TorGuard VPN Review

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The king of ping indeed.

By Matt Elliott

Editor's Note: Due to the popularity and interest in our last VPN roundup, we're reviewing five more VPNs this week to see which of them is the best. We expanded our tests to test ping in more games and at different times of day, and also expanded our upload/download speed tests. For a beginner's guide on what a VPN is and why you should care, read our introductory article Everything You Need to Know About VPN.

TorGuard is the king of ping, and it was the clear winner in our real-world online gaming tests. For hardcore online gamers where performance is paramount that still want to play behind a VPN, it’s worth a close look. For everyone else, PureVPN and VyprVPN offer slightly stronger overall performance and more polished desktop apps. TorGuard is still a more than respectable option, however. Let's dive in.

Pricing

TorGuard’s month-to-month plan costs $9.99 per month, which is about average. You can pay $19.99 for three months, $29.99 for six months, $59.99 for a year, or $119.99 for two years. The plans come with a 30-day, money-back guarantee so you can try the service risk-free and see if our promising ping tests hold up for you. The plans support up to five simultaneous devices. Payment options include credit card, PayPal, Bitcoin, Paymentwall, and the ability to pay anonymously with a gift card from Starbucks, Target, and other major retailers. TorGuard has apps for Windows, MacOS, and Linux as well as Android and iOS devices. I used the Windows app for my tests.

Features

You’ll find the design of the TorGuard desktop app either charmingly old school if you're feeling generous, or just plain ugly if you aren't. Launch the app and you’ll be greeted with a tiny window with tiny text and three drop-down menus for Tunnel Type, Protocol, and Cipher. It supports OpenVPN and OpenConnect clients and TCP and UDP protocols. I used the popular OpenVPN client and the faster UDP protocol for testing.

TorGuard will offer to connect you to the server it thinks is fastest for your location, but you can browse a list of servers by country. TorGuard displays the city for each of its servers but you can’t create a list of favorites, which means you are forced to browse the list again to return to a fast server you like. You can filter the list by continent but you can’t order it by ping as you can with PureVPN and VyprVPN, which is helpful for gamers looking for a fast server in a particular part of the globe. TorGuard has more than 1,600 servers in more than 50 countries. That’s the most servers of the five I tested in this round.

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That’s the most servers of the five I tested.

TorGuard doesn’t feature a simple kill switch that shuts down your Internet connection if the VPN gets disconnected, but it does let you add designated applications that will close should your VPN connection drop. Like any good VPN worth your trust and money, TorGuard's policy states that the company does not log your Internet activity. It also allows P2P torrent traffic and did not block Netflix.

Performance

Routing your Web traffic through a server adds a detour that can slow down the speed of your network connection, but in some circumstances it can actually improve your ping by connecting you to a fast server close to the gaming server. Your mileage will inevitably vary depending on your location and the location of the gaming server to which you are connected.

To test the performance of TorGuard, I ran SpeedOf.Me tests to measure download and upload speeds when connected, and also played League of Legends, Overwatch, and Team Fortress 2 to check the VPN’s effect on my ping in real-world multiplayer game settings. Because the speed of your Internet connection fluctuates throughout the day, I ran each test twice -- once in the afternoon and again in the evening. For the tests, I simply hit the connect button to let TorGuard choose the fastest server. I live in southern New Hampshire; for each test, TorGuard selected a server in New York.

On SpeedOf.Me, TorGuard got off to a middling start, finishing in the middle of the pack on both afternoon and evening tests, with the exception of having the fastest upload speeds on the evening test.

Next, I ran three games in the afternoon to test latency. On League of Legends, my ping on the game’s Americas server was so good (40ms) that I choose instead to test using the game's “EU Nordic and East” server where my ping was higher to see if TorGuard could improve my connection. It turned in the fastest ping of the five on League of Legends as well as both Overwatch tests. It experience a hiccup on Team Fortress 2, where it fell to last place.

Next, I ran the three games again in the evening to see how my ping was affected. It again had the best ping on League of Legends, although none of the VPNs were able to improve ping on this test. TorGuard had mixed results on Overwatch with the best ping on the game’s Americas server and the worst ping on the game’s Asia server. With Team Fortress 2, it avenged its slow afternoon ping with the fastest evening ping of the bunch.

On the whole, TorGuard turned in the best pure ping performance of the five VPNs evaluated this week, and it also connected quickly and was stable. TorGuard’s support is also excellent. When I first installed the app, I kept receiving the same error message about a problem with my PC’s TUN/TAP driver. I filled out a ticket with TorGuard support and received a reply two minutes later that outlined a solution that fixed the problem two minutes after that.

Purchasing Guide

TorGuard offers four payment plans. The price of the month-to-month plan of $9.95 is average. Like other services, TorGuard offers discounts if you sign up for six months or longer but its discounts dwindle for the 12+ month plans, making a six month plan the most reasonable offer currently:

- $11.95 a month billed monthly

- $6.66 a month billed every 6 months ($19.99 per 3 months

- $5.00 a month billed every 6 months ($29.99 per 6 months)

- $4.92 a month billed annually ($59.00 a year)

- $5.00 a month billed every 2 years ($119.99 for two years)

The Verdict

If you don’t mind its ugly app, TorGuard could improve your ping and make everyone on the server jealous. It even has support that is quick and effective.

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