CyberGhost VS Hide My Ass

It can be difficult to choose between the more prominent VPN services as they tend to mirror each other in their features and price. Some aren’t above exaggerating their abilities in order to grab a little more market share. The only real way to find out where they differ is to test them side-by-side — which is exactly what we’ve done with CyberGhost and Hide My Ass (now known as HMA). Find out what we discovered below.

Highlights

CyberGhost vs HMA pricing

Given the above, we can see that CyberGhost is more expensive for a short-term subscription (i.e., one month). However, if you choose to go long-term, the gap narrows quite a bit. And if you go for CyberGhost’s three-year plan, you’ll be paying significantly less than what it would cost you for HMA’s three-year subscription.

Their respective money-back guarantees are also a bit of a mixed bag. CyberGhost’s refund policy is 14 days for monthly subscriptions and extends this to 45 days for all other subscriptions. In contrast, HMA provides a 30-day money-back guarantee with all its subscriptions.

CyberGhost vs HMA features

Both VPN providers are comparable in terms of compatibility. CyberGhost gets the edge for its dedicated Amazon Fire app and set-top box support. It also provides more free extras, such as ad-blocking and malware scanning – which is not available with HMA.

Both providers also support split tunneling, albeit in a limited fashion. With CyberGhost, you get the Exceptions feature. This allows you to specify certain websites that will not use the VPN tunnel. This option is only available when using OpenVPN.

HMA, for its part, supports “full” split tunneling insofar that you can specify which apps use the VPN tunnel and which ones do not. However, the feature is only available on Android for some reason.

Both providers also provide Chrome browser extensions, but CyberGhost goes the extra mile and also provides a Firefox browser extension.

Regarding the number of simultaneous connections, HMA offers 5-device or 10-device plans. The latter is, of course, more expensive than the former. CyberGhost, on the other hand, provides a generous seven simultaneous connections with all of its plans.

Streaming capabilities

HMA works well with Netflix US – and that’s pretty much it. So if you’re big on streaming over VPN, this likely won’t be enough for you.

CyberGhost’s streaming support is essentially night and day with HMA. CyberGhost supported every streaming site we threw at it.

Both VPN services provide sublists of servers based on what you want to accomplish.

Clicking For Streaming on the left-side of CyberGhost’s app displays all of its dedicated streaming servers. It even lists the services for which the server is optimized. With HMA, we get roughly the same thing by clicking Streaming on the left side of the app. The sublist of supported servers will be displayed, but with fewer details (the compatible streaming services are not listed).

Which of these VPNs work in China?

Neither CyberGhost nor HMA work reliably from China. CyberGhost stated that its software rarely works in China and that the issue goes beyond simply bypassing the Great Firewall. Its Support team told Comparitech that there are even some Chinese ISPs that block access to CyberGhost’s website altogether. That makes even installing CyberGhost’s app a technical challenge.

Things aren’t much better with HMA. While there’s a chance you may be able to connect from China, HMA does not guarantee access from restricted jurisdictions. You can test your luck, but if you need a VPN that can consistently work in China, you should look at other VPN providers that work in China.

Setup and interface

CyberGhost’s desktop app is well-designed and easy to navigate. When selecting servers, you can search by region or select a task from the left-hand side of the app to get a subset of servers optimized for the chosen task.

While different, HMA’s app adopts a similar design philosophy, allowing you to choose servers based on location or by specifying a task on the left. Like CyberGhost’s app, this lists the optimized servers for the selected task.

Both apps provide users with a Settings page to customize the app to their needs. CyberGhost’s settings are more comprehensive than HMA’s, but that isn’t necessarily bad. It really depends on the type of VPN user you are. Many will prefer to keep things simple.

CyberGhost and HMA provide mobile apps for iOS and Android. And both are straightforward and adapted to smaller screens.

Servers and performance

CyberGhost provides its users with more servers than HMA. HMA has servers in more countries but, on the whole, operates far fewer servers than CyberGhost. Which offer is better? That will depend on whether you prefer more servers or more locations.

Below is a list of countries that displays where each provider hosts VPN servers:

Security

CyberGhost supports OpenVPN, WireGuard, and IKEv2. All three of these VPN protocols are considered very secure. For its part, HMA supports OpenVPN (very secure), but only on Windows and Android. macOS and iOS users must opt for IKEv2/IPSec.

