TorGuard VPN Review

Summary
  • 8/10
    Features - 8/10
  • 7/10
    Speed & Reliability - 7/10
  • 6/10
    Security & Privacy - 6/10
  • 8/10
    Usability & Compatibility - 8/10
  • 8/10
    Support & Documentation - 8/10
  • 8/10
    Value for Money - 8/10
7.5/10

Summary

TorGuard VPN provides a solid service that is undoubtedly among the strongest of the VPN market. There are some privacy policy issues that we would like to see resolved as it would put any doubt to rest as far as we are concerned. Also, the speed could be improved a bit.

TorGuard VPN is a VPN service from USA, Florida (according to their TOS), focusing on torrent/P2P VPN market. They offer Proxy services for Torrent Anonymity, full-featured VPN services and a Anonymous E-Mail Service with full PGP Encryption. Let’s dig a little deeper:

Features

They provide VPN access (up to 5 simultaneous connections) on 40+ servers in 7 countries: USA, UK, Netherlands, Canada, Romania, Switzerland, Russia. They also offer SOCKS5 and Proxy access to use with BitTorrent clients. That’s a good addition to the common VPN service, as users don’t have to be connected to the VPN if they want to transfer something over P2P networks. Their OpenVPN setup is using 128 and 256 bit encryption. TorGuard also provides a secure webmail solution that is using PGP encryption.

As a VPN feature addon, they allow customers to use a dedicated IP address + unlimited port forwarding for $7.99. That’s kind of pricey if you ask us.

Software

You get a Viscosity Build  for the OpenVPN feature, complete with a valid license key and it come pre-configured with all their servers. Viscosity is a mature, full-featured OpenVPN client that offers reliable connectivity and detailed statistics about your connection times and TorGuard gets some bonus points in this regard. Viscosity is available for both Windows (XP SP3 or newer AND Mac OS X 10.5 or newer).

If you don’t want to use Viscosity you can download their Custom build dialer app, called TorGuard Lite. This offers OpenVPN connectivity with pre-shared server lists. You don’t get the advanced statistics that Viscosity Offers and bare in mind that this is a Java-based app so you’ll need to install a Java Runtime prior to first run (the installer will download the latest Java Runtime for you).
TorGuard Lite is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

If you’re interested in the Torrent Proxy services, you can download and use a pre-configured Torrent Client. If you’re using Windows, you can chose between Deluge and uTorrent but Mac OS X and Linux users have to settle for Deluge as the go-to proxy’d torrent client.

Interestingly enough, TorGuard offers a pre-configured OpenVPN client for Android users as well, available in two releases, for both Android 4.0 or latter and pre-4.0 users.

TorGuard scores high in our charts because they offer a large collection of dialer software that covers all major OS’es and usage. While there’s no pre-configured OpenVPN client for iOS,  TorGuard does offer a pre-configured GuizmoVPN dialer for jailbroken devices, available trough the Cydia Store. So no (official) OpenVPN support for the majority of iOS Users that don’t have jailbroken devices.

All desktop and mobile users can connect trough PPTP/L2TP protocols and there are a lot of step-by-step guides on TorGuard’s web page for all major operating systems and devices (including DD-WRT routers and Boxee Box users)

The Torrent Proxy tutorials are available as well, on-line on their website and in .pdf format for off-line reading. They cover the setup methods for all major browsers, apps and devices (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Skype, Boxee Box, Vuze, uTorrent, BitTorrent and Deluge).

TorGuard is  one of the most well-documented VPN/Anonymity service we encountered so far.

Pricing

You get 30-days money back guarantee on all purchased services, no matter the time period or service type, with one condition: not exceeding 10GB of traffic during that first month.
The prices start from $5.95/month for the Torrent Proxy and $9.99 /month for the full-featured VPN service and go as low as $3.95 /month and $4.99/moth respectively if you chose to buy a one-year subscription.

Payment methods: Credit Card, Google Checkout, Paypal, Bitcoin, OKPay.

They are also selling routers that are compatible with OpenVPN (DD-WRT and Tomato firmwares)

Logging and Privacy

The Privacy Policy states that TorGuard collects both personal information entered while ordering the services and website tracking info. Said information will be made available “to third parties when, in our good faith judgment, we are obligated to do so under applicable laws.”

Speed and Reliability

Since TorGuard is a service targeting P2P users, we decided to do all our speedtests with BitTorrent, downloading Linux ISOs seeded by many users to get best speeds. Speed on Netherlands servers averaged between 700KB/sec and 1MB/sec. Not bad, but it could have been better. Canadian servers were slightly faster, averaging between 1MB/sec and 1.5MB/sec, reaching a maximum speed of 2MB/sec. Romanian servers were the fastest in our tests, easily averaging 2.5MB/sec, spiking up to 3.5MB/sec every now and then.

