Hola VPN Review 2024: Shall You Avoid This Service?

People who use free VPNs are well-acquainted with Hola VPN. Hola has been on the market for quite some time, offering a seemingly perfect blend of being free AND giving unlimited bandwidth for all users.

However, despite its “248 million users” (pretending), this provider isn’t as good as you or many other people online think. Our Hola VPN review for 2024 will highlight all of its pros and cons but the short version would be that it’s simply not safe and secure.

Based in Israel, Hola VPN is a company with numerous past incidents. It’s known not only for intrusive logging practices but also for its harmful Chrome VPN extension that is used to sell users’ bandwidth for various botnets.

Moreover, Hola cooperates closely with Luminati, a company known for data collection and sale. Coupled with its lukewarm security and the lack of basic features, it is clear that you should avoid Hola VPN in 2024.

But if you’re hell-bent on using this free service, we don’t blame you. Hola VPN is indeed attractive at first but in my Hola VPN test and review, you’ll be able to scratch its surface and see what’s underneath.

You might be in for a rude awakening, so make sure you don’t fall asleep first. Now let’s set sail and move on with the review, shall we?

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The 3 best alternatives to Hola VPN:

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Hola VPN User Experience & Device Support

To start off with this Hola VPN review and test, let’s talk about its device support and user experience. Namely, this service offers two distinct options called Hola Browser and Hola VPN. Don’t confuse these two apps because we’re talking about the latter!

Although Hola VPN used to come in the form of Hola Browser, which was even worse.

Desktop and Mobile Apps

But what about the app you’ll ask? Well, before I talk more about how good or bad it feels to use, let me quickly glance over Hola VPN’s device support. I’ll immediately tell you that it’s not great, which you can expect from a free VPN like this one.

When it comes to desktop and mobile apps, though, all platforms except for Linux are supported. They include:

• Windows (+ Edge/Opera extensions and Hola Browser for Windows)
• macOS
• iOS
• Android

What’s great about Hola VPN is that its desktop and mobile apps are very similar to each other. So much so that it’s very easy to transfer from your computer to your phone and not need any time to get used to the “new” interface.

Now that I touched on the interface, it’s not great. I mean, I love minimalistic interfaces like this one, but Hola VPN put minimal effort into making its app look somewhat decent. Not to mention its Dark theme which I usually like, but here, I despise it because of how washed out it looks.

Albeit, that might be my monitor’s issue…

Whatever the case, Hola VPN is overly simple to use which I immediately noticed during my tests. You have one connection button in the middle, with the server list below. That’s the case on mobile devices, as well.

To access additional features, you need to click on the barely-visible gear icon where you can apply some customization options. Interestingly, you’ll see this option to share device resources, which is the whole point of Hola VPN.

However, I’ll talk more about it later in this Hola VPN review. To access its additional features, you need to click on System Preferences, where you can find a few options here and there. And that’s basically it.

Hola VPN is extremely friendly to beginners, all in a bid to attract unaware users and pull them into its data collection scheme.

TV Apps

Despite being a free VPN, Hola obviously earns good money nonetheless. Thus, they developed native VPN apps for Fire TV, LG TV (WebOS), and Smart Tv devices in general. Surprisingly, TV apps are pretty easy to use as well.

On Android TV, this applies as well, where Hola VPN offers a native client downloadable from Google Play. Users on Samsung TV with Tizen OS won’t be able to utilize Hola VPN, which is a bit of a shame.

As for Amazon Fire TV, there’s a native client on Amazon that you can download for free. Besides, Hola VPN’s applications for TV are fully-featured, offering almost all of the desktop functionalities.

I also found out that it is usable on Nvidia Shield TV. Given that it’s based on Android, it’s easy to get a native Hola app, install it, and use it without making an account.

Gaming Apps

To make it clear, this is the review of Hola VPN Free and as a free service, it does cut some corners in terms of device support. When talking about gaming, you can always utilize Hola VPN on your PC or your mobile phone.

However, we always look for additional console support. And upon checking its website, we were baffled to see that Hola VPN has PlayStation and Xbox consoles on its supported devices list.

It, however, clearly states that this is reserved for the premium plan that nobody buys because of its unjustifiably expensive prices. But if you bought it and you want to use it on a gaming console, Hola VPN has tutorials for both consoles.

