WireGuard vs OpenVPN: which one should you pick in 2026?
If you are shopping for a VPN, you will run into these two names. They are the only two serious protocols on the market — the rest are either proprietary or obsolete. Here is what actually separates them, without the marketing gloss.
In one sentence
OpenVPN is a veteran from 2001: highly configurable, and able to disguise itself as ordinary web traffic. WireGuard landed in 2020: far simpler, far faster, and built straight into the Linux kernel.
Speed
This is the most visible difference. OpenVPN is roughly 70,000 lines of code; WireGuard is under 4,000. Less code to run for every packet means more throughput and lower latency. On a fibre line you can measure it; on a phone you also feel it in the battery, where WireGuard draws noticeably less power.
Reconnection is the other win. Walk out of your house and switch from Wi-Fi to 4G: OpenVPN has to renegotiate the whole session, which costs a few seconds of dead air. WireGuard simply picks up where it left off, almost instantly.
Stealth
This is the one area where OpenVPN still holds an edge. Running over TCP on port 443, it looks very much like an ordinary HTTPS connection: in a country or a corporate network that blocks VPNs, it often gets through where WireGuard (UDP, on an easily fingerprinted port) is blocked.
If you are behind an actively censoring firewall, OpenVPN over TCP 443 remains a useful spare wheel.
The 4G MTU trap
Here is something no marketing page mentions, and that costs people hours. On mobile networks, the carrier fragments packets slightly smaller than a fixed line does. If the WireGuard config does not account for it, the tunnel connects — the handshake succeeds — but pages will not load, or only the small ones will. It looks like a broken server when in fact everything is fine.
The fix is one line in the configuration file:
MTU = 1280
We learned this the hard way, which is why every configuration we hand out carries that line. If a provider gives you a file with no MTU and "it doesn't work on mobile data", you now know what to add.
The Linux DNS trap
Another classic: on Debian, Ubuntu or Mint, the tunnel comes up, wg show reports a recent handshake… and no website loads. What is missing is openresolv, without which the VPN's DNS servers are never applied. One command:
sudo apt install openresolv
So, which one?
- WireGuard for everyday use: faster, steadier when you move between networks, easier on the battery. It is what we run at VPN Paris.
- OpenVPN when you have to punch through censorship or an aggressive corporate firewall.
A good provider should be able to offer both. A provider pushing a home-grown, unaudited "proprietary protocol" deserves your suspicion: in cryptography, originality is not a virtue.