Is TunnelBear Good for Torrenting in 2024?

TunnelBear works with torrents, but its Canadian jurisdiction casts doubt on its suitability for p2p-related tasks.

Tunnelbear-Torrenting-2020-in-USA

TunnelBear is the best free VPN that allows torrenting on most of its servers, even though it doesn’t have specialized P2P servers. You can download torrents using TunnelBear’s local servers. We have tested 160+ VPNs and recommended the best VPN of 2024.

Torrenting has been around for quite some time now and still remains a highly popular form of filesharing on the web; after all, it is the first place we look for new games, billboard-topping songs, and record-shattering movies.

Nonetheless, much of the content available for torrenting is copyrighted, which obviously calls the legality of the whole p2p culture in question.

Many VPNs shy away from supporting torrenting traffic on their servers for this reason, but TunnelBear supports p2p activities.

In this article, we are going to decide whether you can use TunnelBear Torrenting, and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of TunnelBear as regards torrenting.

How to Use TunnelBear Torrenting

  1. Get TunnelBear.
  2. After installing it on your system/device, launch the VPN.
  3. Connect to a server location such as Switzerland or Netherlands.
  4. Turn on VigilantBear (kill switch).
  5. Now launch your BitTorrent client. You will now be downloading torrents safely.

TunnelBear P2P-Friendly Features

Some of the features that TunnelBear offers facilitate safe and secure torrenting. These include:

Torrent-friendly server locations:

TunnelBear has a small server network, but it does offer server locations where torrenting laws are lenient. These are Netherlands and Switzerland. Users can download torrents while connected to these servers as TunnelBear does not restrict P2P traffic on these servers.

tunnelbear-server-list

If you’re facing any connectivity issues, see the discussion on TunnelBear not working.

Speed:

While writing this blog about TunnelBear Torrenting, we did our latest TunnelBear speed test. When tested on a US server with a 100 Mbps connection, TunnelBear delivered 67.2 Mbps of download speed, which makes for quick p2p downloads.

tunnelbear speed test

Its US server offered the fastest speeds as compared to the other servers

Unfortunately, TunnelBear with Netflix is not a good reliable option, which is a shame because these speeds are good enough for high-quality streams if only the VPN could support unblocking.

VigilantBear (kill switch):

VigiliantBear is the built-in kill switch found in TunnelBear apps. The kill switch comes into action when you lose connection with TunnelBear servers, keeping your IP address and other traffic details from leaking to the world wide web.

tunnelbear kill switch

This is especially important during torrenting because privacy leaks during a P2P session can cause a lot of trouble from a legal standpoint if you’re caught.

Logging policy:

TunnelBear does not log your IP address or traffic activity, so there’s no way a third party could find out if you were using TunnelBear to download torrents.

Pricing:

TunnelBear offers two kinds of services: free and paid. The TunnelBear free trial comes with a 500 MB/month data limit, so that is pretty useless. The paid version costs $4.17/month and this is what you should be used to obtain the best speeds and unlimited torrenting support.

Unfortunately, there is no money-back guarantee so even if you cancel TunnelBear’s paid subscription, your case will be evaluated by the provider to determine if you’re eligible for a refund.

Each TunnelBear subscription comes with 5 simultaneous connections, so you can set up TunnelBear on Kodi and even on a streaming box like Roku.

Cons of TunnelBear Torrenting

There are also some cons to using TunnelBear if you’re a regular downloader of torrents:

Canadian jurisdiction:

Since TunnelBear is headquartered in Canada, it must comply with the laws of the country which are not exactly torrent-friendly. This is a minor problem, however, since TunnelBear does not store any personally identifiable information. Thus, even though TunnelBear has to comply with warrants, they can only disclose information that they store, none of which explicitly reveals user activity.

However, if you put aside jurisdiction for a moment, TunnelBear is indeed a quality VPN provider that can go toe-to-toe against top-class VPN providers such as CyberGhost.

So if the jurisdiction doesn’t matter to you much, you can think about getting TunnelBear. We recently compared the two VPN providers, check out CyberGhost vs TunnelBear comparison for further details.

Are there any alternatives I can use for Torrenting?

Since TunnelBear is based in Canada where DMCA notices can cause a lot of trouble, you might want to look for an alternative. Fortunately, instead of opting for proxies, you can simply choose a different VPN service, one that supports P2P and offers a genuine no-logging policy.

I have personally tried many best VPN for torrenting, therefore, I am going to list a couple of them that offer encryption for P2P traffic as well as a noteworthy amount of VPN servers:

  • PureVPN
  • Surfshark
  • NordVPN

It is also worth mentioning that these VPNs are not only suitable for torrenting but also for a variety of situations like geo-lock bypassing and anti-tracking. Nevertheless, if you are looking for a free VPN provider that offers almost not the same security and anonymity as TunnelBear does for torrenting, then we recommend you take a look at the best free VPN for torrenting in 2024.

Wrapping up

So now you can easily decide whether you can use TunnelBear Torrenting or not. TunnelBear supports torrenting. So, if you’re already a TunnelBear user, you can use it for downloading p2p files. However, it is not the ideal choice due to average speeds and simply because there are much better p2p-friendly options available in the VPN market today.

Therefore, it would be better to use an alternative VPN based in offshore locations, so you can safely download torrents without worrying about receiving DMCA notices out of the blue.

For more information about this VPN, See our TunnelBear review.