal data that you willingly provide, like your name and email address. It automatically tracks your IP address, country and time zone, along with the amount of web traffic in a given session and your actions on KeepSolid’s own website. It collects your personal data from marketing companies to advertise its products.

To KeepSolid’s credit, its no-logging policy is clearly spelled out. It vows not to monitor or save your browsing habits while you use VPN Unlimited. It also promises to delete the personal data that it does save during your sessions, such as your IP and browser type. KeepSolid has not, as of this update, announced any major leaks.

Nevertheless, we’re not very confident here for a couple of reasons. The info KeepSolid admits to sharing with third parties — on a global network, no less — is concerning enough. Worse, though, is that it’s based in the United States, whose lax privacy laws and membership in the Five Eyes intelligence network mean whatever data it’s saving isn’t safe from subpoena.

For more details on why that’s a problem, see our explainer of the Five Eyes, Nine Eyes and Fourteen Eyes intelligence agreements.

Streaming Performance

Streaming figures heavily in VPN Unlimited’s branding, to the point where it’s as much a streaming service as a privacy app. Since it has streaming-focused servers, we used those to test streaming performance. Each one is supposed to be perfect for watching a different service. There’s also one that’s just labelled “streaming,” which makes things a bit confusing.

Our speed tests showed that the streaming servers generally have great speeds that are more than fast enough for video. The Netflix server got us into Netflix on the first try. The Hulu server worked wonderfully, as well, as did BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime.

The Disney+ server went worse. It wasn’t blocked, exactly, but despite its strong speed test, the site slowed down so far that the main video page took several minutes to load (we quit after six). However, we’re prepared to call that an outlier.

For now, VPN Unlimited looks like a solid choice for streaming. We’d advise caution, though, since these servers are located in the U.S., and speeds can plummet when crossing international borders. If you’d like some alternatives, our search for the best VPN for Netflix and Hulu might be able to help.

Server Locations

We mentioned above that VPN Unlimited makes a map of its server locations part of the main UI window. Let’s take a closer look at that.

Specific numbers aren’t forthcoming, but KeepSolid claims that VPN Unlimited has more than 400 servers in 56 countries. This country number bumps up to more than 70 if you include P2P and streaming servers.

We like to look for diversity over quantity. KeepSolid VPN Unlimited has servers in several typically underrepresented locations: one in Central America, two in South America, plenty all across South Asia and a few surprises, like Libya. Oddly enough, the map shows at least one server that doesn’t appear on the list, somewhere in West Africa near Ghana.

At this point in the VPN arms race, 400 servers is a great start and nothing more. In comparison, NordVPN and ExpressVPN have broken 1,000 servers by now. However, we do like seeing Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia thoroughly covered.

Customer Service

VPN Unlimited makes it easy to reach customer support from the desktop app. On the self-explanatory “support” tab, you can either head to the FAQ in your browser or submit a ticket directly.

The ticket has important information prefilled, which is hugely convenient. Additionally, support promises to get back to you within an hour, but it’s usually more like 20 minutes, making customer service one of VPN Unlimited’s best selling points. The answers to both technical and billing inquiries were well thought out and obviously not copy-pasted.

The knowledgebase is clearly written and extensive, as well, especially the troubleshooting section, which does a great job of holding users’ hands through known bugs. Although there’s no user forum, for this category we have got no problem giving VPN Unlimited a high score.

The Verdict

It should be clear by now in this VPN Unlimited review that we haven’t found much to recommend here. VPN Unlimited is a VPN that works, and it’s not by any means one of the worst VPNs; a service has to be actively hostile to get on that list, rather than just negligent. It has the makings of a decent streaming aid, but it keeps getting in its own way.

Some of its biggest selling points — like the lifetime plan and the huge variety of payment options — seem to be hiding on purpose, while other advertised features are outright absent (looking at you, kill switch and split tunneling). Still others — especially the streaming-focused servers — are easy to find but don’t perform.

While other VPNs are learning and growing, KeepSolid VPN Unlimited is collapsing in on itself. Its little brother KeepSolid VPN Lite isn’t any better, either.

Barring a major, publicized course correction, you’re better off staying away.

VPN Unlimited FAQ

• Is VPN Unlimited Good?

  Our opinion: no. It suffers from slow speeds and a lack of features that distinguish it from other VPNs, without being noticeably cheaper.

• Is VPN Unlimited Free?

  VPN Unlimited doesn’t have a free plan. However, you can get a seven-day free trial by downloading the app.

• Does VPN Unlimited Work With Netflix?

  Yes. It even has a server dedicated to getting onto Netflix. However, that server is based in the United States, and VPN Unlimited’s international speeds are slow enough that users outside the U.S. might have trouble watching.

• How Do I Pay for VPN Unlimited?

  You have several options: a credit card, PayPal, bitcoin, Amazon Pay, Mint, WebMoney, Yandex.Money, Alipay or Qiwi Wallet.