I found them a bit confusing, though, but you can connect your console to a VPN through your PC, by using a router, or by using Hola Premium DNS Proxy. Keep in mind that the latter is more optimized for streaming and not strictly gaming.

Even worse is that Hola VPN hides its setup tutorials if you’re not a premium user. Therefore, you need to PAY for a subscription just to be able to see the whole tutorial. If that’s not unfair and greedy, I don’t know what is.

Router Support

Router support is also important in this Hola VPN review for 2024. However, the router support of this provider is… well, almost non-existent. Namely, Hola VPN supports these Keenetic Ultra routers and offers a tutorial only for them.

Once again, the tutorial is interlaced with “Join Hola Premium to see access details” messages, so you’ll need to shell out your money to learn more. The most infuriating thing is that no other router model is supported, which makes Hola VPN very limited.

ExpressVPN or CyberGhost, for example, are much better examples of router VPNs. They support a vast array of models and offer easy-to-grasp tutorials for all of them, making them much easier to set up than Hola VPN.

Is Hola VPN Safe & Secure? All Security Features Examined!

Our Hola VPN review will also go over its security features and see how safe and secure Hola VPN is. Frankly, Hola VPN has never been known for its focus on security and the VPN itself admits it openly.

At least I’ll give them props for being honest and open… to an extent. Its freshly-baked VPN app comes with some improvements over its browser-based app, so you can expect a feature or two that aren’t present in the browser version.

Here are all Hola VPN’s security features: Spoiler alert: there aren’t many of them!

256-bit AES Encryption

While Hola VPN was just a browser, it had no special security features that other VPNs had. Nowadays, as a full-fledged VPN app, Hola introduced 256-bit AES encryption that improved its security quite a lot.

256-bit AES encryption is the highest level of encryption you can get, also used by the US military and government for safeguarding sensitive information. Hola VPN offers it out of the box but also includes several encryption options.

If you open Advanced Settings, you’ll see that you can change the AH transform, ESP cipher transform, and encryption method. By default, it’s set to AES-256 but AES-192, AES-128, and DES3 methods are also available.

These are weaker types of encryption which could increase the overall performance a bit. However, I always recommend keeping 256-bit AES encryption in place because it has no huge impact on the performance, yet, it brings the highest level of security.

App Kill Switch

Hola VPN’s application also offers an automatic kill switch. Here, it’s called App Kill Switch and as you already know, it’ll shut down your internet connection if you lose the connection to a VPN server, preventing potential IP and DNS leaks.

As its name implies, it’s both a standard kill switch and an App kill switch. What this means is that you can apply its working principle to certain apps. So, if you lose a VPN connection, only the selected app will be cut out from the internet.

What I found confusing is the auto-kill delay, which is, by default, set to 10 seconds. This setting implies how much time is going to pass between the loss of a VPN connection and the kill switch shutting down the internet.

In my opinion, it’s pointless because you need the kill switch to work the EXACT moment your connection is lost. Waiting for 5, 10, or 15 seconds exposes you long enough to hackers and snoopers, so you don’t want a long delay like this one.

If you enable this kill switch, I strongly recommend leaving the delay to 1 second and not 10.

P2P Technology

Before I talk about the privacy policy in this Hola VPN review, let me quickly explain its P2P technology. You see, P2P technology isn’t exactly the safest thing around here, especially not when it’s applied to Virtual Private Networks.

When using Hola, you’re actually not using a real VPN because it uses no protocols to establish a connection. You can’t choose from OpenVPN, IKEv2, WireGuard, etc, etc. Instead, it relies on the users in the Hola network or peers, as they call it.

Then, it allows you to share idle data with other users in the network, so when you change your location to another country, you hijack the IP address of a particular user located there. Beware that it can happen to any user in the network, including you.

And that’s pretty much how Hola VPN functions and why it works so well. Because it doesn’t use traditional servers, you don’t have to worry about being detected on Netflix or anything similar.

Instead, you just use another user’s IP address to browse the web, which is seen by the website you want to visit as ordinary traffic. However, this is very dangerous, especially because someone can use your IP address to perform illegal online activities.

Once the authorities track the activities to your IP, you’ll need to explain to them that you’ve been using Hola VPN or whatever. If you find this rather suspicious, you can check Hola VPN’s privacy policy or just pay attention to the setup process.

