AdGuard VPN Review 2026

During our deep-dive audit of AdGuard VPN, the defining architectural choice is its proprietary HTTPS-based tunneling protocol. Unlike OpenVPN or WireGuard — both of which produce traffic signatures detectable by DPI firewalls — AdGuard's protocol wraps all VPN traffic inside standard HTTPS on port 443, making it appear as ordinary web browsing to any network observer. The protocol uses TLS 1.3 with AES-256-GCM for data encryption and integrates ESNI (Encrypted Server Name Indication) to prevent SNI-based filtering. All 65 server locations run on dedicated hardware in Tier-3 data centres. The company is based in Cyprus, outside mandatory EU or US data-retention jurisdictions.

The exclusion lists feature operates at the DNS resolution layer rather than through traditional split-tunnelling: domains on the exclusion list resolve via your ISP's standard resolver, while all others are handled inside the encrypted tunnel. This means the exclusion is applied before a connection is even opened, preventing the IP-leak window that occurs in kernel-level split-tunnel implementations where the first packet may route before the VPN rule is applied.