Now, let’s see how WireGuard performs on a speed test vs. WireGuard vs OpenVPN – PerformanceĪfter looking at the last two sections, you can see that WireGuard should be a clear winner. It works in the userspace, so it can be resource-heavy and cause quite a bit of speed loss. Encryption overhead is common as OpenVPN uses older methods. Because of the slowness of reconnecting with OpenVPN, using a kill switch is important to protect yourself. Many companies use kill switches to protect the user when the VPN connection drops. While it is secure, that can also cause performance issues. All those lines of code provide more chances to find and exploit flaws in the system. On average, it uses anywhere between 400,000 to more than 600,000 lines of code. With OpenVPN, you can switch ports to help mask activities.

It was designed with security in mind, has been independently audited, and does not keep logs by default.

Through the use of the OpenSSL encryption library and the TLS protocol, it contains many security and control features. The protocol is open-source and uses 256-bit AES military-grade encryption and others. It uses techniques to create secure point-to-point or site-to-site connections. OpenVPN is a VPN protocol that came out in 2001. That means it is possible to have the speed advantages and use it securely. By doing so, they have solved the security issues with the protocol. That said, a few companies offer their own versions of WireGuard. Since WireGuard assigns the same IP address each time you use it, it has to keep a record of your IP and connection times by default. WireGuard was not initially designed with privacy in mind. It offers higher speeds, easy setups, and very quick re-connects. The combination makes it faster, easier to audit than the OpenVPN alternatives, and not so resource-intensive. It offers the state of the art encryption methods such as ChaCha20 for symmetric encryption with Poly1305 for message authentication. In comparison, the coding for WireGuard is around 4k lines of Kernel code (it uses Linux and works in the Kernel space). Though OpenVPN has improved since that time, it still has issues with a complex setup, disconnects, slow re-connection times, and more.

Their goal was to take popular VPN technologies and fix the issues that plague their setups. The creators of WireGuard aim to provide a simple and effective VPN implementation.

Openvpn vs wireguard