Hola VPN states everything CLEARLY and it’s almost 100% transparent about how it works. Paying for Hola VPN is another story, and here, you’ll be able to use real servers. Although, I think it’s a bad idea given its intrusive logging practices.

Hola VPN IP and DNS Leak Test: No IP/DNS Leaks Found

With lackluster security, can you expect Hola VPN to never leak your IP and DNS? To be honest, I’m not exactly sure because the service showed pretty good results across both DNS and IP leak tests in my experience.

To make sure I have no leaks, I connected to a US server with the VPN and I visited ipleak.net. Here, I found that I had no IP, DNS, and WebRTC leaks, which was quite surprising considering its subpar security.

Nevertheless, I tested Hola VPN on another site called browserleaks.com. And here, I got exactly the same results, showing that the service didn’t leak any of the information related to my IP, DNS, and WebRTC.

For this Hola VPN review’s sake, I tested almost all server locations only to come out successful after each test. So yeah, after all, Hola VPN is good at least in terms of keeping your IP away from the prying eyes.

Which, unfortunately, cannot be said about your private information.

Does It Have a No-Logging Policy?

Throughout my review of Hola VPN for 2024, I mentioned its intrusive logging practices. If you do a little Google search of Hola, you’ll find out pretty disturbing information about it. For the start, this is a company based in Israel. Is it a problem?

Slightly.

You see, Israel is suspected to be an extended arm of 9 Eyes, a group of countries known for data collection and distribution. While not “officially” under this umbrella, it’s known that Israeli ISPs still collect and share user data with some English-speaking countries.

That doesn’t have to tell you anything because we still have great VPNs from Israel and 5 Eyes countries. One of them is PIA from the US which stores no logs. Unfortunately, Hola VPN indeed stores logs, so let’s discuss it further.

Which Information Isn’t Stored?

Hola VPN has a very short and to-the-point privacy policy where everything is outlined properly. As such, I had no issues finding out that there’s not a single bit of information that Hola VPN doesn’t store.

Which Information Is Stored?

Don’t believe me? Feel free to check its privacy policy and you’ll see what I’m talking about. For now, I’ll mention only a few bits of information that Hola VPN stores on its servers.

They include your IP, browsing history, personal info from third-party accounts, apps that are installed on your device, browser type, web pages you visit, timestamps, connection dates, and so much more.

With this information, they can indeed track your browsing activities and easily compromise your privacy. That’s not all, though. Namely, Hola VPN shares the collected information with third-party companies and sells this information to earn revenue.

It’s no wonder it offers a free service with unlimited bandwidth. You might not pay with your money but you DO pay with your privacy and personal information. Checking its no-logs policy, you can see that they also retain all your information “for as long as necessary.”

To be honest, this privacy policy is very concerning to us, and if we’re 100% honest, it sounds a bit frightening. Using a VPN that stores this amount of information is ludicrous, and if you know about it, and you still use it, we don’t know what to tell you.

But having your private information handed out to an untrustworthy company that’s going to sell it to more untrustworthy companies isn’t the happiest solution. That’s why we always prefer having a no-logging policy with at least one audit from KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, Cure53, or any other reputable company.

Connection With Bright Data

Now that I touched on third parties, I briefly mentioned Luminati, also known as Bright Data. Bright Data is a company founded by Ofer Vilenski who is, coincidentally, the founder of Hola VPN as well!

Bright Data does something very malicious and engages in similar practices as its brotherly Hola VPN. The company knows that the desktop and mobile devices we use are sometimes idle and aren’t used during particular periods during the day.

Knowing this, Bright Data makes use of idle computing resources and sells them to other companies and businesses. You’ll agree that this business practice comfortably sits in the illegal category, yet, no one bats an eye about that.

The worst thing is that Hola and Bright Data actually cooperate, with Hola VPN supplying the necessary information. Bright Data now has millions of IP addresses in its possession, through which it harnesses the required resources and sells them as a part of the business.

This is only one example of Hola VPN’s deceptive business practices. Make no mistake – the company IS malicious and doesn’t value your privacy even in the slightest. By earning money through your resources and personal info, we can’t say this company is trustworthy.

