TunnelBear is a Toronto-based VPN provider that started in 2011. In March 2018, TunnelBear was acquired by McAfee, one of the leaders in the cybersecurity industry. McAfee wisely retained the brand of TunnelBear, which already had over 20 million users.

TunnelBear uses a simple, funny, bear-animated VPN app that is available on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS. The provider also offers browser extensions for Chrome, Firefox, and Opera, and instructions for manual configuration on Linux. Aside from its VPN service, TunnelBear also ventured into corporate accounts with TunnelBear for Teams, and a password management app called RememBear.

We tested TunnelBear’s VPN service and found it decent at first glance. They are not the best VPN provider we’ve tested, but they are a good mid-pack choice

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Features

TunnelBear has features that are not so different from other VPN providers. It just changed the names, but the features work the same. The features include the following:

• VigilantBear: TunnelBear’s kill switch feature. It protects a user’s connection whenever the Internet connection drops.
• Auto tunnel: Automatically connects you to the server with the lowest ping, ensuring a fast connection.
• GhostBear: Makes VPN traffic less recognizable, which is effective at bypassing VPN blockers set by Netflix, ISPs, and governments.
• Always On: Enables the VPN client to launch and auto-reconnect on startup.
• AES 256-bit encryption: The current encryption standard used by top VPN providers and by the government.

All these features, plus the provider’s claimed no-logging policy, don’t make TunnelBear particularly special. Other VPN providers have these features and no-logging claim too. They are a good choice, for sure, but they’re not the best choice.

Servers & Countries

TunnelBear has servers in 22 countries, including:

• USA
• Singapore
• India
• Canada
• Germany
• Spain
• UK

22 countries is on the lower end of the spectrum, with top providers offering closer to 60 or more. They have managed to set up servers in the most popular countries for geo-blocking and avoiding censorship, so that is good to see from them.

They don’t disclose the exact number of servers they control, although it says that it is still expanding to more countries. We might see a lot more server locations in the future.

Reliability & Speed Tests

While VPN speed depends on several factors, one way of testing this is to do speed tests before and after connecting to a VPN. This is what we did with TunnelBear.

Our speed and latency count before connecting to TunnelBear was this:

Here is our speed test result when we were connected to TunnelBear:

While download speed went down by four Mbps, latency jumped to a high value. We couldn’t even load a YouTube video in 720p HD. This was unusual.

Aside from the increase in latency, we also experienced a drop in connection when we switched to a different server location.

Pricing & Payments

TunnelBear has a freemium VPN service, with the free tier capped at 500 MB per month. This is a great way to test the VPN service. You can even get an additional one GB if you tweet about the provider, which, well, can get annoying if you follow the VPN industry as it creates a lot of spam.

TunnelBear’s regular subscription price is $9.99 per month. Signing up for one year offers 50% savings as you will only need to pay $59.88 for the whole year, or $4.99 per month. This yearly rate is still slightly above other comparable VPN providers who can go as low as $2.50 per month.

Support

TunnelBear’s Help section consists of FAQs which are categorized into the following:

• Billing and Payments
• Troubleshooting
• Getting Started
• TunnelBear for Teams

The section also contains a link to service announcements and the contact form which seems to be the only means to reach customer support. We filled out the contact form, and we needed to wait for 48 hours for someone to get back to us.

TunnelBear also has Facebook and Twitter accounts. Response time could be faster when questions or inquiries are sent through these social media accounts.

Policies & Logging

After reviewing dozens of VPN providers, we can say that there’s really no such thing as a no-logging policy, and TunnelBear is honest about this. The first part of its privacy policy states, “As a provider of an online privacy service, we ultimately strive to collect the minimal amount of information required to operate our service. This often means difficult trade-offs between the information we collect and the performance of our service.”

Although TunnelBear doesn’t collect and store IP addresses and usage history, it stores the following information:

• Account data: This includes your email address, Twitter ID (if you participated in the Twitter promotion), subscription date, and subscription expiry date.
• Operation data: Operational data pertains to the OS version of your device, TunnelBear app version, total data used for the month, and operational events (like when did you create an account, tweet about TunnelBear for additional data allocation, or make a payment).
• Cookies and persistent trackers: TunnelBear lists a lot of them, but the most concerning cookie is _ga which is used by Google Analytics to let TunnelBear know the number of website visitors.

• Although TunnelBear uses Google Analytics’ IP anonymization tool to automatically replace the last few digits of a user’s IP address with zeros, this is still concerning since the cookie is stored for two years. Anyone who obtains the rewritten IP address won’t be able to identify the user directly, but they will know the user’s ISP.
• Payment data: TunnelBear accepts Bitcoin payments for anonymous transactions. However, if you pay with your credit card, the provider will store your last name, the last four digits of the credit card, and the date when the card was used to address credit card fraud complaints. For PayPal or Stripe payments, TunnelBear does not store any information, but the company can view your card billing address, card expiry, and the last four digits of your card.

TunnelBear’s privacy policy went on to say that the company is required to disclose data if it receives a subpoena or warrant, so they are not highly recommended for hackers or those who use torrents.

Expert Recommendation

TunnelBear seems decent enough. It is operated by a well-known cybersecurity company, McAfee, and has all the basic features of a VPN. It is not a great choice though for streaming or unblocking geo-restricted video contents; it only has a few servers, and the latency is quite high based on our testing. TunnelBear’s free tier will let you test out these aspects yourself.

We are bothered by TunnelBear’s use of Google Analytics, especially those that require the IP address of website visitors. Although TunnelBear uses Google Analytics’ IP addresses anonymizer, only the last octet of IPv4 addresses and the last 80 bits of IPv6 addresses are masked with zeros. As a workaround, you can use an anonymous email address and opt out of cookies before you visit TunnelBear’s website.

We like TunnelBear, and know that they have many users out there. They’re an average VPN provider with a great marketing tactic that could meet some particular needs of specific users, such as those who want to package a VPN and a password manager together. They’re not the best of the best, but they are adequate and can be recommended.

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