TunnelBear is one of the few VPN providers to undergo a third-party security audit. It is important to remember to enable VigilantBear (the leak protection feature) to be protected against data leaks. The TunnelBear Mac OS client also did not have any leaks in my tests. I did not find any IP address leaks or DNS leaks with the TunnelBear client. Here you can see the leak test results when connected to a TunnelBear server in Norway: Everything worked well without any leaks to report. I ran both the Windows and Mac OS apps through a round of VPN tests to check for leaks and problems. This feature acts as a kill switch to block traffic when there is no active VPN connection and can be activated directly within the VPN application. TunnelBear offers a basic leak protection option which is called VigilantBear.

If you compare WireGuard vs OpenVPN, the speeds are usually much better with WireGuard. This is a relatively new protocol that provides very fast speeds along with upgraded security and encryption over legacy protocols. No WireGuard support with TunnelBearĪt the time of this review, TunnelBear does not support the WireGuard VPN protocol. OpenVPN is open source, but it requires the use of a third-party client and is more CPU-intensive. IKEv2 can be used natively on various devices (no app required) and runs with less CPU, but it is also not open source. Both OpenVPN and IKEv2 are secure and reliable VPN protocols.

The IKEv2 protocol can be used with iOS and Windows as well. TunnelBear offers good data encryption using the 256-bit AES OpenVPN for Windows, Mac OS, and Android. We discuss this topic more in our post on the best VPN for Chrome. There are also a few other VPNs that offer browser extensions, including VPN.ac, ExpressVPN, and also NordVPN and CyberGhost. In this case, you can simply control the desktop VPN client through the browser. In other cases, such as with ExpressVPN, the browser extension just extends the VPN desktop client into the browser for easier functionality. In some cases, such as with TunnelBear, the browser extension acts as an additional proxy for the browser itself, changing the IP address and DNS requests within the browser.

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