Friday, December 13, 2024

TorGuard Business VPN review

Features

TorGuard Business VPN offers a limited set of features tailored to business users. One of its standout features is AES-256 encryption, combined with support for multiple VPN protocols, such as OpenVPN, IKEv2, L2TP/IPSec, and WireGuard. This ensures a high level of security for businesses that need to protect sensitive data across different devices and networks. Additionally, business users can get dedicated IP addresses (very limited by the pricing plan) and access to over 3,000 servers in over 50 countries, ensuring fast and reliable connections regardless of location.

TorGuard supports unlimited bandwidth and unlimited speeds, making it suitable for businesses with heavy data usage, such as those involved in media production or data analytics.

Another significant feature is Stealth VPN, which helps bypass VPN blocks and firewalls, making it ideal for businesses operating in countries with strict internet regulations or for accessing region-restricted content. The service also supports split tunneling, allowing businesses to route specific traffic through the VPN while letting other data access the internet directly. TorGuard offers two types of kill switches for enhanced security.

The primary kill switch shuts down all internet traffic on your device if the VPN connection drops unexpectedly, ensuring a complete lockdown so no data leaks occur. This feature effectively prevents your real IP address and online activities from being exposed. You can easily activate it in the Network settings, and from our testing, it responds quickly and reliably.

During one instance where TorGuard disconnected, the kill switch immediately kicked in, blocking all traffic to maintain privacy. The second option is the App Kill which targets specific apps or processes that you define if you don’t want to kill the entire connection.

The Tor in the name stands for Torrenting, which explains the heavy reliance and great features surrounding P2P. You have the flexibility to torrent directly through the TorGuard app or by using a SOCKS5 proxy. This provides an extra layer of security and flexibility, ensuring your data remains protected.

Pricing & Plans

TorGuard Business pricing

(Image credit: TorGuard)

TorGuard pricing is the biggest hurdle in our opinion, despite offering four distinct plans. The Starter plan costs $32 a month and covers a “5-user package” which includes 5 e-mail accounts and only 1 dedicated IP address. The next plan, Small, covers 10 users adds 3 dedicated IP addresses, and costs $69 a month. The Medium plan at $110 a month covers 15 users and 5 dedicated IP addresses, and finally, the Large plan covers 20 users and 10 dedicated IPs and costs $169 a month.

While the pricing may look transparent and easy to follow, we prefer the pricing per user strategy that encompasses much more functionality. At the moment, it is difficult to justify the high pricing of TorGuard let alone justify its use for a serious business that aims to scale its services while relying on an extensive remote workforce.

Once you go to the purchase page of the Business VPN, TorGuard will offer upselling options such as a custom VPN router with varying hardware configuration and prices. You can add additional users to your plan for an extra fee, however, the “slide to add” function on their website is clunky and one of the worst experiences we had in trying to add additional costs to a plan.

Performance

In terms of performance, TorGuard delivers consistently high speeds across its global server network, making it suitable for bandwidth-heavy activities like video conferencing, large file transfers, and streaming. The VPN’s unlimited bandwidth ensures that your team’s activities are not hindered by data caps, and its low-latency servers provide smooth, reliable connections for remote workers.

However, during peak hours, speeds can vary, especially when connected to servers in heavily congested regions. Despite this, TorGuard's performance remains above average compared to other business VPNs. The fact that you can choose your protocol and tweak it to a very granular level lets you squeeze out even more performance if you know what you’re doing of course.

Privacy & Security

Security is solid, and its AES-256 encryption combined with multiple VPN protocols ensures data is protected at all times. The service offers DNS and IPv6 leak protection, preventing any data from accidentally leaking outside the VPN tunnel. For added safety, TorGuard provides a kill switch feature that automatically disconnects your internet connection if the VPN connection drops, preventing any unprotected data transfer.

For multi-factor authentication, TorGuard integrates seamlessly with Google Authenticator, adding an extra layer of security for account access. This is a great feature for the admin console through which you can tweak the security and privacy settings for your workforce. The privacy policy of TorGuard states that they do “not collect or log any data from its Virtual Private Network (VPN) or Proxy services.” However, they do collect data for analyzing and improving their website through their own platform, live chat and emails they receive from users.

Alternatives

NordLayer is miles ahead of TorGuard when it comes to the business environment. First of all pricing per user makes it a more affordable solution and gives you easy scaling options and unparalleled flexibility. Its stand-out features such as DNS filtering, network segmentation, dedicated IP, browser extension, smart remote access, a dedicated account manager, Cloud Firewall, Smart Remote Access, and Threat Block come together to offer a comprehensive business solution. If you’re shopping for a VPN or Zero Trust Network (ZTN) you can not go wrong with NordLayer.

ProtonVPN Business is another great alternative to TorGuard as it also has great P2P features. Pricing is a bit steeper than TorGuard but the sheer number of features it offers easily justifies the price difference. Its Secure Core and NetShield features offer protection for even the most paranoid among us, while protocols such as WireGuard, IKEv2, OpenVPN (TCP or UDP), and Stealth offer enough flexibility for all the tweaks you will need. Over 5,000 companies trust their business to this Swiss-based VPN provider, and if you’re in the market for one, it is a much better alternative compared to TorGuard.

Final Verdict

While TorGuard Business VPN is declared to be a business VPN solution, it is hard to justify its usage in an enterprise setting that relies on remote work. It does provide great performance for its core offering, VPN connection, but there are a few additional “goodies” that businesses rely on when looking to set up a ZTN environment. The niche business market that relies heavily on P2P or just needs protection for a handful of its workers can extract benefits from using TorGuard, but a business looking to stay protected and scale easily will be best served to look elsewhere.

Overall, TorGuard seems easier to recommend to individual users who are looking for a reliable and fast VPN solution, and less so for business users.

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