Both services use 256-bit AES encryption and 4096-bit RSA keys with OpenVPN (as well as with IKEv2, for CyberGhost). WireGuard uses different ciphers that are deemed very secure too.

Both providers include a kill switch in their apps and their own DNS servers inside the VPN tunnel.

Privacy

CyberGhost is based in Romania, which does not have mandatory data retention laws. And while CyberGhost does collect limited connection logs for statistical purposes, that data cannot be used to identify an individual user.

Beyond that, CyberGhost adheres to a robust no-logging policy — verified through an independent audit — and does not log any of your activities. So even if it were under legal pressure, it could not hand over what it doesn’t have in the first place. You can also sign-up using a disposable email address and pay using bitcoin for maximum privacy.

With HMA, things are a little bit different. The service is based in the UK, which is a Five Eyes nation. That theoretically means that other Five Eyes nations could collect information on a UK national and subsequently share that information with the UK government.

Both providers have in the past been tied to some rather dodgy privacy practices. HMA was previously in hot water when, in 2020, it was revealed that its parent company, Avast, was selling user browsing data. Prior to that, in 2011, it was revealed that HMA handed over IP logs to law enforcement, which led to the arrest of a LulzSec hacker.

It has since updated its privacy policy to make it clear that this is no longer occurring and now conforms to a solid no-logging policy. Like CyberGhost, it still collects limited connection logs. But, again, this data could not be used to single out an individual user.

In regards to CyberGhost, its parent company, Kape, was caught distributing malware in 2021. That’s definitely not what you want from your VPN provider…

Both CyberGhost and HMA have since cleaned up their act and both provide private and secure VPN services today, although CyberGhost may have the edge in terms of security.

Configuration

Both CyberGhost and HMA give shared IP addresses to their users. That means all users connecting to a given VPN server will share the same IP address (the server’s IP address) as they go about their business on the internet. Shared IP addresses are better for user privacy as they make it more difficult (if not impossible) to correlate the traffic from that IP address to a specific user.

Unlike HMA, CyberGhost comes with ad and malware blocking capabilities. This is done using DNS blackholing, where DNS requests are referenced against a list of known ad networks and malware distributing domains and blocked whenever they match. This enables CyberGhost users to browse the web with far fewer ads and tracking, and enhance their protection against malware. Good stuff.

Customer service

CyberGhost and HMA both provide live chat and email support. CyberGhost also has a ticket system in place for Support issues. They also both provide a searchable knowledge base and several FAQs for the most common issues users may face.

To test each provider’s response time with Support emails, we sent three questions to each provider in three separate emails. The first two questions are pretty generic and common, so there’s a good chance their respective Support department would have a canned response for those (nothing wrong with that). The third question isn’t as straightforward to answer. We did that to try and see how they handle vague  questions that require explanations.

The results are below:

At the time of writing, roughly 24 hours after sending my Support emails to both providers, I only received responses from CyberGhost. Not only that, but two out of three questions were answered in under an hour. The remaining question was answered in 1 hour and 5 minutes. That’s an excellent response time.

The answers I received were always polite and clear, and they all directly answered my questions. Each response from CyberGhost also asked me if there was anything else they could help me with. CyberGhost’s Support is quite simply fantastic.

I don’t want to come down too hard on HMA. While it has been 24 hours, and I haven’t gotten a response, it may well come later. Assuming HMA answers my questions within 48 hours, that’s still not bad. However, 48 hours is a long time to wait if you’ve got issues that prevent you from connecting to its VPN network. I’ll update this section if I get a response within 72 hours.

But regardless of whether or not that happens, CyberGhost still takes it, hands down, regarding the quality of the Support it provides its users. Its response time (as well as its responses) was stellar.

The winner

CyberGhost

While neither of these two services is bad, we feel that CyberGhost has the edge over HMA. On almost every front, CyberGhost manages to outperform HMA. CyberGhost supports more devices, operates more servers, and works with many more streaming sites. Additionally, its privacy practices are more robust, and its Support is excellent.

You could do much worse than subscribing to HMA. Easily. However, given the above results, I recommend CyberGhost over HMA.