CyberGhost 7 review: A great choice for streaming overseas

We haven’t looked at Romania-based CyberGhost since version 5 in early 2018. CyberGhost is on to version 7 now, with a whole new look, more servers, and more country locations. Overall, it’s still the same great service with solid speeds, and the ability to get around regional restrictions of all kinds of streaming services including Netflix, Hulu, and others.

Many people prefer CyberGhost thanks to the fact that it operates in Romania, which is well outside of the so-called Five Eyes, Nine Eyes, and Fourteen Eyes intelligence alliances. If that concerns you then I suppose CyberGhost is a good fit. Before you get all paranoid about your browsing habits, however, consider the online services you currently have. If you use Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo for email, or put your documents in Dropbox, Google Drive, or OneDrive there’s a lot more to worry about than your browsing habits if you’re really concerned about western intelligence spying on your stuff.

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Privacy considerations aside, CyberGhost is a good choice for keeping your data secure over open Wi-Fi and streaming your favorite shows overseas.

Note: This review is part of our best VPNs roundup. Go there for details about competing products and how we tested them.

CyberGhost: Security, software, servers, and speed

CyberGhost uses IKEv2 as its preferred VPN protocol, but unlike its Windows counterpart there are no settings to choose a different option such as OpenVPN. For data encryption it uses AES-256, authentication is handled by TLS, and the handshake uses TLS v1.2 and a certificate signed with SHA-256.

CyberGhost’s privacy policy says it does not log any user data including browsing history, data content, connection logs, IP address, timestamps, or session duration. It does, however, log connection attempts and successful connections in aggregate form.

For country connections, you’ve got 60 countries to choose from and more than 3,700 servers.

When you first start up CyberGhost you’re presented with a single-panel interface that makes it easy to just click and go if all you want is the fastest possible server. If you want to choose a different location or a streaming-specific server, however, you can expand the window into a larger interface.

CyberGhost breaks down its servers by favorites, all servers, servers for downloading, or servers for streaming. Each country in the All servers section shows your approximate distance from each location and the load in percentage. Click the arrow to the far right of each country, and you can dive into every server available in that country. Here again, you’ll see distance and server load.

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Beyond the server listings, CyberGhost 7 for Mac also has a Connection features section where you can turn on a variety of features all of which are disabled by default. These include an ad blocker, malicious websites filter, data compression, online tracker blocking, and an automatic HTTPS redirect. There’s also a Smart rules section for whitelisting known Wi-Fi networks if you want CyberGhost to automatically connect on startup when not on a trusted network.

CyberGhost supports up to seven simultaneous connections with apps for iOS, Android, and Windows in addition to macOS.

In our tests, CyberGhost maintained about 36 percent of the base speed across five locations.

CyberGhost pricing

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CyberGhost will set you back $13 a month if you want to pay month-to-month. A yearly commitment will cost $72, or you can get two for about $89, or three-years for $100. CyberGhost accepts payments via credit card, PayPal, or cryptocurrency via BitPay.

Bottom line

CyberGhost is a good service with a lot to offer people interested in breaking down regional restrictions for streaming services. It’s also got a pretty solid country selection and the privacy promises are right. You can definitely find cheaper services, but few with the range of streaming options that CyberGhost has and the higher number of simultaneous device connections.

Editor’s note: Because online services are often iterative, gaining new features and performance improvements over time, this review is subject to change in order to accurately reflect the current state of the service. Any changes to text or our final review verdict will be noted at the top of this article.