Some screenshots from Viscosity traffic graphs showing the speeds we achieved in our tests.

TorGuard Canada VPN:

canadavpn

TorGuard Netherlands VPN:

netherlandsvpn

TorGuard Romania VPN:

romaniavpn

VPN connections were reliable and we didn’t face any disconnect issues while staying connected for a few days of total usage (1 to 5 hours per session)

Support

TorGuard offers 24×7 support available trough a ticketing system and web chat.

Conclusions

The good:

  • Lots of servers in various geographical regions, especially no DMCA-friendly countries
  • Well documented installation for all major OS’es and devices
  • License for Viscosity VPN client which is by far the best OpenVPN client out there
  • 30 days money back guarantee
  • P2P allowed
  • Pricing is not bad: quarterly and yearly plans are cheaper than many competitors
  • They accept BitCoin

The bad:

  • No official support for iOS customers on OpenVPN
  • VPN speed is not bad, but it could have been better
  • Their TOS is too long to read: a summary would be nice
  • Although the keyword “anonymity” is everywhere on their website, they ask for too many details during signup:

signupdetails

Final Notes: TorGuard is a solid VPN provider but they should increase server/bandwidth capacity a bit. They should also provide some clearer TOS/Privacy Policy because nobody ain’t got time to read big walls of texts. We don’t like that the ask for so many signup details, while advocating anonymity everywhere on their site.. We rate TorGuard VPN at 7.5/10 in the category of paid VPN providers because they have many useful features bundled with their product or available separately.

19 thoughts on “TorGuard VPN Review”

  1. Overall impression: its feels like dealing with a back-yard operation run by a couple (or maybe one) of techos. I paid for TORGuard for 1 year in advance but have decided not to use their services after 5 days of trying to get it working.

    The main reasons are their atrocious support, inadequate documentation, and client service attitude (or its absence).
    After 5 days of emails, there is very little left of the trust that I initially had in their product.

    Their supporter(s) consistently ignored my questions and comments. I had to sometimes ask 3 times before getting an answer, others remain unanswered.
    They DO log information such as download volume and connect it to your ID details.
    Their 30-day money back guarantee(as it turns out) has constraints (less then 10Gb downloaded).
    Their documentation is fragmented over emails, and several web pages and there was no clear installation path (in my situation they connected me to the wrong service which started a range of problems).
    Simple things like a screenshot image in an email could not be dealt with and needed to be uploaded via another web site.
    Maybe their product is great, but after about 5 days and about 10 emails, I’ve now ‘donated’ my fees and decided to call it a day.

    Reply
  2. Solid VPN provider, especially for torrents.

    I just got 50% off with the slickdeals discount and am very pleased.

    FAST speeds on the servers I have tried so far (Canada and Netherlands)

    EASY setup on my laptop and android. You serious have to be a caveman if you can’t get this working.

    Reply
  3. As a user/subscriber to torguard for about 6 months, I have two opinions: Viscosity is great, easy to use and combined with Torguard’s servers, I feel pretty safe in public spaces. Secondly, I have to agree, i cannot find the words to adequately express how poor the customer service is…from the obfuscation on the website to the horrible support personnel ( dont even *think* about getting a question answered first try), its almost like they go out of their way to screw with you. If i can find a better solution I will be moving on when my suscription ends

    Reply
  4. This company is shady. I took advantage of their Memorial Day sale, as it was a good price, but after that, it became a hassle. I needed one port opened so I could access my media server once I setup their VPN on my router. They said it would be an additional $8 per month. There goes the good price!!

    Furthermore, once I wanted to cancel their service after only 2 weeks, they charged me HALF of the entire cost of the year. They refused to refund me the rest of the cost.

    Don’t go with these guys. They are in the business to upcharge you and rip you off. They refused to refund me $8. Really? You’re going to throw your customers under he bus for less than $10?? There’s other services that will treat you better. Avoid these fools at all cost.

    Reply
  5. Unbelievable crooks. I submitted a support ticket because their proxy service stopped working almost everyday, and I had to input a different IP address each time. Their response was for me to check the Bittorrent/Utorrent forums because these clients have problems with their proxy service. These two are the most widely used torrent clients in the world!!! And they just passed the buck and denied any liability. Furthermore, when I threatened to tell my story online, they cut off my service without a refund.!!! Do not use their service, these people are just crooks!!!!

    Reply
  6. Avoid Torguard at all costs.

    (1)Their registration system is messed up beyond comprehension. Grey text on grey background. Virtually illegible. Further, I had to try fifteen different passwords, each of which included mixed case and numbers, before finding one that met their opaque “password complexity requirements.” Why on earth would they force users to go through this ridiculous hacking exercise just to open an account?

