Who Runs AirVPN
AirVPN is operated by Air SRL, an Italian company founded in 2010 by privacy advocates associated with digital rights communities. Unlike most commercial VPN providers, AirVPN's founding mission was explicitly political: the company was established to provide tools for journalists and activists in response to Italian internet filtering legislation. This ideological foundation has shaped every product decision since — AirVPN's interface prioritizes technical control over consumer accessibility, and the company has consistently refused features that would compromise privacy for convenience (no split tunneling on mobile, no AI-assisted "smart server selection").
Port Forwarding: The Defining Feature
AirVPN is one of very few consumer VPNs that offers genuine inbound port forwarding. This allows you to run a publicly accessible server (web server, BitTorrent client with incoming connections, game server, remote desktop) while behind AirVPN's tunnel. The implementation is static — you claim a port from the AirVPN dashboard, and that port is permanently assigned to your account and forwarded to your machine whenever you are connected. This is functionally different from PIA's port forwarding (which assigns ports dynamically and changes on reconnect) — AirVPN's static assignment is more useful for applications that need a consistent inbound address.
Eddie Client: Maximum Transparency
AirVPN's desktop client, Eddie, is open source and provides real-time bandwidth graphs, individual server metrics (users connected, bandwidth utilization, last audit date), latency per server, and detailed connection logs accessible at any time. You can sort servers by load, latency, or geographic distance, and configure split tunneling, DNS leak protection, and network lock (kill switch) with fine-grained control. This level of transparency is unmatched in the consumer VPN space. The trade-off is a UI that looks like a system administration tool — which is exactly what it is.
Speed Performance
AirVPN runs exclusively on OpenVPN — no WireGuard, no proprietary protocols. This is a principled choice (OpenVPN's security properties are more thoroughly analyzed than WireGuard's) but imposes a speed penalty. Our tests averaged 285 Mbps on a 500 Mbps baseline — lower than WireGuard-based providers. On the other hand, AirVPN's servers are individually well-maintained: the server load display means you can always find a lightly loaded server, and in practice, real-world speeds were more consistent than providers with higher peak numbers but overloaded infrastructure.
Italian Jurisdiction
Italy is an EU member state subject to EU data protection law, including GDPR. Italy is also a Fourteen Eyes member (an extension of the Five Eyes intelligence alliance). AirVPN publishes a transparency report listing government requests — as of the most recent report, all requests received were refused or were technically impossible to fulfill due to no-logs architecture. The Fourteen Eyes membership is a relevant jurisdiction consideration for users with active threat models involving Western intelligence agencies.
Who AirVPN Is Best For
AirVPN is the correct choice for: users who need static inbound port forwarding for servers or BitTorrent; Linux users who need a native, full-featured client; developers and network engineers who want to inspect every aspect of their VPN connection; and privacy advocates who prefer open-source auditable software over polished consumer apps. For anyone who wants to press a button and stream Netflix, NordVPN or Surfshark are far easier experiences.
