What Is the Best VPN Protocol? OpenVPN vs. WireGuard vs. SSTP

[Nic]

https://www.howtogeek.com/770807/what-is-the-best-vpn-protocol-openvpn-vs-wireguard-vs-sstp-and-more/


What Is a VPN Protocol?

In short, a protocol is a set of rules that govern how devices within a
network communicate with each other. When you connect to the internet
<https://www.howtogeek.com/341866/how-does-the-internet-work/>, for
example, you’re using the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) to let your
computer talk to the site you’re accessing. A VPN protocol is a specific
type of protocol meant for—you guessed it—VPNs.

A protocol can include all kinds of information. In the case of HTTP,
it’s a set of rules surrounding how two devices can exchange data (in
the form of HTML documents
<https://www.howtogeek.com/752587/what-is-html/>) as well as some basic
security rules.


**

When you use a VPN, you’re rerouting your connection through a server
operated by your VPN service
<https://www.howtogeek.com/133680/htg-explains-what-is-a-vpn/>. To do so
securely, the VPN needs to use a separate protocol, one that’s designed
for VPNs and contains information about the encryption used in the
connection as well as some other technical details.


How a VPN Protocol Affects You

This may sound a little abstract, but it affects you directly: A good
protocol will be a lot faster and a lot more secure than a bad one. Some
protocols are slow because they need more steps when sending
information, while others are less secure because they contain a flaw or
use an encryption key that has a known weakness.

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To help you pick the best VPN protocol for you—and by extension the best
VPN <https://www.howtogeek.com/738071/best-vpn-services/>, period—we’re
going to go over the protocols we’ve come across the most, as well as
some proprietary ones. We’ll start with the best ones out there, OpenVPN
and WireGuard, and work our way down from there.


OpenVPN

OpenVPN <https://openvpn.net> is probably the most popular VPN protocol
out there. Almost all VPN providers offer it to their customers in some
form or another. It offers both speed and security, without any
significant trade-off in either. When using OpenVPN, most VPN providers
will allow you to choose between TCP and UDP
<https://www.howtogeek.com/190014/htg-explains-what-is-the-difference-between-tcp-and-udp/>.
You’re generally better off going with UDP, as it’s faster.

To give you an idea of how good OpenVPN is, almost all VPNs use it as
their default. In the vast majority of cases, there’s no good reason to
use anything else. The only exceptions are WireGuard or particularly
solid proprietary protocols like NordLynx and Lightway, all of which we
explain below.

In fact, we would go so far as to recommend not using any VPN that
doesn’t offer OpenVPN, and to be a little leery of any provider that
doesn’t have it as their default—besides the exceptions we mentioned
earlier. We talk about one example in our Surfshark vs. ExpressVPN
<https://www.howtogeek.com/762463/surfshark-vs-expressvpn/> piece, where
we docked Surfshark some serious points for defaulting to a mediocre
protocol.


WireGuard

For most people, most of the time, OpenVPN seems to be the ticket.
However, in 2021 a very interesting new protocol came out, which has the
potential to dethrone OpenVPN. Named WireGuard
<https://www.wireguard.com>, it’s fast as greased lightning, often
beating OpenVPN on a similar server load—though keep in mind that
there’s a lot more than just the protocol to determine a VPN
connection’s speed
<https://www.howtogeek.com/723924/how-to-test-your-vpn-speed-and-how-to-speed-up-a-vpn/>.

Still, WireGuard looks solid. It has had at least one excellent
proprietary protocol based off of it: NordVPN’s NordLynx. That said,
there have been some rumblings about how private WireGuard
<https://restoreprivacy.com/vpn/wireguard/> really is, as it seems to
store users’ IP addresses indefinitely in some cases.