Download TunnelBear VPN For PC – Latest Version

It used to be that no one could tell you’re a dog (or a bear) online, but these days advertisers, corporations, and governments probably know a lot about you. A VPN helps you retake some of that privacy by routing all your web traffic through an encrypted tunnel to a remote server, making it harder for spies, snoops, and salespeople to track you online. Among the best VPNs we’ve tested is TunnelBear VPN, which protects your privacy with a cadre of cute but powerful bears. It bursts with charm, maintains an outstanding position on transparency and consumer privacy, and delivers excellent security tools at a good price. It’s a VPN that you’ll enjoy using, and it’s an Editors’ Choice winner, too.

How Much DoesTunnelBear VPN Cost?

TunnelBear is one of the few providers we’ve reviewed that offers a truly free VPN service. The free TunnelBear tier restricts you to only 500MB of data per month, however. You can earn more data by Tweeting about the company, which can raise your limit to a total of 1.5GB for one month. You can repeat this process each month to receive the bonus. That’s still very restrictive. Anyone who has used a prepaid wireless plan will tell you how fast 1.5GB goes. The free version of HotSpot Shield limits you to 500MB per day, while the ProtonVPN free subscription has no data limit.

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If you decide to pay for TunnelBear, it won’t break the bank. An Unlimited plan costs $9.99 per month, just three pennies above the $9.96 per month average for a VPN we’ve tested. Hotspot Shield, by comparison, costs $12.99 per month, while Mullvad is a mere $5.54 per month. TunnelBear also has longer term subscriptions: an annual plan that costs $59.88 and a three-year plan that runs $120. Both are significantly less than the average of $72.33 per year among VPNs we’ve tested.

While TunnelBear is an excellent value, we highly recommend starting with the company’s free or monthly plans, so you can test out TunnelBear for yourself and make sure it will work for

You can pay for TunnelBear using major credit cards. Bitcoin is an option, but only for the one-year plan. Other VPN services such as Editors’ Choice-winner Mullvad go further by accepting numerous payments, including cash. TunnelBear says it will accept jars of honey, but this method of payment may prove to be a challenge in practice.

With either a free or a paid account, you can use up to five devices on a single TunnelBear account. That’s average for VPNs, but an increasing number of VPNs are abandoning this restrictive model. Avira Phantom VPN, Encrypt.me VPN, Ghostery Midnight, IPVanish VPN, Surfshark VPN, and Windscribe VPN place no limit on the number of devices you can use simultaneously. (Note that Encrypt.me and IPVanish are both owned by Ziff Davis, PCMag’s parent company.)

What Do You Get for Your Money?

TunnelBear’s biggest drawback is that it doesn’t offer much beyond VPN protection. Editors’ Choice winners IVPN, NordVPN and ProtonVPN are among the few VPNs that offer multi-hop connections, which use a second VPN server for extra security. A few grant push-button access to the free Tor anonymization network. TunnelBear has none of these.

Previously, TunnelBear forbade the use of its services for P2P file sharing or BitTorrenting. Thankfully, those days are gone. You can now use it to torrent over VPN to your heart’s content. It does not, however, include split tunneling, which lets you designate what traffic should pass through the VPN or bypass the VPN.

Some VPNs have expanded their purview beyond securing web traffic. Hotspot Shield grants access to a whole suite of privacy services, while NordVPN now offers subscriptions for a file locker and a password manager. TunnelBear has stayed focused on VPN protection but does offer the RememBear password manager. It’s free to use on one device, but if you want the convenience of syncing across all your devices, you must pay $36 per year (or $60 every two years). A subscription to RememBear is bundled with the three-year TunnelBear subscription.

VPNs do a great job of keeping your online activity private, even from your ISP, but there are many advanced ways to track your movements online. We recommend making use of the privacy tools built into most modern browsers, and a tracker blocker like the EFF’s Privacy Badger or TunnelBear’s standalone Blocker. A VPN will also do precious little to protect you against phishing and malware. We highly recommend that everyone enable two-factor authentication wherever possible, use antivirus software, and create unique passwords with a password manager.

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 offers servers in only 27 countries, about half the average among VPNs we’ve reviewed. This collection covers the essentials, and has expanded to encompass more of South America, but could improve. TunnelBear’s offering completely ignores Africa and the Middle East—an omission that is, sadly, not unusual for VPN companies. The company also has no presence in regions with repressive internet policies, and has moved its servers out of Hong Kong. ExpressVPN covers 94 countries with a physical presence, the largest among VPNs we’ve tested.

At last count, TunnelBear has around 3,000 servers across the globe. That’s a robust offering, and a dramatic expansion over the company’s humble origins. CyberGhost currently leads the pack with over 6,500 servers. Having more servers means it’s more likely you’ll find one that meets your needs, but it doesn’t necessarily correlate with better performance.

