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Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Avast VPN: An in-depth review of its speed, security and value

We take a deep dive into the pros and cons of using the Avast VPN service

Published March 21, 2026 3:55AM (EDT)

Avast, based in the Czech Republic, is well-known for its antivirus products. In 2017, the company entered the VPN space and released Avast Secureline VPN.

Avast’s marketing ticks many of the right boxes, mentioning strong encryption, a no-logs policy and DNS leak protection, among other security goodies. One of them is that the Czech Republic is not a member of the 5, 9 or 14 Eyes alliances, which means the country doesn’t participate in what are considered some of the largest-scale data-sharing arrangements between the intelligence agencies of some of the world’s most influential nations.

That looks pretty good on paper, but there’s a significant caveat. In January 2020, PCMag reported that Avast Antivirus was surreptitiously collecting user data for Avast subsidiary Jumpshot, which repackaged and sold the data. On January 30, 2020, Avast announced it had discontinued the practice.

The collection wasn’t related to its VPN offering; it was happening with Avast’s antivirus products. Still, enhanced privacy is a VPN’s flagship feature, and these practices don’t exactly shore up user trust. Despite this, we’ll keep an open mind and evaluate Avast’s VPN offering as objectively as possible.

Key Features & Technology

While Avast Secureline VPN provides the basics, its offering is pretty bare bones compared to other VPN services out there.

Aside from the VPN connection itself, Avast Secureline VPN provides dedicated servers for streaming and torrenting. On most platforms (not iOS), it supports basic split tunnelling. It also provides a kill switch that you can enable from the app’s settings. That’s pretty much it.

Avast does claim it protects from DNS leaks and adheres to a no-logging policy, which are features of sorts. But as far as functionality is concerned, the above is all you get.

We’ll look closer at the above features when we dig into the app’s settings menus.

Now, regarding the supported VPN and encryption protocols, it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The protocols it supports depend on the platform you’re using. Here’s a breakdown:

Windows: WireGuard, OpenVPN, Mimic

Android: WireGuard, OpenVPN, Mimic

The encryption depends on the VPN protocol. And while Avast’s website is light on technical details, OpenVPN, IPsec, and Mimic use AES-256, which is deemed secure and is pretty much the industry standard. WireGuard, for its part, uses ChaCha20-Poly1305 as its encryption protocol – a slightly more........

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