FinchVPN Review In France 2023 – Free, But Is It Safe to Use?

On paper, it won’t seem too bad. That’s because FinchVPN offers decent encryption, quick connections, and an efficient ad blocker in France. But, it has more flaws than these features. To start, it lacks advanced features like a kill switch, leak protection, and RAM-only servers, which are crucial for all VPN users in France. Moreover, it logs your IP address.

That’s not all. It doesn’t unblock any of the top streaming platforms in France, including Netflix, Hulu, or Prime Video, and supports P2P in only a single server location. This is just the start of all its cons. We tore the VPN down and tested every part before reaching our conclusion. Find all our testing, processes, and results in the FinchVPN review in France below!

Plans & Pricing in France

FinchVPN brings an affordable pricing plan to the table in France. It offers a freemium VPN service with 3 different pricing plans. Let’s have a look at the pricing of FinchVPN in France:

• Free: This plan is as low as $0.00/mo.
• Pro: This plan costs as low as $3.22/mo.
• Premier: This plan costs as low as $4.84/mo.

Every plan has its pros and cons.

While the Pro plan favors light surfers, the Premier offers full-fledged benefits, including unlimited bandwidth, port forwarding, and PPTP support. The price is undoubtedly very affordable in France, but ExpressVPN offers great features.

They have a strict NO refund policy which is a bit of a letdown.

Payment Methods

It was fascinating to see that FinchVPN has more than 80 international payment methods. You will never have to worry about how to send payments to FinchVPN in France now.

Here is a glimpse of these international payment methods so you can register to FinchVPN at your convenience:

1. Visa
2. MasterCard
3. Amex
4. PayPal
5. Bank Transfer and more
6. Bitcoin

Most importantly, FinchVPN accepts anonymous payments from Bitcoin, ensuring premium anonymity to subscribers. The provider also accepts payments from the following payment modes currently, so you can get the FinchVPN premium account easily if you want.

Security – Is FinchVPN Safe In France?

FinchVPN offers the following industry-standard security features in France: AES 128-bit encryption. Even though we prefer using AES 256-bit encryption, which militaries and banks use, AES 128-bit is still pretty secure.

However, it doesn’t offer a kill switch to users in France, which is certainly a drawback. This feature is pretty essential for all VPN users as it shuts down your internet if the VPN connection drops, so their activities remain secure. However, with FinchVPN, you continue using the internet even if you’re somehow disconnected from the VPN server.

It does come with an ad-blocker in France – a feature that blocks all advertisements over the internet. We tested this ad-blocking feature by visiting a few ad-heavy sites, including Ookla’s speed test tool, and found most ads to be blocked. Compared to premium options like Surfshark and PIA, FinchVPN’s ad-blocker is still not as efficient as it should be.

Additionally, the FinchVPN premium account currently offers PPTP and OpenVPN protocols, among which the former is outdated and unsafe. This is why we recommend you never use it. In comparison, OpenVPN is pretty fast and safe in France.

FinchVPN Review In France: Speed & Performance

In this FinchVPN review in France, we concluded that its server speed is too slow. We conducted multiple speed tests on its servers in 6 countries to determine the average speeds of the VPN.

Our download speed before we connected FinchVPN in France was around 91 Mbps. But once we connected to its US – Los Angeles server, we noticed a decline in speed, and it went down to 48.36 Mbps. Not impressive. We could only load videos on YouTube and watch the without any lags.

Here is the screenshot of the result:

We faced a speed drop of 52% in our download speeds using this VPN in France.

We also connected to its server in the Netherlands and got a download speed of 34.12 Mbps. That’s significantly worse than the local server. With these speeds, we faced multiple lags and buffering issues and could barely access sites.

We got a speed drop of 67% while using our 100 Mbps connection in France.

If you want quick connections, you should look for the fastest VPN services in France.

FinchVPN Review In France – Servers & IP Addresses

FinchVPN offers 13 servers in 6 countries, including the US, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Malaysia, and Singapore. There aren’t many servers, as you may know already and it also lacks obfuscated servers. This is quite a disappointment as users always want more servers to access geo-restricted streaming platforms in France easily.

Only a few VPNs possess this feature, but unfortunately, FinchVPN doesn’t. If you want a VPN with an extensive network of servers, then we suggest you get ExpressVPN. This VPN offers 3000+ servers in 105 countries, which is WAY more than most VPNs in France in the industry.

FinchVPN Review In France – Streaming & Torrenting

FinchVPN is a bad virtual private network for streaming or torrenting in France. That’s because it doesn’t work with any of the popular streaming platforms in France, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Max, Hulu, and Disney+. Moreover, we’re not sure we can trust FinchVPN for torrenting in France because it doesn’t offer a kill switch and is known to log your IP address.

When working on FinchVPN Review in France, we tried to connect to US Netflix in France from FinchVPN’s US server, but we were not able to unblock the streaming website’s US library. We also tried to connect with different US servers and the results were the same. If you need a VPN for the sole purpose of unblocking Netflix, then you need the best VPN for Netflix in France.

