WireGuard vs OpenVPN: The Best Choice in 2026
For years, OpenVPN was the uncontested leader in VPN protocols. However, its complex codebase and aging cryptographic primitives have made it bulky in the modern era. Enter WireGuard®: the lean, high-performance successor.
Efficiency and Performance
OpenVPN consists of hundreds of thousands of lines of code, making it difficult to audit and resource-intensive to run. WireGuard is exceptionally lean, often under 4,000 lines. This results in **faster handshakes**, lower CPU overhead, and significantly better battery life on mobile devices like the iPhone.
Speed Benchmarks
On our 10Gbps backbone, WireGuard connections consistently reach 900+ Mbps on consumer hardware, while OpenVPN struggles to break 400 Mbps due to its single-threaded encryption architecture.
Cryptographic Standards
FastVPN uses **ChaCha20-Poly1305** for WireGuard encryption, which is faster and more secure on modern CPUs than the AES protocols used by OpenVPN. Additionally, our implementation includes a secondary obfuscation layer to fix WireGuard's primary weakness: its distinct handshake signature.