There is no scarcity of VPNs and proxy providers as of late, and each nook of the web is plagued by advertisements for a similar. I am cynical of VPNs as a rule, so once I was requested to check out Lantern, I went in with an honest quantity of skepticism. The service has seen loads of momentum in international locations like Iran in current months, and has amassed 10 million downloads on the Play Retailer globally, with over 8 million customers in Iran. The fundamental 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 completely different; it is not a full-fledged VPN that creates a tunnel to a different area and serves knowledge from that nation. As an alternative, 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 informed 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 providers. However the large differentiator for Lantern is that it rotates via 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 offered for Android, iOS, Home windows, Mac, and Linux, and it’s also possible to obtain the installers by way of 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; not like a VPN, there is no approach to choose a area to connect with — Lantern does that routinely. So should you’re trying to make use of a proxy to stream content material from one other nation, this is not the service for you.
Lantern says it is going to provide customers the power to pick areas in a forthcoming replace, however there is no timeline for when the characteristic will probably be obtainable. 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 machine, as an alternative 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 should you purchase a Professional account, you get a code that you’re going to have to key in on each machine you employ to unlock limitless knowledge (it really works on as much as three gadgets). The dearth of account administration is an annoyance; I take advantage of zero-knowledge providers like ZeroTier and Tailscale that do a a lot 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 an honest job unblocking web sites. That mentioned, there are limitations round usability — there is no approach to choose a area, no account administration, and the free tier is hobbled by bandwidth restrictions. If you happen to simply want a dependable approach to keep protected on-line, a VPN nonetheless makes loads of sense because it offers you higher privateness and extra selection with reference to area choice.
And even in eventualities the place a VPN is focused by a authorities, the IPs are cycled regularly sufficient you could get again up with out an excessive amount of of a problem. Lantern clearly has a number of advantages in how aggressively it rotates IPs and the truth that it ensures uptime when comparable providers go down, however that solely turns out to be useful in international locations like Iran and China, and it is no surprise 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 primarily a P2P community. Customers have the power 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 an excellent job as a proxy service, nevertheless it is not the one one to take action. Free providers like Freegate do an honest sufficient job in terms of unblocking web sites, and should you want extra options, I might nonetheless counsel going with a VPN. Lantern’s greatest 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 at all times a problem 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 an alternative choice to a VPN. I am going to replace the put up ought to that change, however for now, you are still higher off with one of many providers in our VPN purchaser’s information — my advice is ProtonVPN or Mullvad.