Moreover, not all FinchVPN’s servers are P2P optimized for torrenting. It reveals that only its Netherlands server is P2P optimized. So, if you live outside Europe, you’re bound to have really slow speeds. For instance, it took us 10 minutes to download a 0.5 GB file which was hardly impressive.

Leaks – Does FinchVPN Leak IP, DNS, & WebRTC In France?

Since FinchVPN doesn’t offer a leak protection feature in France, we found it to be leaking our actual IP/DNS on multiple occasions. First, we connected to its Australian server that we tested for leaks. Here is the screenshot of the results:

IP Leak:

This was a bit concerning for us.

DNS Leak Test:

Our DNS remained safe with this VPN in France.

WebRTC Test:

This ensured that we can use our browsers for anything safely in France.

Virus Test:

We found 1 virus that goes by the name ‘Riskware agent.’ This is why it is risky to download the Windows client that is provided on their website.

Here is the proof:

After this, we weren’t very sure about using this VPN in France.

Trustworthiness – Logs and Customer Support

FinchVPN keeps connection logs but doesn’t store your usage logs in France. Its privacy policy was last updated 3 years ago so nothing has changed.

FinchVPN collects the following information from users in France:

• Username
• Name
• Email Address
• Password (encrypted)
• IP address

An IP address is something very critical to your online privacy and FinchVPN stores that information. However, it makes it very clear what important data it doesn’t collect:

“We do not store details of, or monitor, the websites you connect to when using our VPN service”

Having said that, the internet traffic that is routed from their server is completely anonymous. Have a look at the VPNs that don’t store logs in France.

FinchVPN Customer Support

FinchVPN has decent customer support, but still, there is a lack of a live chat feature. It currently has Email support, Ticket-based support, a Discussion group, and a Facebook page.

However, we couldn’t find its live chat anywhere on the website. Both ticketing and email banners only directed us to empty pages. We messaged them on their Facebook page, but they never responded to us.

Even though the website offers a few configuration guides, no troubleshooting methods are available. And since their live chat is nowhere to be found, you’re pretty much stuck if you face any issues. Instead, most premium VPNs in France like ExpressVPN offer super-responsive customer chat support and email support.

Device Compatibility In France

With FinchVPN, you don’t get native VPN apps, and its Android and iOS counterparts don’t work in France. You are required to use OpenVPN on Windows and macOS in order to use its servers. We conducted FinchVPN app reviews in France and got the following results: 

FinchVPN desktop apps in France

After we logged in to FinchVPN in France, it turned out that the Windows and macOS clients of this VPN are not as glossy as the apps of some other VPN providers. Instead, it is a throwback to the early days when VPN apps were more text-filled and less pleasing to the eyes.

By the looks of it, it’s quite outdated.

Moreover, they require the OpenVPN configuration. But, they were easy to find VPN servers and connect to them, and equally simple to enable an ad-blocker.

With all this, the Windows app has an Anti-DPI feature that protects your connection from Deep Packet Inspection, making you untraceable on the web.

If you are wondering, how to use FinchVPN in France on a PC, then this really shouldn’t be a problem as the Windows app is simple to use. You just have to choose the protocol, port, and server, and press “connect”. You can leave the protocol and port settings to default if you have no clue what these settings are.

There are, however, some issues with the client. Sometimes it fails to connect and the interface freezes for frustrating lengths of time. Also, the app has no kill switch feature to prevent an IP leak in case the connections drop for any reason.

Despite all this, we enjoyed using the software, but these are errors that definitely need to be addressed by the company.

FinchVPN mobile apps in France

While testing FinchVPN on Android and iOS in France, we were able to install the VPN within 1 minute. But as it seems, the apps are a work in progress.

The Android app in France would barely work on our device.

We made several attempts to run this app but unfortunately, it failed in every instance. Moreover, once we did after several tries, we couldn’t connect to any FinchVPN servers after importing the OpenVPN files on Android in France.

The design of the app is somewhat comparable to the Windows client and it provides similar options. But none of that matters because the app does not work at all. Anyway, after conducting this FinchVPN app review in France, we hope the provider brings some much-needed updates to this app and makes it capable of securing Android devices.

Also, you can explore our detailed guide on the best VPNs for Android in France to uncover more popular VPNs.

Jurisdiction

FinchVPN is based in Malaysia, which is a good thing because it does not fall under 5 Eyes, 9 Eyes, and 14 Eyes country. This is to convey to our readers that if a company falls under 14 Eyes intelligence-sharing nations, then these companies would be bound by law to share users’ information if demanded by authorities.

Since FinchVPN isn’t bounded by law, you’re safe.

FAQs – FinchVPN Review In France

Do We Recommend FinchVPN In France?

No, we do not recommend this VPN in France. FinchVPN has a free and premium version, but it doesn’t offer exciting features even for a free VPN. For starters, it doesn’t unblock Netflix or have live chat support, and its servers aren’t fast enough to let you stream buffer-free videos.

We know it’s too much to ask for in a freemium VPN, but it’s a matter of users’ online privacy and the overall experience of streaming when we performed the FinchVPN review in France. With that in mind, we wouldn’t recommend FinchVPN in France at all.