Cactus VPN Review

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MONTHLY PRICE: 4.99 USD
ANNUAL PRICE: 38.99 USD

Moldova based CactusVPN offers access to US, UK, Netherlands and Romania servers and supports OpenVPN, PPTP, L2TP, SSTP on all mainstream devices including Windows Phone and Chromebook. Their custom apps are available for Mac, Windows, iOS and Android.

CactusVPN software has a number of handy features. Their apps can automatically launch, login and connect to a specific VPN server on restart. CactusVPN apps also prevent information leaks by shutting down specific applications when VPN connection drops. Apps Killer feature works similar to a widely used Kill Switch. It closes selected apps (like Chrome or uTorrent) when the connection is unexpectedly lost, automatically re-establishes connection to a VPN server and restarts those apps once secure tunnel has been created.

CactusVPN is also a torrent friendly VPN with a pricing plan specifically designed for this purpose – Liberty VPN. P2P file sharing is allowed on their Netherlands server and forbidden on US and UK servers. Users who violate this policy might get their accounts terminated.

CactusVPN is also a perfect choice to use in countries that employ Deep Packet Inspection to block OpenVPN and other protocols (China, Iran, Syria and the Middle East in general). SoftEther is a custom protocol that can effectively bypass even the most advanced firewalls including college and corporate environments because SoftEther supports SSL-VPN and NAT Traversal. SoftEther uses HTTPS protocol in order to establish a VPN tunnel, thereby, completely masking VPN tunnels – firewalls cannot distinguish SoftEther traffic from regular HTTPS requests.

Even though Cactus offers high-speed VPN servers to access geo-restricted websites like Netflix and BBC iPlayer, their SmartDNS service has virtually no speed loss and is somewhat easier to use if you need to switch between countries on a regular basis. SmartDNS automatically determines which location should be used to unblock a channel and Cactus SmartDNS service gives access to 200 websites in USA, UK, Canada, Germany and Poland.

All in all, CactusVPN is a good provider for multimedia streaming, torrenting and for protecting communication from surveillance or other online threats.