Tuxler VPN Review 2025

Tuxler VPN: What You Get for Free

Like any VPN, Tuxler claims to offer better online privacy by encrypting your traffic and changing your IP address to one of its over 300,000 residential IPs.

Tuxler provides residential IP addresses across 116 countries, all accessible even on their free plan. Additionally, they maintain data center IPs in Australia, France, Japan, Poland, and the United States. To put this in perspective, even industry leaders like NordVPN barely beat Tuxler with 127 countries — making Tuxler’s geographic spread surprisingly extensive.

Tuxler VPN does not limit the bandwidth of its free users, unlike the best free VPNs we’ve tested. That means you can browse, download, and stream to your heart’s content. The free tier restricts you to a single device connection and delivers reduced speeds compared to premium accounts — minor trade-offs on paper. However, things get more complicated.

Tuxler Free VPN Is Not as Awesome as It Sounds

The idea of a free VPN maintaining hundreds of thousands of IP addresses across global servers seems financially impossible, because it is. Tuxler actually operates traditional VPN infrastructure in just those five data center locations we mentioned. For context, when we tested HotSpot Shield’s VPN, we could choose from data centers in over 115 locations. So where do those residential IPs come from? They come from users like you.

When you connect to a location through Tuxler, it identifies another active user in that region and routes your traffic through their home internet connection. Meanwhile, your own IP address enters the pool for others to use. Think of it as an involuntary IP address exchange program — except the stakes are much higher than a bad Secret Santa gift.

Is this approach secure? Absolutely not. Consider the bad things someone can do by just knowing your IP address. Now multiply those risks when strangers can actively use your IP as their own. Imagine this scenario: another user visits illegal content or engages in cyber attacks. When law enforcement traces the activity, they’ll find your IP address, potentially making you a suspect in criminal investigations.1

If you’ve already used Tuxler VPN and unknowingly gave your IP address to someone else, we highly suggest you change your IP address as soon as possible. Thankfully, you can change the actual IP address of your computer. This changes your hardware settings to give you a new IP address which is a lot different than hiding your IP address with a VPN.

You can keep your IP address out of Tuxler’s pool but still gain access to its network by paying $7.99 per month for the premium version. The free version clearly poses serious security risks, but can the paid tier salvage Tuxler’s reputation?

Testing Tuxler VPN’s Premium Features

We purchased the premium subscription to thoroughly evaluate Tuxler’s paid offering. Here’s what our comprehensive testing revealed about its capabilities and limitations.

Does Tuxler Have a Kill Switch?

Tuxler lacks a traditional kill switch feature, though its SOCKS5 protocol implementation creates a similar effect. If the VPN connection fails, your device’s internet automatically disconnects. Think of it as an always-on kill switch you can’t control.

This forced protection creates unexpected problems. Since Tuxler routes through other users’ residential connections, your link drops whenever that user goes offline. During testing, we experienced three IP changes within 10 minutes, each causing our internet to disconnect. This caused frustrations when downloading large files, as transfers repeatedly failed and had to restart.

Does Tuxler Use Split Tunneling?

Tuxler doesn’t provide split tunneling functionality. It forces all device traffic through its tunnel. We discovered a workaround using the Tuxler Chrome extension. This secured our browser activity while keeping other applications like Slack outside the VPN connection, allowing smoother video calls and app performance.

Can Tuxler Stream Netflix and Other Services?

Netflix has relaxed its VPN policies, no longer completely blocking detected VPN users. Instead, they restrict content to Netflix Originals and globally licensed titles when VPN usage is detected.2 Since Tuxler uses genuine residential IP addresses, Netflix can’t distinguish you from a regular home user, theoretically granting access to full regional libraries.

Will My IP Address Still be in the Community Pool with Tuxler Premium?

The premium subscription’s main selling point is removing your IP from the shared pool. You can still use others’ addresses, but you don’t have to share yours. However, Tuxler’s lack of transparency about the free plan’s IP sharing scheme raises trust concerns. We question whether they truly honor this privacy promise given their track record.

What VPN Protocols Does Tuxler Use?

Here’s where Tuxler’s true nature becomes clear. It exclusively uses SOCKS5, not legitimate VPN protocols like OpenVPN, WireGuard, or IKEv2/IPSec that industry-standard VPNs employ.

A VPN protocol is a rule set that decides how your traffic is routed from your device, through the VPN tunnel, and to the VPN server — or, in Tuxler’s case, to the residential IP address of an active user.

This is the critical flaw. SOCKS5 is a proxy protocol, not a VPN protocol. Unlike true VPNs that encrypt your traffic, SOCKS5 merely reroutes it. This means your ISP, hackers on public WiFi, or anyone monitoring your connection can still see your actual online activity. Basically, you’re getting anonymity without security.

Is Tuxler truly a VPN or just a proxy service? Given the SOCKS5 protocol, IP pooling system, and residential addresses, we’d classify it as a proxy masquerading as a VPN. That’s a concerning misrepresentation.

Does Tuxler Prevent IP Address Leaks?

When you’re connected to a VPN — or even a proxy — one of the main things it does is hide your IP address. That’s for your privacy.

However, DNS and WebRTC vulnerabilities can expose your real IP address to websites, defeating the entire purpose.

We tested Tuxler using multiple leak detection tools. After connecting to an Australian server, we ran comprehensive leak tests. The results were alarming. Both tools detected our actual IP address and location, not the Australian IP we should have been showing.

Our DNS leak test clearly showed our real location despite being “connected” to Australia through Tuxler. This fundamental failure means Tuxler can’t even deliver basic IP masking, let alone comprehensive privacy protection.

Is Tuxler Fast?

Despite Tuxler’s security failures, we tested its speed performance. If it delivered exceptional speeds, it might have limited use for non-sensitive streaming. After all, casual streaming doesn’t require military-grade encryption.

Our baseline network speed measured 334 Mbps download and 178 Mbps upload. After connecting to Tuxler, speeds surprisingly jumped to 444 Mbps download and 271 Mbps upload.

These results immediately raised red flags. VPNs inherently slow connections due to encryption and routing overhead. They never increase speeds. Further investigation revealed the truth. Tuxler wasn’t actually routing our traffic at all. Even Speedtest by Ookla detected our real IP during testing, confirming Tuxler’s complete failure to function as advertised.

The Bottom Line: Is Tuxler Safe to Use?

Tuxler fails as both a VPN and a security tool. The free version endangers users by sharing their IP addresses with strangers — a massive privacy violation. The premium version, despite its price tag, provides neither proper encryption nor reliable IP masking.

For fast, secure, and reliable VPN options, check out our list of the best VPNs, where you’ll find 13 of the most powerful VPNs we’ve tested. Also check out our NordVPN review and Surfshark review, both of which scored the highest ratings in our testing.