CactusVPN Review

CactusVPN is a small, independent VPN company, which has been incorporated in Moldova since it was founded in 2011.

The company originated as a startup and has now been in operation for nearly a decade.

While CactusVPN has never pushed through to the forefront of the VPN market, it has maintained a dedicated user base throughout this time.

Its jurisdiction in Moldova isn’t too common among commercial VPNs, but appears to offer pretty good data privacy and protection.

Moldova isn’t part of the EU, or part of the Five-, Nine-, or 14-Eyes data sharing alliances. It also isn’t part of any other known data sharing groups, like SIGINT.

Like all the best VPN jurisdictions, it also doesn’t have any legal requirement on companies to keep data logs, or to hand those logs to the authorities.

Unlike many of these privacy havens, however, it also has pro-consumer data protection legislation which is approximately equivalent to GDPR, and gives users the right to request and delete any personal information kept on them.

Some of the strength of Moldova as a jurisdiction appears to come from a lack of legislative focus on data practices, though.

In the short term this is great news, as there is no law or precedent compelling CactusVPN to keep logs or hand over information to either domestic or foreign governments.

The flipside, though, is that the legal situation may change in the future.

Moldova has recently distanced itself from the EU, but maintains a relationship with both it and Russia.

The evolving political situation, and Moldova’s still-in-development data law make it difficult to pin down just how good a region it is for privacy – we’ve called it a ‘Privacy Haven’ above, but there has been a history of (non-digital) surveillance in the country.

In any case, the precise legal situation of Moldova will be irrelevant if CactusVPN doesn’t keep any logs in the first place.

The following logging policy is laid out in CactusVPN’s terms and conditions:

This is a really strong policy which, while short, gives us confidence in CactusVPN.

It doesn’t keep records of your activity or any metadata, not even any hashed or anonymized metadata about your connection. This is about as good as it gets for VPN logging policies.

We would like to see CactusVPN carry out and publish a full audit of this policy in the near future, though, to confirm it is as good as it sounds.

CactusVPN performed pretty well in our standardized speed tests – certainly well enough to stream HD video.

Latency isn’t great, though, so you might struggle to play online video games due to high ping, even on a local connection.

These are really good local speeds – right up there with the biggest VPNs, like ExpressVPN or CyberGhost.

This kind of performance should let you use the internet exactly as you normally would without noticeably reducing loading speeds or buffering times.

But can CactusVPN keep up on the international stage?

We test every VPN by measuring the speeds of its worldwide connections from our office in London, England. These were our results:

• US: 14.14Mbps (download) & 9.67Mbps (upload)
• Germany: 84.41Mbps (download) & 87.01Mbps (upload)
• Singapore: 25.88Mbps (download) & 8.1Mbps (upload)
• Australia: 4.17Mbps (download) & 4.06Mbps (upload)

Connections to Europe were fast, suffering only around a 10% drop in speed. Global connections were a different story, however, with connections to Australia, Asia, and the US experiencing at least a 70% drop in speed, with terrible latency.

Larger drops over long distances aren’t at all uncommon. Only the best VPNs manage to keep a decent connection to places like Singapore and Australia – CactusVPN’s results aren’t bad, but they’ve fallen short of the top tier here, particularly with the US.

If you get the full package, CactusVPN is split into two halves. A VPN which offers good security but is pretty ineffective at getting around content blocks and a Smart DNS proxy service which doesn’t offer any security but works exceptionally well at unlocking content.

We aren’t huge fans of this way of doing things, since you won’t be secured behind your VPN nor fully anonymous while streaming.

With some browser compartmentalization (where you split different kinds of activity between multiple browsers to confuse any onlookers) and a proactive approach to maintaining your privacy and security, though, it certainly isn’t the worst method.

In all, CactusVPN’s Smart DNS service unblocks over 340 streaming sites. This includes US Netflix, BBC iPlayer, and Amazon Prime Video. You can see the full list of supported streaming services here.

CactusVPN only allows P2P traffic on certain servers, but they are well-labeled and easy to find online and in the app. They make up about a third of the total network.

When properly configured, there aren’t any leaks, which is vital if you want to torrent safely and anonymously. Although it’s a concern that configuration is necessary in the first place.

Its no logs policy is very good, so you can feel comfortable there won’t be a record of your activity.

While CactusVPN’s speeds aren’t the very best we’ve seen, local performance is certainly good enough to download and seed large files with ease in Europe.

There are no torrenting servers in the Americas and only one in Asia (Malaysia). The rest are all located in Europe. This is an extremely odd choice, and one which will have a severe impact on your torrenting speeds if you live in the US, Canada, or anywhere in Central and South America.

According to CactusVPN, it currently does work in China for users with either the SoftEther VPN protocol or the OpenVPN protocol.

We’ve seen varied statements online about whether or not it does work in China. Most likely it doesn’t work all of the time, and requires some fiddling to get going.

It does have some obfuscation technology in place, though, and allows you to route traffic via Port 433. This should help get your traffic past the censors in countries like Iran and Turkey more consistently.

For the best chance of connecting to the global internet from China, though, we recommend taking a look at our favorite VPNs for China.

CactusVPN otherwise offers a pretty secure service.

Across its apps it offers a selection of OpenVPN (not available on macOS), IKEv2, and even the newer WireGuard.

You can also choose which servers to use for DNS leak protection, which is a nice touch. Cloudflare, Google, OpenDNS, and even CactusVPN’s own DNS servers are all available.

The app includes a functional kill switch, which prevents your computer from connecting to the internet if your VPN connection drops unexpectedly.

Without a kill switch you can’t trust a VPN to never expose your data or give up your true IP address. With CactusVPN you don’t need to worry about it.

It also offers an app-specific kill switch called ‘App Killer’. When you add a program to its list, that program will be terminated entirely should your VPN connection drop.

It also supports routing through TCP Port 443 – the port used by most HTTPS traffic. This can help keep the fact that you are using a VPN secret from government and corporate censors. This isn’t available on Mac, though.

We found the CactusVPN help team responded to all our questions quickly and informatively.

The online resources are pretty comprehensive too, if difficult to navigate at times.

The benefit of a small team is that help often goes beyond the scripted responses of some larger, more corporate providers.

We’d love to see live chat make a return, as that’s really all that’s missing here.