I’ve been a loyal customer for 10 years for PIA, but my subscription is up and I’ve decided to move on.
Good:
Fast, works well, etc. I was able to get 300-400 mbps consistently wired in
Dirt cheap price. Many other high quality VPNs cost significantly more.
Proved out to be no-log
Works in China: Despite everyone telling me to pay $9/month for Express and that’s the best VPN out there, PIA worked just fine. I even paid for 1 year of Express just to prove out the comparison and PIA worked. Everytime the CCP cracked down on VPNs where we’d lose access for a few days, PIA and Express would BOTH be down, and if you spent enough time trying to find servers, you could get both to work. So why pay triple or more for Express?
Despite what people say for support, they’ve been great and fast. I contacted them on the first day of my membership (mistyped my email), as well as more recently to get old receipts pulled up
Bad:
App and development seems to have seized up. I know many apologists here tell me if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, but software is a moving train. New vulnerabilities in protocols are revealed all the time which is why you have monthly security patches on Android, Windows, etc. Even Apple pushes out updates on a frequent basis to address CVEs.
Wireguard on MacOS is still Beta and Mac in general is an afterthought (Edit: I mean M1 Native)
This community used to get a lot more support activity and it seems dead now.
Browser extension is a joke and has always been a joke.
Split tunneling is half broken still after so many years. I hardly use it, but I can’t help notice there’s a complaint every other day.
Personally I’m not completely against mind paying for PIA for another renewal, but there are other options out there worth trying. Given the downward trajectory of PIA, I feel it can’t be that bad to explore other options. I’ve decided to give Surfshark a run and see how that goes. If money weren’t an object I’d go for ProtonVPN given their company’s values, but they’re really just too pricey with only minor improvements to justify switching over.
I pay PIA for the VPN service they provide, not an app.
If you say the app is crap, I believe you, however that doesn’t mean the VPN service being provided is crap.
Using the app isn’t required or needed. There’s nothing the app does that can’t be manually done; including split tunnels and kill switches.
Of course that takes more effort on my part, but when it comes to something as important as a VPN connection, I can’t be relying on some app. It’s the main reason I went with PIA in the first place.
Rock solid VPN service (even through their next-gen server upgrades), don’t require use of their software, and at the best price around… yes, please.
First. Wireguard is not beta on mac. Not sure where you got that idea. Works great for me
Second, split tunnel on mac doesn’t work on ANY of the competitors. The fact pia got it working some of the time for some people is already way ahead of the competitors. Apple broke split tunnel when they killed kernel extension, but it appears like pia sort of found a way around it.
Third, compare the feature list of pia to any of the competitors. PIA has automation, CLI, dns configurabiliy, port forwarding, split tunnel ( on most platforms), Linux support, dedicated ip, etc etc. Pia is already way ahead of the competitors even without a recent update.
While I wish they’d update more regularly, pia is still ahead of the pack for me. No one even comes close.
Good price… I have no problems using it on my iOS devices as well as attached to them via WireGuard from my Gluetun container for secure surfing and ISO downloading. Never have problems and one of mine is connected 24/7/365 doing work so I get what I want and pay for
You forgot to mention that geohopping for streaming just doesn’t work and they don’t care. Signed up with SurfShark for about the same price for two-year subscription and when my PIA sub ends I’m out too after nearly 10 years.
15 months later I see PIA is getting updated again. There’s Wireguard, Apple native silicon support, and the app’s getting REGULAR updates which is important given you don’t want something as sensitive as network security being riddled with exploits.
My Surfshark subscription ends in 1 year and I may come back. The browser extension has been really meh, but then again it was meh on the PIA side too, but this Surfshark desktop client on Windows is really bloated. The service works well, I get great speeds.
My partner has Nord which is paid for by work so in some ways we’re already in the same VPN company. It may make sense for me to diversify to a different service.
I’m not dissatisfied with Surfshark per se but not married to sticking to them, and given PIA has treated me well in the past, who knows, I may come back. I have another 10 months to decide though.
I have this debate almost every year and eventually I end up staying with PIA because of the low price and cause 90% of the time it’s good for my use. That extra 10% don’t woth the extra price for me…
Anyway, look up on the Mr.mobile youtube channel. It usually have a sponsor spot with a discount for surfshark (although, like most VPN’s sponsor spots the deal is usually not exclusives and available on the website anyway)
I was with PIA for years, until the company was sold or taken over by another entity, and they stopped location cloaking, my main reason to have the vpn. Been with nord 2 years now, and quite satisfied.
I got the VPN and a big savings. Ironically your plusses and minuses prompted me to join, not avoid them. Caught an 83% discount. Saved like $250. I have held off gettin a VPN for 20 years, so thanks for the prompt. (It’s good for another 15 hours if anyone cares to do the same, but not for long.)
I don’t think they’re bad per se. I wouldn’t have stuck around for 10 years if they were that bad. I agree they finally made some updates after basically 1.5 years of silence, but I firmly disagree with people saying “if it ain’t broke…” when it clearly was and VPN protocols get regular updates regarding security.
Also how did a post just 1 hour ago get 13 upvotes already in reply to a post I made 7 months ago?
The reality is 98% of users (making a stat up but sure it’s not too far up) rely on the app for the service.
To simply provide fast servers isn’t hard. Many services provide this. My partner has Nord, a good tech relative of mine has Mullvad, and now I have Surfshark. I’ve speedtested all of them to 300mbps+
If you’re fine with using the OVPN app or doing more high level tech stuff that some of us don’t want to bother with, then that’s great. Technically I could probably figure it all out as an engineer, but you know what? I got enough going on in my life like most people where I just want my VPN to one click and go like every other service out there and worry about other things.
Again, I’ve been generally happy with the service that PIA has provided, but I really think that given the competition can offer something similar, I’m not bound by loyalty to stick with PIA or anything. I think the loyalty factor exists because so many people buy multi year deals. That’s great and all but it also means that most people don’t actually test drive like 3 or 4 VPN services before picking the best. I knew for the past 10 years that what I was using was a decent service. Maybe not the best, but good enough for me. That was enough to keep renewing, but it’s dropped to a point where I think I ought to check out the other offerings to confirm if PIA is worth keeping. Like I said, if others are so bad, I can always run right back to the arms of PIA, but so far I’m not seeing a compelling reason to return.
but would be handy to know how Surfshark goes.