And as far as transparency goes, screw that. If someone tells you that he’s going to put a bullet through your skull before he does it, is it going to “hurt” less? Well, we can say the same about Hola VPN.

Besides, its transparency has limits, so don’t believe everything it says. Actually, don’t use it at all – just choose NordVPN or ExpressVPN, both of which have certified no-logs policies with no business practices like Hola VPN. You’ll be much happier.

Hola VPN for Streaming: Netflix & Other Platforms TESTED

If despite its lackluster security and shady business practices, you still intend on using Hola VPN, you’re probably wondering how it’s going to do in terms of streaming. Well, in this Hola VPN review, we’re going to answer this question through several streaming tests.

Does Hola VPN Work on Netflix?

For the majority of people, the most important Hola VPN test will be on Netflix. Does Hola VPN work on Netflix, though? Fortunately, the answer is YES and there’s a simple reason for that.

As said, it doesn’t use traditional servers, so it doesn’t have a problem with Netflix detecting VPN servers and blocking your access. Instead, you’re just using an IP address of a user located in another country, making no use of VPN servers at all.

To prove my point, I tested Hola VPN with Netflix US and I tried to watch Grey’s Anatomy on Netflix. As you can see below, with a US IP, I managed to access the show with no issues.

The same applies to Midnight in the Switchgrass, a movie on Netflix Canada. Below, you can see that it worked perfectly, once I obtained a Canadian IP address.

Finally, I tested Naruto Shippuden on Netflix by using a Japanese IP from Hola VPN. Needless to say, that attempt was successful as well, giving me access to the entire show.

You could say that Hola VPN is a great choice for Netflix, which it surely is. However, having in mind its downright despicable logging practices and no security, is it worth paying the price to be able to watch Netflix movies and shows?

For me certainly not. But if you don’t care about privacy and Hola VPN selling your personal info… who am I to judge you? Go ahead and enjoy!

And What About Other Platforms?

My Hola VPN test and review will also show you if the service works with other streaming platforms. While using the same IP address from before, I tested two American streaming services – Disney+ and Hulu.

Both of them worked, although I didn’t enjoy the best streaming experience due to poor speeds. More about that later. Moving on, I tested BBC iPlayer using the UK server as well, with the results being positive.

Despite my location in Eastern Europe, Hola VPN indeed worked flawlessly.

Finally, I used an Indian IP address to test out Hotstar and see if I can watch its content. Needless to say, because of Hola VPN’s nature, that worked, but with lackluster performance that made streaming not so enjoyable.

Speed Tests: Here’s How Fast Hola VPN Really Is

Now that I touched on performance in my Hola VPN 2024 review, let me tell you how fast or slow it is. Despite its decent streaming capabilities, you’ll find that Hola VPN’s performance is all but satisfactory.

But let me first tell you about my testing parameters. As always, I test each service for 3 days, 3 times a day, using 4 server locations – the UK, the US, Australia, and Japan. Bear in mind my Eastern European location and my native internet speeds that look like this:

Now, with that out of the way, here are the best results I got with Hola VPN:

UK:

US:

Australia:

Japan:

You can clearly see that its speeds aren’t great, even when using the UK server which is somewhat close to me. Compared to ExpressVPN, the fastest VPN, Hola VPN’s speed reduction is very noticeable.

That is further exacerbated when using Australian and Japanese server locations. They drastically decrease overall performance, making it hard to enjoy streaming, downloading, or even browsing more bandwidth-hungry pages and websites.

Simply put, Hola VPN isn’t built for having extremely fast speeds and taking on activities like streaming, torrenting, or gaming (we discuss that in the next section). This provider doesn’t even have a proper VPN network of servers, so it can’t provide impeccable performance.

Therefore, I still recommend ExpressVPN for the best possible performance.

Is Hola VPN Good for Gaming?

Using Hola VPN is great for giving out your personal information to who knows who. Is it great for gaming?

Nope. It’s not.

I mean, you’ve already seen in this Hola VPN test how fast (slow) it really is. Slow speeds and smooth gaming don’t go with each other so well, making Hola VPN an extremely bad VPN for fast-paced games like COD Warzone.

Nevertheless, I tested it on my phone and my PC, and with sky-high ping values, I couldn’t enjoy a single great round of the games I played. Some of you will enjoy cloud gaming on PS Now or GeForce Now but that’s a bit of a stretch for Hola VPN.

