Windscribe Review 2024: A User-Friendly and Feature-Rich VPN That Can Benefit From a Speed and Security Makeover

So, why a Windscribe VPN review? Is it the fastest VPN in the world? Taking ten seconds to seek a Netflix video, we’re pretty sure it’s far from it. Does it have the largest VPN coverage? Currently holding just 174 servers spread among 63 countries, the answer would be quite the opposite. 

Yet, surprisingly, if we google “top 10 VPNs 2024,” oddly enough, we’d see the name “Windscribe” right there in that list of results! What’s the catch? Considering its seemingly less than optimal characteristics, how come Windscribe hasn’t just gone with the wind by now?

To find answers to this conundrum, we thought of getting our hands dirty with our suspect Windscribe VPN–along with the help of VPNcheck’s team of experts well-versed on the topics we’re about to explore!

• Streaming and Speeds – Unblocking streaming content is a challenge and, when it actually works (on Netflix, for example), the speeds leave much to be desired.
• Servers – Only 174 servers in 60+ countries – a very limited coverage compared to competitors’.
• Device compatibility – Windscribe can be used on a wide variety of devices operating on Windows (7, 8, 10), Android (5.0 and higher), or iOS (10 and higher). It is also compatible with routers, Amazon FireTV, Nvidia Shield and KODI media player.
• User-friendly apps – With its feature-packed but also nicely-packed set of uniformly themed client apps, you won’t have a hard time finding your way around the VPN’s features.
• Novel features – A specially built firewall working as a Kill Switch and a customizable ad-blocker called R.O.B.E.R.T are two of the features that individualize the Windscribe experience.
• Security – IKEv2 as default protocol, with WireGuard, UDP, TCP, Stealth, WStunnel as additional options. No external audit to confirm the level of security assured.
• Flexible plans – Besides the classic Monthly and Annually plans, Windscribe gives you the option to build your own subscription, based on the exact servers you’d use.

It’s no secret that half the VPN subscribers use VPN to bypass those geo-blockings and watch some Netflix or an equivalent. Unfortunately, our Windscribe speed tests and streaming service access had more failures than wins, resulting in an overall negative impression.

Add to that, there used to be a “Windflix”-labeled set of servers dedicated for streaming which are currently not operational as per the website’s statement of streaming services no longer working with Windscribe.

On our tested server pool, some streaming services worked for all the servers while others didn’t work on almost all servers except a random lucky server that managed to pass through the login. For the streaming services that did work, streaming and seeking speeds were unacceptably low, ruling out a few lucky servers that were quite snappy. 

Based on what comparisons, you may ask? Well, we interviewed an industry professional and asked them to test Windscribe’s VPN service to see what the experts would say after having used the applications.

Here’s where our luck–of finding the right server and our patience–of waiting until the video buffers- gets tested.

Our tested Windscribe VPN server pool consisted of 5 states in the US, Canada, UK, France, Italy, Australia, and Germany. Although there’s no mention of Netflix support on their official site, all of these Windscribe servers managed to log in to the Netflix platform successfully. Further, we stumbled upon 3 lucky servers—namely, New York (Empire), Seattle (Cobain), Canada Toronto (Comfort Zone)—that played Netflix videos at great speeds, and managed to seek them just as well:

As you can see, we reached highly commendable speeds for the 20 Mbps 4G WiFi connection we tested our lucky servers on.

However, this was where Windscribe’s Netflix streaming success ended.

All other servers we tested could barely play videos even with Netflix automatically lowering the buffering quality to ‘basic.’ And, seeking the videos on those servers was just a dream. If you’re patient enough to wait ten seconds each time you seek the video ahead or backward, you’re most welcome to try! But keep in mind that this review doesn’t cover any bodily injuries or property damages caused by any rage-invoked incidents.

Although Hulu is a popular streaming platform housing loads of movies and TV shows, unfortunately, Hulu is available only in the US. Hence, people turn to VPN services to hopefully bypass those geo-blockings and enjoy their favorite shows in peace.

