The Search for a Cisco VPN Alternative: a Steadier Encrypted Connection by Combining Starlink, Wi-Fi, 4G/5G and DSL with Speedify
Small businesses move away from Cisco VPN hardware for three reasons: price, complicated setup, and being tied to one office. Speedify is a VPN app that installs on laptops, phones or routers and uses every internet connection a site already has at the same time (broadband, wired Ethernet, Starlink and 4G/5G cellular), so staff traffic stays private, uploads and downloads run faster, and work continues when one internet connection goes down.
This article compares Cisco VPN with Speedify for a small business: where Speedify can take its place, and where it cannot. Speedify encrypts staff’s internet traffic and keeps it online, but it is not a remote-access VPN into the office network, so a team that needs its internal servers keeps a company VPN for that. The speed and failover gains need two or more internet connections at a site; on a single connection, Speedify works as an encrypted VPN and can be a little slower.
Speedify keeps your VPN tunnel up when one internet connection drops out
Speedify vs. Cisco VPN Hardware for a Small Business
A hardware VPN router, such as one from Cisco, ties the secure connection to the office where the router sits. Running Speedify as software instead of a hardware VPN router encrypts the internet traffic of each laptop and phone, wherever staff work. Dual-WAN routers typically rely on load balancing, which keeps each session on one connection, and their failover switches to the other connection with a new public IP address, which breaks logged-in sessions and calls. Speedify splits traffic across connections packet by packet and keeps the same public IP address when one connection drops.
Speedify for Teams gives a small business the features of a business VPN:
- Software and hardware deployments. Use the software app directly on your computers and mobile devices or on your router or other networking devices (powered by Speedify).
- Secure communication between team members: calls and messages stay encrypted on hotel, airport and other networks, including networks that block calling apps such as WhatsApp or Microsoft Teams.
- Access to your own services while traveling: staff reach the company’s cloud tools (email, CRM, file storage) and their home accounts through an encrypted connection. Streaming services set their own regional rules in their terms.
- Private browsing: the internet provider and the local network cannot see which sites staff visit, so they cannot use that history for “personalized” ads (what Speedify itself records is set out below).
- Internet connectivity that stays up when one connection drops, with faster uploads and downloads, by combining two or more connections at once.
Free Speedify Alternatives and What Speedify Offers for Free
If you are looking for a free alternative to Speedify, you most likely want to use two internet connections at the same time without paying. Speedify itself has a free tier: 5 GB per month with a free Speedify account on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android (Linux and routers need a paid plan). The usual alternative, a dual-WAN router, balances sessions across connections rather than splitting each one, and changes the public IP address when one connection fails, which breaks logged-in sessions and calls.
How Speedify Keeps a Small Business Online While Encrypting Traffic
Say your team has a VPN that covers all the security points above. That still leaves the reliability of the internet connection underneath.
Security does not help much if the internet connection is slow or keeps disconnecting, and most VPNs slow down your Internet connection even more. On fast internet the slowdown is hard to notice; on a slow connection it can break up a business call.
With Speedify, you do not have to trade security for internet speed. Speedify combines internet connections, such as broadband, 4G/5G cellular and Starlink, and splits traffic across them packet by packet, for faster and more stable internet. For the best result, the second connection should come from a different provider, so one outage cannot take down both.
Plus, with Speedify you can also get:
- Dedicated VPN servers: with dedicated VPN servers, no one outside your team shares the server, so speeds stay more consistent. Each one offers up to 1 Gbps, a static IPv4 address for IP allow lists and card terminals, port forwarding, and an SLA of one free day of service per hour of downtime.
- Teams dashboard to manage users and billing and view usage statistics.
- Management API to add and remove users and devices, push Speedify settings to the whole team or to single users, and check usage, through the Speedify for Teams REST API (HTTP requests, JSON responses).
- Support for every major platform: Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS and Android, plus OpenWrt 23.05 or later routers, GL.iNet firmware and Powered by Speedify routers with a Router License.
Speedify Is Used on Millions of Devices Worldwide
Speedify has made internet connections faster and more reliable for businesses and individuals since 2014.
15M+
Speedify downloads worldwide75K+
5-star reviews for Speedify on iOS and Android82
Speedify server points of presence in 50+ cities on 6 continents500TB+
Of internet traffic carried by Speedify every weekSpeedify Partners
Speedify works with these companies to bring faster, more reliable internet and networking technology to their customers and employees.
When Speedify Can Replace Cisco VPN, and When to Keep Both
Speedify is both a VPN and a link aggregation solution: one app encrypts the traffic and combines the internet connections, so a business gets a safer and a more reliable internet connection without trading one for the other. For a team whose staff mostly work in cloud apps, that can take the place of Cisco VPN hardware.
Where Speedify cannot replace Cisco VPN is remote access to the office network. A Cisco remote-access VPN (Cisco Secure Client, formerly AnyConnect) or a site-to-site tunnel connects staff to the company’s internal servers, file shares and intranet. Speedify connects them to the internet through a Speedify server and does not join them to the company network. A team that needs both keeps the company VPN for internal resources and runs Speedify on a router or a second device in front of it, so the VPN runs on top of Speedify’s combined connection and stays up when one internet connection drops. Speedify and another VPN cannot reliably run on the same computer at once, because each tries to route all traffic through its own virtual adapter.
For security reviews: Speedify encrypts traffic with DTLS 1.2 and AES-256-GCM or ChaCha20-Poly1305, and traffic is decrypted at the Speedify server before it goes on to the internet. Speedify keeps no record of the sites users visit and records connection metadata (IP address, device ID, connection time and data used). Teams that cannot send traffic through a third-party server can run a Self-Hosted Server, which still activates through my.speedify.com. To size a deployment, contact Speedify’s sales team or book a demo.
Speedify Business Solutions
Speedify Teams
Speedify for Routers
Speedify Embedded Solutions and Integrations
Add Speedify to your own app or hardware with the Speedify SDK. Your product then combines internet connections, fails over automatically when one drops, and encrypts the traffic, using the same technology as the Speedify app.