Comprehensive Urban VPN Review: Is It Worth It in 2023?

Rob Githinji Last updated: May 2, 2023 Read time: 13 minutes Disclosure
Facts checked by Abeerah Hashim

With unaudited logging policy and log keeping, Urban VPN is the epitome of everything problematic with free VPN providers. A reliable, affordable VPN provider like NordVPN or Surfshark is a much better choice.

The service is a relatively new entrant in the free VPN market, introduced by Urban Cyber Security Inc. in 2018. On the website, the VPN claims to offer good speed, unlimited bandwidth, and completely anonymous connections. However, its use of P2P raises questions, which isn’t common practice among VPNs. So, are these claims valid? We tested it thoroughly to find out the answer to this question. So, here is our unbiased review of Urban VPN to let you know more about it.

Urban VPN key specifications 

Price  Free 
Simultaneous connections Unlimited 
Protocols OpenVPN 
Browser Extensions Yes 
Customer support Email and ticketing system 
No-logs policy Questionable 
Jurisdiction United States 
Network 4572+ servers in 84 locations 
Compatibility Windows, Android, iOS 

Urban VPN pros and cons

Pros Cons 
Boasts a completely free plan Collect and sell user data 
User-friendly interface  No manual server location selection
Decent speed  No kill switch 
Multi-languages support  Not available on all platforms 
A quick and effortless setup process  Lacks essential security and privacy features
No customer support

Urban VPN speed test

Speed is an essential factor to consider when choosing a VPN. Initially, people mainly focused on a VPN’s capability to protect their connections and keep them anonymous. However, speed is equally important these days because of tasks like streaming, gaming, or downloading torrents. So, while working on this in-depth review, we put Urban VPN to the test, and here’s what we observed. 

Speed without a VPN 

First, we recorded our base internet speed before connecting to the VPN. It would be our benchmark to see how Urban VPN affects the speed. 

Note: A VPN encrypts your traffic and routes it through intermediary servers. This adds extra steps between your device and the internet, which is bound to slow down your internet connection.

Download speed (Mbps) Upload speed (Mbps)  Latency (ms)
237.83 350.37 5.2

Speed on a local server 

Below is the speed test results when we connected to a local Urban VPN server. 

Download speed (Mbps) Upload speed (Mbps)  Latency (ms)
228.69 361.72 5.58

As you can see, the drop in download speed is minimal when using a local server. That is because your data packets travel a short distance from your device to the server. 

Strangely, the upload speed increased slightly. Sometimes, internet service providers (ISPs) throttle internet speed to balance bandwidth distribution on the network. A VPN helps to overcome the issue, which may be what happened here.

However, the latency (delay) also increased a bit after connecting to the VPN server. Higher latency means a poor connection

While these results aren’t bad for a free VPN, Urban VPN’s speed unstable and varies a lot, as we’ll discuss later. 

Speed on a distant server

Below is the speed test results when we connected to a distant Urban VPN server.