Hidemyass vs. IPVanish: VPN Comparison

IPVanish and HideMyAss VPN are two of the most popular VPN’s in the industry, and with good reason. They offer more server locations and IP addresses than almost any other VPN provider, and they impress with top-notch security and software. See who wins the battle of Hidemyass vs. IPVanish!

Head to Head Specificications

	Hidemyass	IPVanish
Jurisdiction	United Kingdom	United States
Number of Servers	150+ servers in 72 countries	120+ server locations in 50+ countries
VPN Protocols	OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP	OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP and Stealth OpenVPN
Encryption Strength	256-bit AES	256-bit AES
Torrent Proxy Included?	No	Yes, SOCKS5
Torrent Policy	Technically allowed but discouraged	Fully allowed on all servers
Logging Policy	Logs kept for up to 6 months	No Logs.
Pricing/Plans	One Month: $11.99 One Year: $6.99/m 3 Years: $2.99/m (best deal)	One Month: $10 One Year: $6.49/m (best deal)
Refund Policy	30 days (conditional)	7 days (unconditional)
Our Review	Hidemyass Review	IPVanish Review
Signup Link	Visit Hidemyass	Visit IPVanish

HIDEMYASS VS IPVANISH: SOFTWARE AND FEATURES

HideMyAss has a number of standout features. They offer more servers and country locations than any other VPN I can name, but their biggest selling point is their outstanding VPN Software. The truth is no other VPN provider even comes close to offering the same level of control, security, and customized features as HidemyAss. 

IPVanish by comparison offers a very standard VPN client with easy server switching and OpenVPN connectivity. It’s perfectly functional, but it their software sure can’t match up to HidemyAss. No one’s can, and it seems like most of the VPN providers around aren’t even trying to match up on the software front any more.

Let’s take a closer look…

IPVanish’s Software:

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IPVanish gives you easy access to all of their servers in 58+ countries. You can also choose your preferred VPN protocol for your current needs.

Choices Include: OpenVPN (TCP/UDP), PPTP, and L2TP

IPvanish’s software let’s you sort by city, country or ping time, making it easy to quickly connect to the server you want.

In the options menu, you can choose whether to save your login credentials (username/password) and whether you want IPvanish to launch when windows starts.

The software also includes a link to check your IP so you can confirm that your VPN connection was successfully established.

IPVanish also has a stealth/obfuscated VPN protocol in case your ISP or Network Administrator tries to block VPN traffic. This can also help with throttling.

HideMyAss VPN Software

Hidemyass’s VPN Software has an incredible number of features. We’re going to cover go through all of the best of them one-by-one. If you want to hear it from the horses mouth, check out Hidemyass’s own software overview.

Hidemyass: Choosing a server location

Hidemyass gives you complete control over the process of choosing the best VPN server for your needs. You can sort by country, city, or speed. You can also choose servers from a list or from the map view (as seen above). You can even select a list of servers to run a speed test on, so you can choose the fastest server that meets all of your criteria.

You can also save ‘favorite’ servers by clicking the heart icon next to a location, which will save it in a separate list for quicker access later.

If you’re using Hidemyass to download torrents, you’ll probably want to use the ‘Quick access’ mode to auto-connect to a p2p-optimized server. Hidemyass will automatically choose the fastest/least-crowded location.

IP-Management and Server switching

Hidemyass lets you auto-rotate IP addresses or servers at any time interval you specify. The downside is that you will be disconnected for 10-30 seconds between connections so it’s recommended you have the kill-switch activated if you’re using BitTorrent.

Hidemyass: Secure IP-Binding & Kill-switch

In previous versions of their software, Hidemyass had an IP-bind feature which allowed you (the user) to choose specific programs that would only run when the VPN tunnel was active. If the VPN tunnel goes down, the chosen apps would force-close.

For example: You might make uTorrent or Vuze force-close if the VPN fails, so that your peers never see your real IP address.

This feature has now been rolled into Hidemyass’s Kill-switch, and is available on PC and Android devices.

#4 HideMyAss Speed Guide and Server Load Balancing

Once you’ve picked the geographic location that you’d like your IP address to originate from (the could be a city, state, country, or entire continent) Hidemyass helps you easily find the fastest server.

