An old brand, and who has it now
StrongVPN started in 2005. In an industry where most recognisable names are younger than a decade, twenty years of continuous operation is genuinely unusual and worth acknowledging. It predates the modern consumer VPN market entirely.
It has changed hands along the way. It is now owned by Ziff Davis, the listed media and internet group, which also owns IPVanish and Encrypt.me. Three VPN brands, one parent.
That is the fact this review is organised around, because it is the fact a buyer is least likely to know and most likely to be affected by.
Why shared ownership matters to you
Search for a VPN recommendation and you will find lists placing StrongVPN and IPVanish as separate options, sometimes at different positions, sometimes with one described as the alternative to the other. Presented that way, they look like a choice.
They are not a choice in the sense that matters. If your reason for picking a VPN includes anything about who the company is, its jurisdiction, its incentives or its legal exposure, then StrongVPN and IPVanish give you the same answer, because there is one company behind both. Switching from one to the other because you read something concerning about the first accomplishes nothing.
This is precisely why our ownership explorer exists, and why Ziff Davis appears there alongside Kape Technologies, which owns ExpressVPN, CyberGhost and Private Internet Access as well as three of the largest VPN review sites. The industry’s concentration is not obvious from the outside and it is not disclosed in the places people look.
Ziff Davis, to be fair, does not own VPN review sites, which is a meaningfully better position than Kape’s. The concern here is duplication in comparison lists rather than a conflict of interest in the reviews themselves.
United States jurisdiction
Strong Technology, LLC is American, and the United States is a founding Five Eyes member with broad legal instruments for compelling service providers, including some that restrict a company from disclosing that a demand was made.
There is no data retention requirement for VPNs in the United States, so a provider that genuinely keeps no logs has little to produce. That is the standard and correct rebuttal, and it depends entirely on the logging claim being true, which brings us to the next section.
No audit, after twenty years
There is no published no-logs audit.
For a two-decade-old brand owned by a listed parent with the resources to commission one, this is a real gap. NordVPN has been audited repeatedly. Proton and Mullvad publish audits and open-source their apps. Surfshark and even the much smaller hide.me have commissioned no-logs audits.
An unaudited logging claim in a Five Eyes jurisdiction is the weakest combination of the two properties, and it is why StrongVPN sits where it does on our privacy ranking.
What it costs
| Plan | Intro | Renewal | True cost per month over 3 years |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $11.99 | $11.99 | $11.99 |
| 1 year | $79.99 | $79.99 | about $6.67 |
The low monthly figure in the advertising comes from a first-term promotion. At roughly $6.67 a month over three years this is not a cheap provider, and it is more than Surfshark, Proton VPN or hide.me cost over the same period, each of which offers more.
Features
Twelve simultaneous connections, which is generous and is the best practical reason to choose it. WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2. Split tunnelling. Router and television support, which is well documented and genuinely good, a legacy of the brand’s age. Live chat.
Around 950 servers in 30 countries, which is small for the price. No obfuscation, no multi-hop, no port forwarding, no Tor integration. Streaming is inconsistent across services.
The absence of obfuscation excludes it from the censored countries covered on this site, in the same way it excludes Bitdefender VPN and FastestVPN.
The iPhone app
The iOS app has a moderate App Store rating on a sample of several thousand ratings, below the leading providers and well above the worst. Our App Store analysis publishes a score only when Apple’s review feed returns a large enough sample, and it had not at the last collection. When it does, a panel will appear here and on our iPhone rankings.
Where it lands
StrongVPN is a working, unremarkable VPN with an unusually long history and an owner most buyers do not know about. If twelve devices and good router documentation are what you need, and jurisdiction does not concern you, it does the job.
If you are choosing on privacy, the combination of American jurisdiction and no audit puts it behind most of this catalogue, and the shared ownership with IPVanish means it does not even function as a hedge against that company.
What we have not tested
We have not run our own speed, leak or censorship tests on StrongVPN. Its scores marked pending stay pending until we have.