By: Tamara | Last updated August 15, 2020 
ZenMate is a VPN service developed by a company in Germany. The company is relatively new on the market. It’s only been around since 2014. ZenMate is based in Berlin and even though it is a new comer in this industry, it shows a lot of prospect and has managed to attract a lot of customer in this short time. ZenMate boasts on being used by more than 47 million users worldwide.
What are the features of ZenMate?
One of the reasons why ZenMate is this popular is the fact that in addition to the paid plans it offers, it also has a free package. The free plan is indeed limited, but it is no less secure than its paid counterparts.
Free plan
The free plan offered by ZenMate requires only an account on your part to be able to enjoy the VPN free of charge. You have to create an account by providing a valid e-mail address and a password and by agreeing to their terms of service. It is as easy as that.
The free plan only gives you access to 4 locations although ZenMate has servers in more than 30 countries around the world. However, the rest of the servers are only available to those who sign up for a paid plan.
You’ve got a maximum speed of 2 MB/s and the VPN will only work on Chrome, Opera and Firefox. P2P and torrent support are not included and there will be annoying ads you have to deal with. On a better note though, even the free plan comes with ZenMate’s 100% no logs policy.
Why should you choose a paid VPN instead of a free one?
Reputable providers such as ZenMate and others, are trust-worthy enough even when it comes to using their free plan. However, this is not the case with all the free VPN providers on the market. In many cases, that 100% no logs policy is not guaranteed and the company might track your activity and sell your personal data to third-parties for advertising purposes. That kind of makes sense if you think about it, though, because they have to make money somehow, if not by charging you directly.
Another drawback of free VPNs is the fact that they are extremely limited, as even ZenMate clearly proves it. Free VPNs are usually slower in speed, they give you only a few options in terms of servers you can connect to (even if the company has hundreds or even thousands of servers spread across the globe) and they usually come with limitations in bandwidth. That limit is usually set on a monthly basis and differs from provider to provider, but it’s nevertheless annoying.
Another disadvantage of free VPNs is that they can be more susceptible to online threats than paid VPNs, because the first ones use weaker protection tools.
Aside from the free plan and also a free 7-day trial offered by ZenMate, this provider includes pretty much all the features you need in a VPN:
- ZenMate allows up to 5 devices at a time
- This VPN takes pride in its 100% no logs policy
- ZenMate has servers in over 30 countries worldwide (a large part of Europe, South Africa, US, UK, Canada, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, Rusia and many other)
- Available apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Chrome, Opera, Firefox
- Military grade security features, including AES 256-bit encryption on its desktop and mobile apps, a kill switch feature, DNS leak protection, the TLS 1.2 (RFC 5246) protocol, the Identity Shield feature, which informs you if your e-mail address has been breached
- ZenMate is P2P and torrenting friendly
- ZenMate works with Netflix and other geo-restricted platforms
- ZenMate has a very simple and straightforward interface
- ZenMate has impressive speeds
As we’ve already mentioned it, ZenMate has a free plan and a free 7-day trial. As far as the paid plans go, there are 3 types of subscriptions you can choose from and they all come with a 30-day money back guarantee: a 1-month subscription, a 1 year subscription and a 2 years subscription.
The 1 month plan is priced at $9.99/month.
The 1 year plan is priced at $3.99/month.
The 2-year plan is priced at $2.05/month.
As for payment methods, there are many methods available, from credit cards to PayPal and GiroPay.
The only area in which ZenMate could use improvement is customer support. Even though response times are quite decent, you can only contact ZenMate’s support team via their contact form. There is no phone or live chat support available.
