Spotflux

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on October 22, 2012

Spotflux is a free encrypted VPN client that routes your Internet traffic through a series of secure servers that mask your actual IP and make it virtually impossible to trace the connection back to your computer. Unlike some VPN clients, Spotflux is easy enough for anyone to use.

Spotflux has a unique Setup wizard that offers more options than most installers, including extra software we declined to install. The first thing Spotflux did when it launched was to secure our Internet connection by changing our settings to conform to the secure network's servers. Our browser opened with our secure connection (you can change that option in the program's Settings) but it took a few reloads before we could load any Web page; in fact, we had to close Spotflux and reopen it to access Web pages with our default browser, Chrome. It's almost impossible for an Internet connection routed through multiple secure VPN servers to be as fast as your normal broadband connection, and we noticed a bit of a lag in our browsing with Spotflux activated, though it's not really a concern since even our slowest sites loaded quickly enough -- certainly fast enough that we didn't think about disabling Spotflux right away, as has so often been the case with secure VPN clients. A system-tray icon let us check Spotflux's status at any time simply by hovering the cursor; right-clicking produced a menu that let us disable Spotflux's secure connection, access the program's Settings, and Quit the program. The Settings are basic but useful, such as languages, startup behavior, and proxies. Spotflux doesn't have a Help file in the usual sense, but the program is so easy to use, and a Support tab on the Settings dialog generates Support Bundles.

Securing your Internet connection helps protect your privacy and anonymity, and it blocks Web trackers and those all-too-personalized ads, too. It even protects against infected Web sites. Spotflux made all that as easy as any tool we've tried, and it doesn't slow your browsing enough to make you want to quit it.