Thousands if not millions of avid movie-watchers use the aforementioned VPN tactic, but most probably, they don’t use Windscribe to achieve this goal. At least from the set of Windscribe VPN locations we tested, only a single server (Chicago Cub) successfully logged us into Hulu. All other servers simply caught us red-handed:

Disney+ entered the streaming arena quite recently in 2019, yet it has gained popularity among streaming enthusiasts worldwide just a year or two later. Still, a large portion of the world is waiting for Disney+ to be released in their area. There’s also a set of Disney+ users looking for ways to watch movies and shows they aren’t allowed to stream just because they live in the “wrong” area.

Hence, people resort to VPNs to bypass geo-restrictions enforced by Disney+. However, just like our Hulu experience, Windscribe doesn’t come to our rescue. None of the Windscribe VPN servers we tested managed to bypass the Disney+ login screen. For all tested servers, the Disney+ homepage loads, but the login page loops on a blank screen. A quick look at the browser console shows a 400 error with a “forbidden-location” message.

With Amazon Prime Video now available in more than 200 countries, that’s one less problem to deal with when we want to binge-watch our favorite TV series. But, don’t forget, we still have to surpass that ugly demon named geo-block. 

As usual, there’s no official mention of Windscribe supporting Prime Video. But, to our delight, every Windscribe server we tested managed to log in and stream videos on Amazon Prime Video!

It wasn’t the smoothest ride: there was a considerable delay to initially buffer the video, Amazon even gave “streaming delay” errors periodically. But once buffered, the video played consistently, although the seeking was a bit slow as usual.

BBC iPlayer can more or less be called the British counterpart of Hulu when it comes to their geo-restrictions. In other words, BBC iPlayer content is exclusively accessible for those living in the United Kingdom.

We tested all six of the Windscribe UK servers with BBC iPlayer. Quite unfortunately but almost expectedly, iPlayer recognized all six servers as VPN connections catering to users outside of the UK:

DAZN holds a notorious name for being one of the hardest streaming services to break in using a VPN. With a strict DAZN VPN-blocking policy, you would need a really strong VPN to bypass DAZN’s geo-blocking.

You must probably already know where this is heading…

Indeed, no Windscribe VPN server we tested bypassed DAZN’s efficient VPN blocking methods. All tested servers instead showed a “DAZN isn’t available in this country” error message like this:

After our disappointing streaming experience, we won’t blame you if you expect an ill-fated situation when it comes to Windscribe’s torrenting capabilities as well.

Fortunately, a comprehensive Windscribe set up guides library is available, including a guide for multiple torrent clients. They even supply steps to use Windscribe securely when torrenting.

And, just as we wished, torrenting served quite passable speeds; P2P connections were available for both free and premium users.

Even if it’s such a contrast compared to Windscribe’s load of drawbacks, a deservingly praiseworthy aspect of Windscribe would be its widespread compatibility.

Just a quick peek at Windscribe’s client app download page shows us that it supports the following:

• Desktop platforms:
  • Windscribe for Windows: 7, 8, 10.
    Note: Windscribe still lends out its Windows client app’s legacy version which could work with Windows versions prior to Windows 7.
  • Windscribe for mac: 10.12 Sierra and higher.
    Note: Windscribe still lends out its macOS client app’s legacy version which could work with macOS versions prior to 10.12.
  • Windscribe for Linux: Ubuntu 19.04, Debian 10, Fedora 22+, CentOS 6+.
    Note: Linux client app is still in its beta stage.
• Mobile platforms:
  • Windscribe for Android: 5.0 Lollipop and higher.
    Note: Windscribe provides a direct APK link as well which you can use for manual installation of the Android client app.
  • Windscribe for iOS: 10 and higher.
• Browser extensions:
  • Windscribe for Chrome: v39 and higher.
  • Windscribe for Firefox: v57 and higher.
  • Windscribe for Microsoft Edge: v79 and higher.
  • Windscribe for Opera: v37 and higher.
    Note: No dedicated browser extension but provides a guide on how to use the Windscribe Chrome extension in Opera.
• Routers: 
  • Support and guidance to set up Windscribe VPN on DD-WRT, Tomato, Asus routers.
  • Users can also opt for an Invizbox router that’s pre-configured for Windscribe servers and accounts.
• Other devices:
  • Amazon FireTV Gen 2+, Nvidia Shield, KODI media player (Android-based and Linux-based).

