WireGuard vs. OpenVPN: Why We Picked Speed Without Sacrificing Security

OpenVPN has powered consumer VPNs for over two decades, and for good reason: it's flexible and battle-tested. But that flexibility comes from roughly 100,000 lines of code, which makes it slow to audit and heavier on CPU.

WireGuard takes the opposite approach. At around 4,000 lines of code, its entire cryptographic surface can be reviewed in an afternoon. It uses modern primitives (ChaCha20, Poly1305, Curve25519) by default instead of offering a menu of configurable — and sometimes outdated — ciphers.

In practice, this translates to noticeably faster handshakes, lower battery drain on mobile, and throughput that stays close to your raw connection speed instead of losing 30-40% to encryption overhead.

Next Bolt VPN's WireGuard configs are generated per-server and per-device, so each tunnel uses its own keypair. If you've only ever used OpenVPN, the speed difference is usually the first thing you notice.