    (2) When I finally registered, I was unable to purchase anything. I received the following error:
    “maxmind error. Your order has been flagged as potentially high risk and therefore it has been held for manual review.” This was no doubt because I entered a bogus zip code (55555), city, and phone number.

    (3) As pointed out in this review, they *do* record your originating IP address in their logs — both for VPN use and for their technical support / contact management system. They also ask for a valid phone number, address, and other personal information during signup.

    Briefly stated, Torguard is truly the worst “anonymous” VPN service I’ve ever encountered. Avoid at all costs!

    Reply
    • I think you’re too harsh. Agree that their registration is not cool and we pointed out in the review that we don’t like that they ask for so many details. Maxmind fraud prevention can be a real pain sometimes. Yet on the technical side, the service is quite good for its purpose. There is no such thing as “anonymous” VPNs and we always downgrade a service when we review it if it claims to provide anonymity.

      Reply
      • I beg to differ. MULLVAD does not care about any details. You can pay cash in the mail if you want and they will enable your account.
        Also, I have played with a few vpns today and none of them wanted from me more than a user name for loggin and a password. All accepted bitcoin, etc…
        So, yes Torguard really sucks from this perspective…

        Reply
  7. Torguard sucks. Several attempts to connect, failed. After just one day of trial, I cancelled my subscription.
    Support tickets remain unanswered and Money-back guarantee is a fraud.
    After now 6 weeks, my payment wasn’t reimbursed

    Reply
  8. They’re awful. Initially I enjoyed the speed of their service and last month my throughput dropped over 90% I waited a week before contacting them, I was clear in the presentation of the facts, I offered to provide whatever data I could to assist in their ‘efforts’ to resolve my issue and instead I got a litany of never ending canned though increasingly hostile responses. Which I’m attaching for your review: (I don’t have my first message, it was through torguard form submission… Let me assure you, it was data packed.)

    Tor:
    Hi – i take it you are using google dns right now ?
    Let us know if you have any further questions.
    Regards
    TorGuard Advanced Support

    ME:
    I’m sorry but my issue is with the speed that I illustrated in the attachments, please address that issue. I can set the dns servers to whatever you wish for testing purposes however there is no apparent correlation between the poor speed and the dns servers I am currently using. Additionally if you view the reply I sent to my original ticket, the trace route shows potential sources of the speed drop.
    Regards,

    Tor:
    Yes DNS can play a big part in speed actually – i would suggest you try alternative DNS, maybe ours: 91.121.113.58, 91.121.113.7 Orang other public DNS.
    Please also bar in mind we did take quite a few user son due to our promo this weekend and so our load-balancers will eventually even it our over the next 2/3 days.
    Let us know if you have any further questions.
    Regards
    TorGuard Advanced Support

    Me:
    I’m sorry I mentioned DNS, it has, so unnecessarily, become the focal point of what is not a DNS issue. Let’s not discuss DNS anymore please. I have attempted to connect to Region East, Central, Dallas, and Los Angeles; Dallas was my fastest connection at 5Mb. Central Connected at 4.72Mb, East came in at 2.34Mb and LA is so embarrassingly slow the speedtest could not complete after 10 minutes. I’ve attached a screenshot of that gem for you; something like .51Mb down and .06Mb up…
    So lets approach this differently, I’m writing you with a valid connection issue. Your service is and has been unusably slow for going on six days now. We have exchanged several emails with you utterly fixated on a non-issue. In the last email you said ‘use our dns. we added a lot of users under a promo this weekend… maybe in 2-3 days things will get better’ All of the speed tests in this email were run using Torguard settings – not my own, Torguard DNS – not third party, and I’ve already been waiting 6 days… How many more do I have to wait before anyone has even the slightest inclination to help me?
    Well, my service has been bad for almost a week. I can’t use your service at all unless I am content with 0.02% of my normal speed. (5Mb/215Mb=0.02%). I have been paying monthly for your service… Something like what, $12 a month? When I emailed you and told you I can’t use your service I’m told ‘sucks, maybe in a few days, use different DNS.’ This is not acceptable, nor is it an answer, so I’d like a serious answer as to my speed issue, or I’m done with Torguard. I don’t care what promos you gave to others to use your service… I haven’t been able to functionally use it for a week.
    Help me to be able to use your service and I’m happy. Seems reasonable, yes?
    Let me know

    Tor:
    It looks like you changed what i said to something that sounds a bit more curt , your saying i said “maybe” when in fact i said it WILL even out., i see you have been a member since last June and just the last week this has started happening your saying or you have just noticed ?
    Dns CAN slow things down depending on the resolvers you are using so I’m pretty much asking to try resolvers outside your ISP and even ours to make sure that’s not it, its actually very common.
    Speed also has many many factorss so i can’t just magically come up with an answer for you and pin point your problem.