Holding a mere number of 174 servers spread among 63 countries, Windscribe surely has a long way to go when it comes to its location coverage.

Nevertheless, users can check Windscribe’s Location Status page for an update of currently operational Windscribe VPN locations.

As a VPN bearing a wealth of functions and features, Windscribe owes it to us to present them in an efficient and elegant manner. And, thankfully, Windscribe doesn’t disappoint in this context.

Here’s our UI/UX expert’s view on Windscribe’s look and feel.

What Windscribe lacks in terms of performance, coverage, and reliability, Windscribe makes up for through its almost-no-device-ignored arrangement of device support.

Windscribe provides support for Windows versions 7 and onwards.

Furthermore, all the main features of Windscribe are easily available in their client app for Windows: the kill switch (Windscribe calls theirs a firewall. More on that later), split-tunneling, multi-hop, quick connect, dark mode, you name it.

All the features available in the Windscribe Windows client app are attainable through their macOS client app.

Windscribe hasn’t overlooked the good-old Linux distro users. Although currently at its beta stage, Windscribe provides a fully-functional CLI client app for Ubuntu 19.04, Debian 10, Fedora 22+, CentOS 6+ Linux distributions.

The whole bunch of features available in the Windscribe desktop apps with GUIs can similarly be found in their Linux client app.

But, this time, the split-tunneling feature isn’t available–yet. Who knows, Windscribe just might implement split-tunneling as well later on in their Linux app development, fingers crossed! And lastly, the dark mode feature is missing, too. Because duh it’s a console app it only knows to execute commands.

Impressively, Windscribe brings the same bundle of options in their desktop GUI client apps to the Android client app without cutting any corners. If anything, the Android app even lets us choose between ‘Light’ and ‘Dark’ themes, a feature that’s not seen in their desktop or browser extension counterparts!

Due to iOS restrictions, Windscribe could provide neither a kill switch nor a split-tunneling feature on their iOS client app. But, for all other features, Windscribe’s iOS app is a carbon copy of its Android counterpart.

Any software or service is only as good as its accessibility to the end-user, and no VPN is exempt from this. Windscribe indeed seems to know the validity of this concept judging from the distinctive, easy-to-use, and consistently themed collection of client apps they provide for all of their supported platforms.

Windscribe presents a feature-filled client app for its Windows users:

And a click on its ‘options’ button brings us a similarly option-packed set of various settings:

The client app Windscribe brings for the macOS platform is quite indistinguishable from the Windows client app:

Linux doesn’t get the luxury of a GUI app when it comes to Windscribe. But all in all, functionality-wise Windscribe’s Linux client app works just as admirably:

Making desktop users feel right at home, Windscribe offers an Android client app that looks and works almost the same way:

Similarly, a quick look at the Windscribe iOS client app screenshots on the Apple App Store proves it follows suit with the rest just as we expected!

As we learned before, Windscribe provides extensions for Firefox, Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and even supports Opera through the Chrome extension. And, looks-wise, they appear quite the same as other Windscribe apps:

As an additional option, Windscribe browser extensions provide an easy shortcut to link a desktop client app with itself. This comes in handy when we use the double-hop feature of Windscribe–more on this in just a second!

We already flew through Windscribe VPN’s performance and its design. Thus, instead of just taking our words and pictures for it, why not lay your hands on Windscribe, glide, and wing through it firsthand – see if it floats your boat, so to speak?