Not all servers are created equal. Virtual servers are software-defined servers, which means several virtual servers can run on a single physical server. Virtual locations are servers configured to appear somewhere other than where they are physically located. Neither is inherently problematic, and both can allow a server to live in a secure location while providing coverage to a nearby unsafe location. It becomes an issue when companies aren’t transparent about where your data is headed.

TunnelBear told us that it has dedicated servers in all of its locations and only uses virtual servers to handle unexpected demand. The company says that less than 20% of its servers are virtual. Importantly, those virtual servers are located in the country they claim to be. If you’re using TunnelBear, rest assured that your data is exactly where it’s supposed to be.

Many VPN companies are aware that their products are used to help bypass censorship, and work to support those efforts. TunnelBear has offered free bandwidth to users in specific countries and in 2020 it kicked off an increased focus on anti-censorship efforts.

TunnelBear says that it has taken steps to limit the damage a successful attack on its server infrastructure might cause. The servers themselves contain no identifiable information about users, and the drives are encrypted. Some companies, including NordVPN and Surfshark VPN, now run their servers “RAM only,” and TunnelBear should consider doing the same.

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 great 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 in order 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 or not a certain email address was used to open an account. That’s excellent. 

The company maintains a robust privacy report, which confirms it has not provided information to law enforcement beyond confirming an individual had an account with the company. Additionally, TunnelBear has the notable distinction of having completed not just one, but four independent code audits and publicly released the results of those audits. That’s great, and I’m pleased to see that TunnelBear is committed to an annual public review process. A company representative described these audits to us as, “security audits of our whole stack, which includes our backend servers, our VPN servers, and VPN clients.”

Security is really an issue of trust. Even if a company does everything right, it doesn’t matter much if you, the customer, don’t trust them. We recommend that consumers consider this information and choose a service with which they feel comfortable.

Hands On With TunnelBear For Windows

TunnelBear currently offers clients on Android, iOS, macOS, and Windows. TunnelBear also offers browser plug-ins for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, which function as proxies (which are distinct from VPNs) to reroute your traffic through a TunnelBear server. For this review, we tested the Windows client on an Intel NUC Kit NUC8i7BEH (Bean Canyon) desktop running the latest version of Windows 10.

Years ago, when Max was shopping for his own VPN, he showed his partner all of the top-rated services he had reviewed. He explained what he thought made the best the best, and then asked which his partner would actually use on a daily basis. They picked TunnelBear without missing a beat. They have used it ever since. This is just an anecdote, but it speaks to the unique value of TunnelBear VPN: it’s just really friendly and appealing.

Decked out in bright colors with bold yellow accents, the app has a charming tongue-in-cheek attitude that it brings to every aspect of its app. It’s cute and colorful, without ever being overbearing or cloying. For example, whenever you connect to a VPN server, a notification appears bearing a bear with a hat representative of that country. Exquisite.

The app is built around a central map of the world displaying the company’s server locations, shown as Mario-esque pipes. Select your desired location from the menu above or click on the map to switch protection on, and you’re treated to a surprisingly smooth animation of a bear tunneling away from your current location. All the TunnelBear apps use the same design, so you’ll have a familiar experience no matter where you go with TunnelBear.

This has been the experience with all TunnelBear apps, but there have been slight changes. In our testing, the Windows version looked a little crisper, and was snappier to respond than previous versions. TunnelBear already has a winning design, so tweaks around the edges like this only help keep it fresh.

TunnelBear doesn’t have many locations to choose from, but a location search box would be an excellent addition, as would a list of servers, with some basic information such as load and ping time. NordVPN and others provide detailed information about specific servers, which can be useful when you need a connection in a very specific location.

The TunnelBear app does include some useful additional features, such as Trusted Networks, which is basically a whitelist of Wi-Fi networks you trust. Another important tool is VigilantBear, which works as a kill switch and prevents data from slipping through should you become disconnected from the VPN. The GhostBear option aims to circumvent VPN blocking by disguising VPN traffic as normal HTTPS traffic. A TunnelBear representative told us that the company advises that users switch on GhostBear only when absolutely necessary, as it can reduce performance. It’s an impressive offering, but not unique. Many other companies offer similar custom tools designed to circumvent censorship.

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.

This VPN Is Just Right

There are two design options for security software: black, green and edgy, or blue and high-tech. TunnelBear VPN, on the other hand, succeeds because it dares to be lighthearted, yellow, and cute. The company has always put a premium on design and user experience, which is sorely needed in all of digital security. But its excellence is not only skin-deep: TunnelBear offers a robust service and strong transparency principles.

There are other excellent VPNs that have more bells and whistles than TunnelBear, but this genial VPN fits perfectly into your life and remains a PCMag Editors’ Choice winner.