    The following factors will also effect your VPN speed.
    The speed of your computer, if it’s overloaded everything is slower.
    The speed of your own Internet connection.
    The speed of your ISP routes to the vpn server.
    Maybe i can send you a list to test with L2TP to see if this works well so we can isolate ?
    Let us know if you have any further questions.

    Me:
    Gave it a couple days as you requested. Ran each test three times, recorded best result. Killed Flash process before each attempt to provide best results. The speed via Viscosity has not increased at all and at this point I’m at 9 days of this. Please assist. I’m not interested in L2TP due to the public and static nature of your preshared key (key: Torguard), I have concerns about the susceptibility to MITM attacks.

    ISP Connection Speed:
    ping: 12ms D/L: 214.23Mbps U/L: 20.72Mbps
    Speed connected through Viscosity, verified version current:
    ping: 29ms D/L: 4.41Mbps U/L: 8.42Mbps

    L2TP Results: (omitted due to length. all were below 5Mbps.)

    Tor:
    Listen, we have took on a lot of users for the promos we have been running and are getting ready to bulk up, we know things have slowed a little more, WE KNOW. I’m sorry we cannot provide you 100Mbps every day 24/7 for a few bucks a month, how much do you pay your ISP for that ??
    We offer privacy, with VPNs there is always up and down, if speed is all you want and all you care about then i guess youl have to wait until we bulk up (waiting on hardware) or move services…
    And btw, just because we offer a public pre-shared key it does not make us vulnerable to a man in the middle, don’t you think we have already thought of that ?
    Let us know if you have any further questions.
    Regards

    Me:
    I hear what you’re saying but you need to understand that you’re not doing me a favor by providing your service… And you’re not giving it to me at discount pricing either; you’re charging what the market will bear. That being the case, the service and support you’re providing are easily replaceable at this pricepoint. So I’ve done my part to help with your load issues; I’ve requested cancellation for my accounts. To be clear, the service speed has been a problem but it’s not the reason I’m cancelling.. Your email support is the reason I’m cancelling.

    Anyway… Throughout the entire process, no troubleshooting was performed. No support was rendered. Simply redundant questions and one liners. Torguard sucks.

    Reply
  9. Terrible. Torrents worked and speed good but utorrent showed unconnectible which is a port issue. They advised how to set a port forward but no suggestions fixed the issues. Then around the time USA woke up my speeds dropped to 1.1MB constant and never fluctuated.
    Disconnect and port issue and speed all fixed. They deny all throttle of speeds and we had 12hrs offering basic support that didn’t help. I asked to cancel and refund and they asked again to help and can we hold off the cancel. I headed home to continue our support after all day at work trying to fix.
    When got home they had cancelled me with no notification and no advise on refund. I am new chasing them for refund advise.

    They are clearly not very professional and have no ideas on fixing basic port issues. And went admit throttle when clearly do.
    1.1MB on all servers all day after 9am USA time

    Avoid

    Reply
  10. Avoid – scammers. Speeds are good, then after 7 days, they drop drastically. Can’t get your money back after 7 days. Coincidence? I think not. It seems every server after 7 days is capped to 1mb/s downloads. Threw away the money I spent and went back to PIA.

    Reply
  11. I’ve been using Torguard for a few months but the download speeds weren’t too good. I signed up with PIA a few weeks ago and I am more than happy with it.

    Reply
  12. After I solved the problem TorGuard was causing the VPN itself seems to be doing a great job. (I didn’t see any option for Viscosity, they may no longer be providing that client or this new TorGuard -NOT “Lite”- might be a rebranded GUI, I don’t know.) I get 30+ Mbps down while connected (my regular ISP speeds are north of 100) and torrent downloads are very quick. No complaints on that but …

    Holy crap is their support system worse than useless, not only useless but dangerous. The problem mentioned above was BSODs when three conditions existed. The VPN was connected, the torrent client was running and downloading a torrent. Within a minute or two the system would BSOD every time without fail.

    This “Andy” joker who I was dealing with at TorGuard support didn’t have a clue, didn’t work with me even a little bit, paid no attention to the information I was giving him, made ridiculous suggestions with links to Microsoft KB articles about drivers that don’t exist on my machine and even went so far as to suggest that I run the VPN and download torrents with NO security active on my system at all. He wanted me to uninstall my AV and MBAM. I guess he never heard of ransomware?

    I did find a good, safe, easy solution on my own so all’s well that ends well but I cannot believe how utterly terrible their support is. Seriously, it’s that bad.

    The price is good, when it works it works good, and it’s fairly simple for me to turn on and turn off which I do when I’m not running a torrent client. I don’t surf kiddie porn or any of that nonsense, I just wanted the take-downs to stop from my ISP. So far, so good but if you can’t solve problems on your own this is not the service for you because you ARE on your own. They have a legitimate support mechanism but that’s not a help if the support personnel are idiots.

    Reply

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