There is not any scarcity of VPNs and proxy companies as of late, and each nook of the web is suffering from advertisements for a similar. I am cynical of VPNs as a rule, so after I was requested to check out Lantern, I went in with a good quantity of skepticism. The service has seen plenty of momentum in international locations like Iran in latest months, and has amassed 10 million downloads on the Play Retailer globally, with over 8 million customers in Iran. The essential premise of Lantern is that it offers entry to blocked web sites, and it guarantees to take action even when conventional VPNs go down.
That’s an space the place Lantern is totally different; it is not a full-fledged VPN that creates a tunnel to a different area and serves knowledge from that nation. As a substitute, it’s a proxy service that goals to unblock web sites which were focused for shutdown in authoritative regimes. I talked to the parents behind Lantern, and was advised that the service was utilized by protestors in Iran to evade the native authorities’s censorship of social media websites like Twitter.
Whereas there’s a free model of Lantern, it’s restricted to 6Mbit and also you get simply 500MB of knowledge, and when you cross that determine, the connection is throttled. There is a paid tier that prices $48 a 12 months and provides limitless knowledge, so you find yourself paying the same quantity as most VPN companies. However the large differentiator for Lantern is that it rotates by way of hundreds of IPs a day, so even when a VPN goes down in a area, Lantern’s proxy service ought to nonetheless work for unblocking web sites.
Lantern is out there for Android, iOS, Home windows, Mac, and Linux, and you can too obtain the installers through its GitHub web page. I used the Android consumer for many of the testing, setting it up on my Galaxy S23 Extremely and Pixel 7 Professional. The interface itself is as barebones because it will get; in contrast to a VPN, there is no solution to choose a area to hook up with — Lantern does that robotically. So if you happen to’re wanting to make use of a proxy to stream content material from one other nation, this is not the service for you.
Lantern says it can provide customers the flexibility to pick areas in a forthcoming replace, however there is no timeline for when the characteristic might be out there. In its present state, there’s only a toggle to allow the proxy service, and it runs within the background. It would not filter all outgoing site visitors in your system, as a substitute kicking in when it detects a web site has been blocked in a specific area; in these situations, it makes use of a proxy server to load the web page.
As for safety, Lantern anonymizes your knowledge in transit, and the model notes that it flushes server logs day-after-day and would not retailer any consumer knowledge. That features consumer credentials; there is no account administration as such, and if you happen to purchase a Professional account, you get a code that you will must key in on each system you employ to unlock limitless knowledge (it really works on as much as three units). The dearth of account administration is an annoyance; I exploit zero-knowledge companies like ZeroTier and Tailscale that do a significantly better job on this regard, and Lantern says that it’s contemplating going the same route.
In my utilization, I discovered Lantern to be simply as quick as my VPN of selection — ProtonVPN — and it did a good job unblocking web sites. That stated, there are limitations round usability — there is no solution to choose a area, no account administration, and the free tier is hobbled by bandwidth restrictions. Should you simply want a dependable solution to keep protected on-line, a VPN nonetheless makes plenty of sense because it provides you higher privateness and extra selection as regards to area choice.
And even in eventualities the place a VPN is focused by a authorities, the IPs are cycled incessantly sufficient that you would be able to get again up with out an excessive amount of of a trouble. Lantern clearly has just a few advantages in how aggressively it rotates IPs and the truth that it ensures uptime when comparable companies go down, however that solely is useful in international locations like Iran and China, and it is no marvel that an amazing majority of the service’s userbase is in these areas.
One other differentiator for the service is a Uncover characteristic that is basically a P2P community. Customers have the flexibility to add paperwork, audio and movies, and pictures that may be accessed by different Lantern customers. It’s helpful in getting round content material restrictions, and the native nature of the service means content material uploaded in a area stays in that nation.
In the end, Lantern does a very good job as a proxy service, nevertheless it is not the one one to take action. Free companies like Freegate do a good sufficient job on the subject of unblocking web sites, and if you happen to want further options, I might nonetheless counsel going with a VPN. Lantern’s finest use case is evading censorship, and I intend to check the service to a greater extent the subsequent time I am in China. Accessing a dependable VPN is all the time a trouble within the nation, so I wish to see if Lantern’s claims of offering entry to the broader web maintain up in that state of affairs.
Contemplating what the Professional tier prices and the inherent limitations, Lantern would not actually make sense as a general-use proxy service or as a substitute for a VPN. I will replace the put up ought to that change, however for now, you are still higher off with one of many companies in our VPN purchaser’s information — my advice is ProtonVPN or Mullvad.