What VPN Protocols Does TunnelBear VPN Offer?

TunnelBear secures your connection with the OpenVPN protocol for Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. This is our preferred protocol, as it is open source and available to be picked over for any potential vulnerabilities. IKEv2 is also available for the iOS and Windows clients.

You can’t change which protocol TunnelBear uses in its app—it’s handled automatically—but that’s fine for most users.

Many of the best VPNs we’ve reviewed, including NordVPN and Mullvad, have begun deploying the next generation, open-source WireGuard VPN protocol.

A TunnelBear representative tells us that the company is looking to implement WireGuard in a future release, which is fine considering how new this technology is, but it’s not ideal.

TunnelBear VPN’s Servers and Server Locations

The more server locations a service has, the more options you have for spoofing your location. A wide variety of locations also means you are more likely to find a server nearby when traveling abroad, which will likely be faster and more reliable than a distant server.

TunnelBear has nearly doubled its server offerings, now boasting 49 countries. That’s just nearly dead-on to the average we’ve seen across the products we review. This collection covers the essentials and has expanded to encompass more of South America and Africa—two continents frequently ignored by other VPN companies.

The company still has limited presence in regions with repressive internet policies, lacking servers in Russia, Turkey, or Vietnam, for example. TunnelBear also moved its servers out of Hong Kong. While the bears have expanded, it’s still far short of the 94 countries covered by ExpressVPN

Your Privacy With TunnelBear

Beyond its powerful bears, TunnelBear’s greatest strength is its stance on privacy. It has one of the best privacy policies we have seen, explaining in detail and with plain language, exactly what it collects and why. It also includes discussion sections, where the company explains how it arrived at a particular decision. Other VPN companies should take note of this approach.

TunnelBear says that it will not disclose, sell, or trade personal information with third-party companies. TunnelBear does use third parties for payment processing, but this is not unusual. Additionally, a company representative confirmed to us that TunnelBear’s only source of revenue is subscriptions—not data mining or ad retargeting.

The company says it does not collect information about users’ web activity, nor does it store originating IP addresses, timestamps, or DNS queries. The company does rely on an account system, so the information you provide to create an account is stored by TunnelBear. IVPN and Mullvad VPN have an unusual system that does not use accounts and requires no user information.

For free subscribers, TunnelBear does record the overall bandwidth to enforce its data cap. This is reset to zero at the end of each month.

The company is based in Toronto, Canada, and incorporated in Delaware. It’s owned by the antivirus company McAfee. Canada and the US do not have mandatory data retention laws.

The company says it has legal teams for responding to requests for information but, “we have no information that can connect customers to usage, so we’re unable to provide law enforcement with anything not in our Privacy Policy.” We’ve been told that the most information the company can provide is whether a certain email address was used to open an account. That’s excellent.

DNS Leak Test

When we test VPNs, we check to confirm that our test IP address changes and the name of our ISP is hidden, and we use the DNS Leak Test to see if DNS information is, well, leaking. TunnelBear passed all these tests easily, but we only checked one server. It’s possible other servers could be misconfigured.

We had no trouble streaming movies through Netflix while connected to a US-based TunnelBear VPN server. That was true when we tested the service, but your mileage may vary—as is always the case when you try to use a VPN with Netflix.

Speed Test

No matter the VPN you choose, you’ll likely see a decrease in download and upload speeds and an increase in latency. To get a sense of that impact, we run a series of tests with and without each VPN using the Ookla speedtest tool. We then compare those figures to find a percent change. We have a whole feature on How We Test VPNs, so do read it for more on our methodology and the limits of our tests.

Hands on With TunnelBear for Android

Tunnelbear’s Android app is beautiful, with its bright happy graphics and animated team of bears. The app’s world map features a bear standing in your location when disconnected from the VPN, and when you connect, the bear roars and takes off on the world map in the direction of your VPN server. It’s cute, it’s fun, and it’s a far cry from the stripped-down two-color layouts of competitors like NordVPN.

We tested the app using a Samsung A71 5G running Android version 10. Tunnelbear for Android has a few more features than the iPhone version of the app. It includes Ghostbear for use when internet providers block encrypted traffic, a kill switch called VigilantBear, and SplitBear, which allows you to select apps that will not be tunneled through your VPN server. You can choose your server from a list of countries at the bottom of the screen.

We tested Tunnelbear by visiting DNSLeakTest.com and running an extended test on a server based in Milan, Italy. Our DNS data did not leak through, and the app successfully changed our public IP address, but it was just one test on one server. Other servers could be improperly configured.