This is an automated archive.

The original was posted on /r/ivpn by /u/mantisghost on 2023-10-01 13:15:17+00:00.

Hear me out. The core function of providing VPN connection works quite well. Connecting to servers works and is fast. Multiple hops may not be as fast as in other VPN’s but still are acceptable. Still, the Windows application is just terrible. It is not user-friendly, confusing and just do not work well at all. Let me point things out:

  1. Double left-clicking on the tray icon does nothing - (on different VPN apps, it shows the main app window). So to show that window, user needs to right-click and choose show window. Some extra steps that for me are annoying.
  2. You cannot resize the window and sometimes it gets small by itself. It can be fixed by randomly clicking on interface stuff until it just resize to original by itself
  3. No kill switch in the app. On the website, it says that IVPN has kill switch, but in the app there is none. It’s not possible to even know if it is enabled and works or not. I just assume that the firewall is a so-called kill switch here. If it is, then for all that is sane point that out somehow in the GUI.
  4. Mentioned firewall works terrible. If firewall is set on-demand it somehow works but is yet another bloatware added to the system when we already have built in firewall in it. If it is set as always-on, it screws connections up. I do use Xbox Game Pass and need to disable VPN to stream games because split tunnel do not recognize it (most of VPN just don’t work with Xbox app). So when that awful firewall is set to always on and a user choose to pause connection or disable VPN, the internet on a machine (at least mine) lags and is really slow as clearly the firewall is messing something up. The issue does not appear when firewall is set to on-demand, then firewall just turns off completely fine.

I must say that after testing NordVPN and Mullvad apps for windows, IVPN’s is the worst experience so far. As said before the core function of VPN is good, it does what it should but the application and that fancy firewall are bothersome and annoying to use.