NoodleVPN review

NoodleVPN is a VPN vendor that has been around since 2010. It doesn’t offer much information on its website, but it does provide a capable VPN service that delivers strong speeds at an affordable price.

The provider may also be in the process of changing its name, since its Windows and Android apps are both called “NiceVPN”.

Price

This VPN can be yours for as little as $1/month, charged at $12 every twelve months, which is seriously cheap.

There is no free trial or refund policy, but the price for a one-month subscription is so low ($2) that it wouldn’t hurt to pay, even if it’s just to try out the service. There’s also a 6-month option that costs $9 (or $1.5/month).

Payment is possible via PayPal, PerfectMoney, Bitcoin and Tether. That said, getting your hands on the service is more complicated than it should be, because you're required to email the provider for confirmation after you make your payment.

Under one account, you can run only one VPN connection at a time.

Alternatives

Although it features low rates, nice speeds and some geo-unblocking capabilities, NoodleVPN is inferior to some of its competitors in various areas.

First of all, it doesn’t have any sort of a free trial or money-back guarantee, whereas CyberGhost offers a generous 45-day refund policy. It also doesn’t have a lot of usable information about its own platform, while the likes of NordVPN makes a point of ensuring total transparency.

ExpressVPN, meanwhile, is way more expensive, but offers thousands of servers, feature rich apps, world-beating customer service and more.

Streaming

NoodleVPN may be lacking in some areas, but being able to bypass geographical restrictions imposed on the likes of Netflix, Hulu, or BBC iPlayer isn’t one of them. We were easily able to access whatever content we wanted, although not on every server.

About the company

We couldn’t find any information about the location of this VPN provider, but its Android app page has a link for the developer's website, which is in Persian.

The original website is unclear about the precise number of servers and locations, stating in one place that it has 1,300+ servers and 5,600+ in another. These servers are available in 71 locations in 59 countries, including Argentina, Costa Rica, Poland, Ukraine, Albania, Georgia, North Macedonia, Iceland, Vietnam, Thailand, Turkey, India, South Africa, and others.

That said, when we signed up for the service, we only got access to servers in the Netherlands, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the United States and Canada.

Privacy and encryption

According to the website, the provider uses PPTP, L2TP, Kerio, Cisco VPN, Ikev2, SSL Tunnel, OpenVPN, IPSec, WireGuard, and OpenConnect connection options, with no information about the level of encryption. That said, we only got connection details for L2TP and IPSec, while the apps also use PPTP.

The website claims there’s a kill switch, but we failed to find any evidence of one inside the apps.

From what we could deduce from the blog, torrenting is allowed on servers in the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and Canada.

We managed to find a Privacy Policy for NiceVPN, the application we received a link to after signing up. It states the app doesn’t “keep logs of your online activities and never associate any domains, or applications that you access while the VPN is connected with you, your device, or your email.”

It does, however, collect log data that may include your device’s IP address, “device name, operating system version, the configuration of the app when utilizing Our Service, the time and date of your use of the Service, and other statistics.”

Support

Judging by its website, NoodleVPN is supposed to have apps for Windows, iOS, Android, and Mac devices. However, when we received the welcoming email with the sign-up credentials and download links, we realized there were no download links for iOS and Mac apps.

Additionally, the Android app redirected us to the page for an app called “NiceVPN” which, at the time of writing, had been installed over 10,000 times, and had been rated with 4.1 stars (out of 5) by 513 users. Clicking the developer’s link in the Google Play store led to a website in Persian.

The website also hints that NoodleVPN supports manual installation on Windows, iPhone, iPad, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows phone, wireless modems, Mac, Mikrotik and Linux. The manual configurations use the L2TP protocol.

Should you require assistance, you can contact customer support via ticket, email, Twitter or Facebook. We contacted customer support via email and got a fast response the first time, but had to wait for a while for an answer to an inquiry about the broken Windows app download link. We’re also still waiting for the answers to our more general questions.

Some information is available on the provider’s blog. You can also try the knowledgebase, but it has barely any useful material.

Speed and experience

NoodleVPN is far from the easiest VPN we had ever used. Its problems begin as soon as you sign up and purchase the service, after which you need to inform customer support so they can send through your VPN credentials. You’re then supposed to download and install the Windows or Android app or set up your iOS or Mac device manually with the help of the configuration options and instructions.

We tested the servers on a 55Mbps testing connection and were pleasantly surprised with the performance. A server in France delivered an amazing 37.27Mbps, one in Germany gave us a decent 15.61Mbps and another server in the UK delivered 20.83Mbps.

We were also impressed with the performance of servers in the US and Canada, which gave us 10.88Mbps and 15.12Mbps respectively.

Verdict

NoodleVPN has some advantages: it costs next-to-nothing, provides excellent download speeds, supports torrenting on specific servers and unblocks popular geo-restricted streaming content.

However, it has hardly any clear and usable information on its website, lacks apps or support for any platform that isn’t Android or Windows and offers no free trial or money-back guarantee.