Using the speed guide, you can add a list of servers to run a speed test on. You can choose from a ping test, express test, or full test. All of these tests are tested on your own actual VPN connection, so they’re alot more accurate then a speedtest done on HMA’s servers.

Once completed, you can easily sort the list and pick the fastest server to connect to.

You can also choose to enable server load balancing which will alert you if Hidemyass notices that there is a much faster server in the same location that you are currently connected to, and gives you a one-click option to switch to the faster server.

Software: Hidemyass vs IPVanish — who won?

IPVanish has solid, stable software but Hidemyass has several extra features that we love. Their smart-connect option, in-app speed testing, and IP-bind feature give them a little extra edge.

Winner: Hidemyass

HIDEMYASS VS IPVANISH: SECURITY AND PRIVACY

IPVanish took a bit of a beating on the software front, but the really make up for it in terms of security and privacy features. Let’s take a quick look at the stats.

Are Hidemyass & IPVanish Secure?

Hidemyass and IPVanish both offer the most secure open-source encryption protocols available: OpenVPN and L2TP/IPSec. Each offers up to 256-bit encryption, which is considered unbreakable even by Nation-State level actors.

IPvanish does have a slight edge here, because they have a stealth protocol layer (optional) which will disguise OpenVPN traffic as regular SSL traffic to help avoid throttling or slip through VPN-blocking firewalls. HMA doesn’t currently offer this.

Privacy & Logging Policy

This is an area that IPVanish has a massive edge over Hidemyass.

Because Hidemyass is headquartered in the United Kingdom, they’re subject to UK data-retention laws. Hidemyass used to keep logs for up to 6 months! But now they’re down to a more reasonable rolling 30-day retention.

Here’s what Hidemyass keeps in their connection logfiles:

• License ID
• a time stamp when you connect and disconnect to our VPN service;
• the amount data transmitted (upload and download) during your session;
• the subnet of the IP address used to connect to our VPN (we anonymize the last octet: i.e. 92.145.233.343 becomes 92.145.233.000)
• the IP address of the individual VPN server used by you.

So how does that compare to IPVanish?

IPVanish keeps no logs of any kind regarding your VPN activity or connection history. IPVanish offers a much higher level of privacy than Hidemyass does.

BitTorrent & P2P Policy

Not every VPN provider actually allows torrents (though most say they do). Hidemyass has become much more tolerant of BitTorrent traffic recently, but they still don’t rank as one of our Top Torrent VPN services.

In Summary:

• IPVanish: Extremely torrent-friendly with their zero-log privacy policy, included SOCKS5 proxy (works with torrent clients) and Torrent downloads allowed on all servers.
• Hidemyass: Torrent-tolerant, but not friendly by any means. They keep IP logs, restrict torrents to specific servers, and don’t offer proxy service.

IPVANISH VS HIDEMYASS: SPEED TEST

This is yet another area where IPVanish shines. They are without a doubt, one of the fastest VPNs for downloading torrents.

As a result, it should be no surprise that IPVanish performed great in our speed test.

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IPVanish Results

• USA: 94.24 Mbps download, 71.51 Mbps upload
• United Kingdom: 86.63 Mbps download, 103.82 Mbps upload
• Germany: 55.46 Mbps download, 75.70 Mbps upload

Hidemyass Results:

• USA: 38.78 Mbps Download, 44.30 Mbps Upload
• United Kingdom: 31.42 Mbps download, 26.61 Mbps upload

Winner: IPvanish, solidly faster.

Best Overall: IPVanish or Hidemyass?

If you ignore the Hidemyass’s logging & torrent policy, this would be a pretty close matchup. But this is a website dedicated to torrent privacy, and the logging & p2p policy are HUGE factors.

So IPVanish is the runaway winner here, especially if you plan on using it for torrenting.

But that doesn’t mean it’s right for everyone, and HMA does have some redeeming qualities.

Here are our favorite features of each VPN:

Winner: IPVanish!

IPvanish is great, and has been one of our favorite Torrent-friendly VPNs for years. There’s a reason they dominate the VPN rankings across many privacy review sites, especially those dedicated BitTorrent or Kodi privacy.

And don’t forget, they have a 7-day 100% refund policy so you can try IPVanish risk-free!