WireGuard is modern, fast, and simple — great default for phones and laptops. OpenVPN is older, flexible, and still useful when WireGuard is blocked or enterprise constraints require it.
In our speed tests, WireGuard/NordLynx-style stacks dominated. Details in individual VPN reviews.
WireGuard is commonly cited at roughly four thousand lines of code; OpenVPN's core is usually put at seventy thousand or more, and considerably higher once its dependencies are counted. That is not trivia. A smaller codebase is one a human being can actually read, which is why WireGuard could be audited seriously and why it reached mainline kernel inclusion. Less code is less surface area.
WireGuard picks its cryptography for you — ChaCha20-Poly1305 for the data, Curve25519 for key exchange, BLAKE2s for hashing, with SipHash and HKDF alongside. There is no negotiation, so there is no downgrade to negotiate and nothing to misconfigure. OpenVPN is the opposite: it can be tuned in almost any direction, which is exactly why it survives in enterprise environments with unusual requirements, and also why a badly configured deployment can be weak while looking fine.
WireGuard runs over UDP. That is part of why it is fast, and the reason it struggles on networks that filter aggressively — there is no supported way to dress it up as ordinary web traffic, because the packet format is deliberately rigid. OpenVPN can be carried over TCP and pushed through the port used by normal HTTPS traffic, which is unimpressive engineering and extremely useful when you are on a hotel, campus or state-filtered connection that drops anything it does not recognise.
This is the single most practical reason to keep OpenVPN available: not because it is better, but because it still connects where WireGuard will not.
WireGuard identifies peers by key rather than by address, so moving from Wi-Fi to mobile data resumes the session without renegotiating. On a phone that is the difference between a tunnel you leave on and one you keep switching off.
There is a wrinkle worth knowing. A stock WireGuard configuration assigns each peer a fixed address inside the tunnel, which would be a persistent identifier for the account. Providers work around this with shared exit infrastructure and by rotating internal assignments — which is why most consumer apps advertise a WireGuard-derived stack under their own name rather than shipping the protocol untouched. When you compare providers, the interesting question is what they did about that, not whether the marketing page says WireGuard.
No. Its small, fixed design was chosen to make review feasible, it has been examined seriously, and it ships in the mainline Linux kernel. The relevant risk is not the protocol but how a provider deploys it.
Yes, on networks that block WireGuard's UDP traffic. OpenVPN can be carried over TCP on the standard HTTPS port, so it connects in places WireGuard cannot.
Vendor stacks built on or alongside WireGuard, usually to solve the fixed-tunnel-address problem with shared exit infrastructure. Judge them on what the vendor changed and what has been audited.