I use a VPN tunnel to administer my VPS and to connect back to my home network when I am away. Over the past year I have used both OpenVPN and WireGuard for this purpose. Here is how they compare in practice.

The setup

My use case is straightforward: I need a secure tunnel from my laptop to my VPS for SSH, web dashboards, and occasionally reaching services on my home LAN. Nothing exotic — just point-to-point connectivity between machines I control.

I ran OpenVPN first because I was already familiar with it. Later I set up WireGuard on the same server and ran both in parallel for a few weeks before switching fully to WireGuard.

Configuration complexity

OpenVPN configuration is verbose. A typical server config file is 30–50 lines, and you need a PKI infrastructure for certificates. Tools like easy-rsa simplify the certificate management, but it is still multiple steps: generate a CA, create server and client certificates, configure TLS parameters, set up the tunnel interface.

WireGuard is dramatically simpler. A server config is about 10 lines. There is no CA — you generate a key pair on each peer and exchange public keys. Adding a new peer is three lines in the config and a reload. The entire setup from scratch takes about five minutes.

Here is a minimal WireGuard server config for reference:

[Interface]
Address = 10.0.0.1/24
ListenPort = 51820
PrivateKey = <server-private-key>

[Peer]
PublicKey = <client-public-key>
AllowedIPs = 10.0.0.2/32

The client side is equally short. Compare this to an OpenVPN config with its certificate paths, cipher negotiations, and TLS auth keys.

Performance

This is where WireGuard stands out most clearly. On my VPS (1 vCPU, 2 GB RAM), I consistently measured 15–25% higher throughput with WireGuard compared to OpenVPN over the same connection.

Latency overhead was also noticeably lower. With OpenVPN (UDP mode), the tunnel added about 3–5 ms of latency. With WireGuard, the overhead was typically under 1 ms. For interactive SSH sessions, this makes a perceptible difference.

The performance gap makes sense architecturally. WireGuard runs in the kernel and uses modern cryptography (ChaCha20, Curve25519) with a fixed cipher suite. OpenVPN runs in userspace and supports a wide range of cipher combinations, which adds overhead.

Resource usage

WireGuard is lighter on resources. On my server, the wg0 interface uses negligible RAM and no persistent process — it is a kernel module. OpenVPN runs as a userspace daemon that typically uses 10–20 MB of RAM.

On a small VPS where every megabyte counts, this matters. Not enormously, but it adds up if you are running other services.

Stability and reconnection

Both have been reliable for me, but WireGuard handles network changes more gracefully. When my laptop switches from WiFi to a mobile hotspot, WireGuard reconnects transparently — there is no handshake negotiation, just a seamless transition. OpenVPN sometimes needs a manual reconnect or a timeout before re-establishing the tunnel.

WireGuard also handles the “roaming” case well. Since it is based on UDP and uses the concept of cryptokey routing, the server automatically updates the endpoint when a client’s IP address changes.

What OpenVPN still does better

OpenVPN has a more mature ecosystem. It supports TCP mode, which can be useful if you are on a network that blocks UDP. WireGuard is UDP-only by design.

OpenVPN also has more granular access control through its certificate infrastructure. You can revoke individual client certificates without touching the server config. With WireGuard, you need to remove the peer from the config and reload.

If you need to push routes, DNS settings, or other options to clients dynamically, OpenVPN has built-in support for that. WireGuard keeps this out of scope by design — you handle routing on each peer yourself.

Where I landed

I switched to WireGuard for my daily use and have not looked back. The simplicity of the configuration, the lower latency for SSH sessions to my VPS, and the seamless reconnection when switching networks all make it a better fit for my workflow.

I keep the OpenVPN configuration around as a fallback for situations where I might be on a network that restricts UDP traffic. But in practice, I have not needed it in months.

For a straightforward secure tunnel to your own server, WireGuard is the clear choice. The smaller codebase (around 4,000 lines vs. hundreds of thousands for OpenVPN) also means less surface area to audit, which is a nice bonus.