Cloud gaming tends to be laggy if your internet connection is average. But when you put Hola VPN on top of that, you get a state-of-the-art recipe for disaster. Seriously, you’ll be hard-pressed to find a VPN worse than Hola for this purpose.

If you’re an avid gamer, I recommend trying out ExpressVPN, NordVPN, or CyberGhost instead. With their great speeds and stable performance, gaming even on more distant servers will be doable. You can also check out Surfshark if you’re interested in another affordable service.

Surfshark isn’t the fastest but its stable connections and WireGuard support will definitely help you play games with no lag compared to Hola VPN.

Can I Use Hola VPN for P2P and Torrenting?

A Virtual Private Network is necessary to make sure that your P2P activities are safe and secure. Hola VPN’s safety and security are not even questionable. We already know how greedy and malicious this company is.

For that very reason, we do NOT recommend using this VPN for torrenting. Because of how much data it stores, you won’t have any protection while downloading torrents. Undoubtedly, Hola VPN will know your browsing and downloading history.

Coupled with the information about your IP, location, timestamps, and whatnot, it can easily give out this information to the authorities upon request. This violates the purpose of using a VPN since Hola behaves pretty much like your ISP.

However, no-logs VPNs like ExpressVPN or CyberGhost are completely different. With no logs stored on their servers, no one can see what you downloaded, when you did it, and from which location the traffic is originating.

Not to mention that Hola VPN is extremely slow, so torrenting will be followed by a humongous speed reduction. That, of course, won’t be the case with the services I mentioned, as they boast much better performance and security, in general.

Is It Working in China & Other Censored Countries?

What about censored countries like China? Is Hola VPN going to work in this country? As you know, the Great Firewall of China is perhaps the strongest firewall in the world. It blocks 8,000+ websites as we speak, including VPN sites and applications.

This is the reason why 90% or more VPNs don’t work in this country. Hola isn’t a traditional VPN, as said in the review, but still, our attempts to use it in this country were futile. We actually tested it through our writers and acquaintances living in China.

All our testers came with poor results, with no one being able to use Hola VPN in the country, even when changing a few settings that were available in the app. However, the good thing is that Hola VPN will work in every other country.

You can use it in Turkey, Russia, the UAE, and anywhere else. That is if you want to use it after reading this Hola VPN review. Keep in mind that the three aforementioned countries are also censored and known for government surveillance.

Therefore, even if Hola VPN works in any of them, we still don’t recommend using it. Hola VPN will store and sell your data either way, so there’s no point in using a provider like this in these countries. That, fortunately, can’t be said about ExpressVPN, NordVPN, or Surfshark.

Servers and Server Locations: Here’s How Big Hola VPN Is

Hola VPN counts millions of users worldwide, so it’s expected that its server fleet is somewhat decent. Let me just mention one more time that this is a P2P-based VPN, so you won’t use any servers here.

Instead, the VPN basically relies on its peers to “make” a server network for you to connect. However, the Hola network doesn’t span the entire earth and there are only certain countries to which you can connect.

At the time of writing the review, there are 41 countries in total, which isn’t a very impressive number, to be honest. The “server” list is unknown because of the absence of real servers.

As stated, it will depend on the number of peers in the network, which are all free users of Hola VPN. Moreover, the countries you’ll get here are mostly European and North American, so the country distribution is poor.

You do get some South American countries like Brazil and Argentina, but there aren’t any African countries. This leads us to the conclusion that, despite its wide P2P network, Hola VPN still isn’t going to give you a lot of countries to choose from.

If you want to be able to choose from nearly 100 countries, we recommend using ExpressVPN. It has 94 countries and 160 locations, making it the most ever-present provider out there. Or, you can simply go for CyberGhost with 9,100+ servers in 91+ countries around the globe.

We also recommend Private Internet Access with 30,000 worldwide servers, albeit, in a bit under 90 countries. Either way, all of these providers offer much broader, more versatile server fleets than Hola VPN ever will.

Customer Support: How to Contact Hola VPN for Help?

One of the worst aspects of Hola VPN is its customer support. There’s no 24/7 live chat support and in this Hola VPN review, I struggled to get a response to any of my questions. The support team takes an eternity to respond and it’s not very helpful.

