WireGuard is faster than OpenVPN, uses less battery, has a far smaller codebase, and is the right default on most connections. OpenVPN is slower and heavier, but it has twenty years of deployment behind it, runs over TCP as well as UDP, and can be tuned in ways WireGuard deliberately does not allow. The short answer for 2026: use WireGuard when it works, fall back to OpenVPN in TCP mode when a network blocks UDP, and consider VLESS when a network actively filters VPN traffic.

Design philosophy

OpenVPN, released in 2001, is built on OpenSSL and supports a long list of ciphers, key exchanges, compression options and transport modes. Every one of those options is a decision an administrator can get wrong, and the codebase is large, in the range of several hundred thousand lines including its dependencies.

WireGuard, merged into the Linux kernel in 2020, takes the opposite approach: one fixed set of modern primitives (ChaCha20-Poly1305 for encryption, Curve25519 for key exchange, BLAKE2s for hashing), no negotiation, no options. The protocol itself is around four thousand lines of code. If a primitive is ever broken, the protocol version changes; there is nothing to misconfigure.

Speed

WireGuard wins clearly, and the gap grows on weaker hardware.

  • Throughput. On the same server and connection, WireGuard typically moves data several times faster than OpenVPN in UDP mode, and the difference is bigger against OpenVPN in TCP mode. On a phone or a router the gap is largest because WireGuard's encryption is cheap and runs in the kernel on Linux.
  • Latency. WireGuard's handshake is a single round trip; reconnecting after a network change takes a fraction of a second. OpenVPN's TLS handshake is heavier and slower to recover.
  • Battery. WireGuard is silent when idle and wakes only to send data; OpenVPN keeps more state and more keepalive traffic. On a phone this is noticeable over a day.

If speed matters and the network is ordinary, the choice is made. Why speed drops at all is covered in does a VPN slow down your internet.

Security

Both are secure when configured correctly. The difference is in how easy "correctly" is.

WireGuard's fixed cryptography means every deployment uses the same modern set; there is no legacy cipher to accidentally enable. Its small size has been formally analyzed. One design trade-off: WireGuard servers keep the client's public key and last-seen IP address in memory while the session is active, which some providers work around by assigning addresses dynamically and wiping them on disconnect.

OpenVPN's security depends on the configuration: TLS 1.2 or newer, AES-GCM or ChaCha20, a strong key exchange, and no compression (compression enabled old attacks). A well-configured OpenVPN is solid; a default from an old guide may not be.

Where OpenVPN still wins

  • TCP mode on port 443. Some networks block UDP or throttle unknown UDP traffic. WireGuard is UDP-only; OpenVPN can run over TCP on the HTTPS port and often gets through where WireGuard cannot.
  • Fine-grained control: per-client certificates, custom routing pushes, scripts on connect. Corporate deployments rely on this.
  • Old hardware and firmware that shipped with OpenVPN and never got WireGuard.

IKEv2/IPsec

The protocol built into iOS, macOS and Windows without any app. Fast, and excellent at switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data without dropping. Its weakness is the same as WireGuard's: recognizable traffic and standard ports, so it is easily blocked, and its configuration surface is larger than WireGuard's. A good choice on phones when the network is friendly.

VLESS: the option neither of them offers

WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2 all produce traffic that a network can recognize as a VPN. On networks that filter or throttle VPNs, hotels, campuses, corporate networks, some countries, they either fail or crawl. VLESS with Reality, from the Xray project, is designed for exactly that case: the tunnel is indistinguishable from an ordinary HTTPS connection to a well-known website, at a speed close to WireGuard's. It is not a replacement for WireGuard on a normal network, but it is the tool for a hostile one.

Choosing: a simple rule

  1. Start with WireGuard. On most home, office and mobile networks it is the fastest and lightest option.
  2. If the connection fails or is throttled, try VLESS. If your app selects protocols automatically, this happens on its own.
  3. If you must use OpenVPN, use UDP if it passes, TCP on port 443 if not, and check that the configuration uses TLS 1.2+ with AES-GCM or ChaCha20 and no compression.
  4. On iPhone without an app, IKEv2 is the built-in fallback.

Whichever you use, verify the tunnel with What Is My IP, and check the IPv6 leak test, because protocol choice does not fix a leaking configuration.

404 VPN offers WireGuard and VLESS with Reality, chooses between them automatically based on the network, and keeps DNS inside the tunnel with a kill switch in both modes. How the connection is built is described on the how it works page; get started here.