Let us guide you on exactly how to set up Windscribe VPN on your computer.

1. Head over to the official Windscribe download page and click the button showing your desktop Operating System:Note that the browser and OS versions you’ll see on this download page are customized based on the browser and the Operating System you are using. That is to say, if you’re accessing this page from a Mac, fear not, because the steps will be just the same!Clicking the earlier mentioned button should have downloaded a setup file containing the Windscribe client app for your Operating System.

2. Open this file and install it on your system.
   
3. Run the Windscribe client app and click the “Get Started” button to take you to the Windscribe sign up page:
   
4. Create your new account:
   What’s this R.O.B.E.R.T. feature they’re asking me to enable? At this point, your thoughts might be something along these lines, are we right? We’ll be touching on R.O.B.E.R.T.—pun not intended—later on when we discuss Windscribe’s extra features, so for the time being, think of it as a Windscribe-provided ad-blocker with a fancy name. And, it will not cost you a dime in its default setting so we suggest leaving it turned on as it is.Simply click “Create Account” once you’re done! If all goes well, you’ll be taken to an “Account Overview” page listing details of the Windscribe account you just created.
5. Connect to a Windscribe VPN using your Windscribe account. Head back to your client app, click “Login” and enter your Windscribe account credentials:
   That’s all it takes! You’re now ready to VPN to your heart’s content. Just click that huge round button for a quick connection to the closest and fastest Windscribe server; or if you have a particular server in mind, click on “Locations” to bring up the set of Windscribe servers you could connect to as you please!

Not all internet users use a VPN just to stream a geo-blocked Netflix show. An overseas employee might need to access their online bank accounts from abroad without fearing their funds would disappear the moment they do so. A traveler might need to connect to a public WiFi at a convenient coffee shop only with panic if their coffee would leak, not their personal information.

Hence, they would turn to VPNs, and in exchange, VPN services bear a responsibility to not break the pivotal trust the users lay on their hands. So, how does Windscribe deliver in this scenario?

Owing to multiple susceptibility occasions, such as when Ukrainian authorities seized Windscribe servers that weren’t encrypted, and a user IP address leak due to a WebRTC bug, we’re probably better off with another VPN if security is our topmost concern.

Windscribe uses the IKEv2 protocol by default. But, navigating to the Windscribe client app’s Connection tab inside its Settings lets us choose our preference from a collection of protocols:

What’s their stance when it comes to its security features? Let’s find out.

A Kill Switch is more or less a disconnection (or killing) of the user’s whole internet connection in the event their VPN connection drops abruptly. Apparently, a good old Kill Switch is snake oil for Windscribe. In its place, the Windscribe firewall keeps the Windscribe VPN connection tunnel enclosed, just as a standard firewall would. Hence, a sudden internet connection drop won’t matter, since the firewall would recognize it’s about to output packets to a non-Windscribe-protected environment and would simply block it. 

Windscribe provides its Firewall feature on all of its desktop client apps. And, thankfully, Windscribe allows us to turn this feature off if we need to. Because, at the end of the day, some would prefer not to put a heavy helmet on a turtle if you know what we mean!

As they say, “you can never be too careful.” Hence, if we don’t mind putting our already bogged down Windscribe VPN-tunnelled internet connection through yet another VPN server for the sake of another layer of security, Windscribe allows us to do this through its Double Hop feature. But, the catch is, it’s executed as a 2-hops method where the first hop is the Windscribe VPN tunnel we create using our desktop app, and the second hop is our browser extension creating another tunnel and making the 1st hop flow through the new tunnel. So, in essence, all Windscribe does is chain two of its VPN connections to flow one after the other.

Double Hop is available on all devices Windscribe supports, with its desktop and mobile client apps stepping in as the first hop and the browser extensions backing up as the second hop.