You get only email support that you can utilize by submitting a request on the site. Once you do that, expect to get a response in 48 to 94 hours if Hola VPN answers your request at all. The best thing here is to go for a self-help method.

That means opening its FAQ and reading through the answered questions to fix the potential issue. Although, the FAQ section isn’t particularly organized and readable, so finding the information you need can be time-consuming.

Hola VPN Pricing: Is It Affordable?

At the start of this Hola VPN review, we stated that we’re talking about a free provider. However, to make matters worse, you can also buy a premium plan that should eliminate the privacy issues we talked about.

But with these kinds of companies, you never know if that’s really the case. What I know for sure is that Hola VPN is VERY, VERY expensive for what it is, with the price significantly higher than ExpressVPN, which is 15 times better.

Look at this. The cheapest premium plan costs $2.99 a month for a 3-year plan, and you get “Fast Connections.” Then, you have the Ultra Premium Plan at $7.99 a month for the same 3-year plan, where they give you “Ultra-Fast Connections.”

Now let’s compare it to CyberGhost which offers much better speeds. It costs around $2.5 a month for a 3-year plan and comes with a 45-day money-back guarantee. ExpressVPN’s 1-year plan has a 49% discount and 3 months free on top of that.

Hence, it costs a measly $6.67 a month, which is, once again, cheaper than Hola VPN. While both VPNs offer a money-back guarantee, Hola VPN mentions nothing about it even on its T&C page.

However, I found that you can request a refund by Google searching “Hola VPN refund.” From there, I managed to submit a refund request even though I haven’t bought the VPN – strange. Besides, Hola VPN never mentions how many days the refund period lasts.

Is it 15, 30, or 45 days? I don’t know. All I know is that you can request a refund. At least that’s something. Hopefully, they’ll give you your money back if you purchased it, and if they don’t respond… well, good luck earning back your money through hard work.

What We Don’t Like About Hola VPN?

Usually, before we wrap up our reviews, we talk about what we don’t like about a certain Virtual Private Network service. In this Hola VPN review for 2024, I think we already clarified what’s good and what’s really bad. I would say that Hola VPN is really bad. Plain and simple.

I do like its easy-to-use application, unlimited bandwidth, and its ability to unblock geo-blocked streaming sites easily. Apart from that, Hola VPN’s biggest downside is the lack of security and privacy, which is the biggest reason I don’t like it.

God forbid getting a premium version of Hola VPN. DO NOT DO IT. It won’t give you more privacy and on top of that, you’ll pay top dollar for the subscription.

How Do Other People Rate Hola VPN?

One thing I find baffling is how well Hola VPN is rated among users online. I don’t know if users are oblivious to its business practices or if they’re paying certain people to do these reviews. Here’s one thing I noticed.

All relevant reviews of Hola VPN on Trustpilot come from people with only one review. And guess what – that one review is exactly the one regarding Hola VPN. As such, Hola VPN has more than 1,000 reviews on Trustpilot with 4.4 out of 5 stars.

The same could be said about Google Play. It seems as though Android users are in love with Hola VPN, giving it an average review of 4.5 stars.

On the Apple Store, however, it has 3.7 stars, which is a bit lower. It looks like iOS users are more privacy-aware and are well-acquainted with Hola’s logging practices.

Conclusion: What’s Not Clear? Skip This VPN!

My Hola VPN review for 2024 is coming to an end with everything I said so far. I think it’s pretty clear what kind of VPN we’re talking about. This is a service with no respect for your security and privacy that should be avoided at all costs.

With poor performance, malicious logging practices, no P2P capabilities, and very few security features, Hola is perhaps the worst VPN you can currently get. While it does work with Netflix and offers easy-to-use apps, it’s not a good trade-off having in mind its security issues.

Bear in mind that many other free VPNs for Windows or any other platform will follow in the same footsteps and this is the main problem with non-paid providers. For these reasons, we recommend premium providers like ExpressVPN, CyberGhost, or NordVPN instead.

They’ll cost you only a few dollars a month, yet, you won’t have any similar issues with them. Thanks to rock-solid security, no-logs policies, and great speeds, any of the 3 VPNs I mentioned will be a much better choice.