If you’ve ever used a “hard disk data recovery” tool to recover some files and photos you previously deleted, you must know what those data could do if they ended up in the wrong hands. Ergo, almost as a trend, a great feature loads of VPN services have started to implement is to make their servers run solely on volatile RAM memory. This way, any and all of your private data ever stored by your VPN would disappear from the face of Earth the moment the server’s plug is pulled.

Technically, Windscribe has plans to make all of their servers RAM-only. But at the same time, Windscribe seems to have jumped on the RAM-only bandwagon quite recently. Since there’s no mention of a completion of that shift in Windscribe’s official page, possibly not all of their servers could’ve made the RAM-only transition just yet.

Windscribe never says it stores “no logs.” Instead, they add an adjective like “user-identifiable” or “identifying” to the word “logs”, and say “no identifying logs” or “no user-identifiable logs” whenever they claim the Windscribe no-logs policy. And, turning to their privacy policy reaffirms this showing a bunch of data and logs Windscribe does store when we use their VPN.

Thanks to a nice load of options on their official site including setup guides, FAQs, a Knowledge Base, and another set of selections to receive technical support, Windscribe sets foot in the right direction when it comes to customer support. But, regrettably, their nonexistent support email address cuts down that good impression and the brainless bot they call live chat, leaving us with the only option to submit a ticket via the Windscribe support page, which could take up to 24 hours to get a response.

With these pros and cons altogether, is Windscribe reliable or not? Maybe a legal expert could shed some light on this.

Are we on our own if something goes wrong in our Windscribe connection or our Windscribe account? As we mentioned before, Windscribe provides a set of support options on their official page. Let us glide through them one by one!

Why involve another party if we could fix it ourselves, right? Windscribe provides a scope of options for the DIY or the Do It Yourself guys:

• Windscribe Set Up Guides – A verbose collection of step-by-step walkthroughs to set up Windscribe on any and all of the devices it supports. But, do keep in mind that some of the provided videos could show guides for their client app’s legacy versions instead of their latest.
• Windscribe FAQs – Answers to general, desktop app, and browser extension-related questions frequently asked.
• Windscribe Knowledge Base – A stack of articles focusing on various issues faced by Windscribe VPN users.

Windscribe brings out multiple routes a user with a technical issue could take:

• Windscribe Reddit – Quite commendable, there’s an official subreddit for Windscribe! Possibly the fastest way to reach the Windscribe team compared to other methods.
• Submit Ticket – Allows users to put tickets regarding their Windscribe-related technical issues.
• Talk to Garry – A basic bot that would reply based on a few keywords it identifies on your query:

As you can see, the bot’s surely not the most intelligent of the bunch at least at its current state. So, except for some basic inquiries, we’d suggest you stick to other support options until Garry gets wiser – hopefully.

Yegor Sak and Alex Paguis, Windscribe’s founder and co-founder respectively, established the VPN service in Toronto, Ontario, Canada—a country that is part of the 5 Eyes alliance—on the 1st of July in 2015.

Currently headquartered in Richmond Hill in Ontario, this entirely self-funded Windscribe service aims “…to develop easy to use yet powerful tools that allow anyone to circumvent censorship”. And, judging from their vast array of user-friendly client apps, WIndscribe sure does seem to live up to its claims.

Along the way, the company made several false steps, the latest of which ended up being a massive strike to their security-wise credibility in the eyes of Windscribe users. But learning from their mistakes, Windscribe still holds a viable position among the best VPN services in the world.

What if you found a downright impeccable VPN with all the features and performance you ever wished for, but it’d cost much more than you could afford? On the other hand, what if you found a VPN that doesn’t cost a dime but by the time it loads a webpage you could drink a coffee and have your meal, as well? An average VPN user would look away at both of these occasions. But, when it comes to Windscribe’s pricing, it doesn’t fall into either one of these categories.

Neither does Windscribe’s run-of-the-mill monthly plan nor the unsurprisingly discounted yearly plan yield anything we haven’t seen before. But, what takes the cake is their Build A Plan option letting us choose the exact servers we’d like to add to our plan costing $1/month for each server we add. This sort of flexibility can hardly be seen on even the most premium VPNs!

In order to help you make the right choices on what plan to subscribe to, we sought advice from a pricing professional about Windscribe’s pricing plans and how they tally up against other VPN services:

From ad-blockers and encryption configuration generators to split-tunneling, static IP, and port forwarding, WIndscribe gets us almost overflowingly covered when it comes to its extra features.

Working as a “customizable server-side domain and IP blocking tool”, R.O.B.E.R.T. is Windscribe’s solution for an ad-blocker that doesn’t quite wash its hands of just blocking a few ads. R.O.B.E.R.T. essentially sits in front of the DNS server as a proxy and decides which DNS requests gain access to the DNS server based on a set of block lists provided by the user. Read more on how R.O.B.E.R.T. works.)

A quick check on our Windscribe account page will show a clickable R.O.B.E.R.T. tab to create block lists:

As you can see, R.O.B.E.R.T. provides us with a few Whitescribe-maintained block lists ranging from malware, ads, social networks to explicit content, gambling, and a bunch of others. Additionally, Windscribe lets us add a custom set of IP addresses we’d like to block or whitelist.

Only the Malware and ads/trackers lists and 3 custom rule entries are unlocked for a Windscribe free account, but a Windscribe Pro subscription would allow us to enable any of the block lists and provide as many custom rules as we want.

At times, we might need to tunnel particular websites or apps through our VPN while letting other websites and apps directly access the internet skipping the VPN. Imagine watching a geo-blocked Netflix show on one browser tab while googling some local news on another.

Windscribe allows us to do exactly this and more in its split tunneling feature.

We can use this feature on our Windows (8 – 10) and Mac (10.12 – 10.15) devices to include/exclude a specific list of apps and/or IP addresses & hostnames from our Windscribe VPN connection. Even the Android client app supports split tunneling but currently, it only allows us to choose apps to split tunnel with (no option to add IPs and hostnames to the split tunneling list). Windscribe conveniently provides a detailed guide to set up split tunneling on both Windows and Android platforms.

Just in case the vast collection of devices Windscribe already officially supports doesn’t fit the bill when it comes to our device, there’s a Windscribe config generator tool to generate our own configuration and place it on our devices:

The only requirements to use this tool would be for our device to support OpenVPN and for us to have a Windscribe Pro account.

We’ve seen even the most premium VPN services (*cough*ExpressVPN*cough*) skip on providing their users with a Static IP option. But, probe into Windscribe and we’ve got static IPs that come in 2 flavors: Data-center IPs and Residential IPs. These Windscribe static IPs would cost different amounts based on the flavor that you chose.

Wish you could check up on your home-installed security cameras while you’re at your office? Doing that with no network security just might give a man-in-the-middle a quite convenient look into all the secret places at your home!

Windscribe helps in this scenario thanks to its port forwarding feature. With the help of this feature, we can safely monitor our home when we’re outdoors with the peace of mind that all the stuff we saw on our screen would stay exactly that way when we get back home. Windscribe particularly asks us to have a Windscribe Pro account and a WIndscribe static IP to go along with it, to use their port forwarding option.

Windscribe brings a lot of novel ideas and features to the table. With a self-named firewall instead of a kill-switch, R.O.B.E.R.T.–an ad-blocker on steroids, and even a Build a Plan option to customize the user’s own subscription plan, Windscribe pretty much wins the medal when it comes to their creativity. But, quite unfortunately, a wealth of negative points brings it down from being a winner of a VPN service. Just to name a few, the poor performance due to the low count of servers and a bunch of security leaks which they’ve pleaded guilty for but nevertheless remains a user-security infringement they’ve committed, the sum of these negativities end up leaving Windscribe as a not-the-most-recommendable sort of VPN in our books.