Sort by what matters to you. Speed is shown as a relative band rather than a number, because throughput depends on your hardware and network — not on the protocol alone.
A deliberately small, auditable design with no cipher negotiation, which removes a whole class of downgrade attacks. Its compactness is the main reason it is easy to review and fast in the kernel.
Two decades of scrutiny and near-universal platform support. Flexible to the point of being easy to misconfigure, and the large codebase is harder to audit than WireGuard.
TCP-over-TCP causes retransmission stacking, which is why it is slower. Worth the cost only when a network blocks everything except HTTPS.
Built into most mobile operating systems and very good at surviving a handover between mobile data and wifi. Security depends heavily on how the endpoints are configured.
L2TP provides no encryption on its own, so everything rests on the IPsec pairing. Widely supported but there is no reason to choose it over IKEv2 today.
Its encryption has been considered broken for well over a decade. It appears here so you can recognise it and rule it out, not as an option.
Every protocol is hidden by the current filter.
The three meters are relative rankings derived from each protocol's design, not measurements from a lab. Speed reflects where the work happens (kernel or user space) and how much per-packet overhead the protocol carries. Security reflects the cipher design and whether the protocol negotiates algorithms — negotiation is flexible but invites downgrade attacks. Firewall tolerance reflects how easily a network administrator can block the transport.
Whichever protocol you use, the questions it does not answer are what your browser reveals and whether your traffic leaks outside the tunnel. Our privacy audit checks the browser side, and how to check your VPN is working walks through verifying the connection itself.
WireGuard for most situations, because it is fast, small enough to audit properly, and handles changing networks well. Use IKEv2/IPsec on a phone that switches between mobile data and wifi constantly. Fall back to OpenVPN over TCP on port 443 when a network blocks everything except HTTPS, accepting that it will be slower.
Two reasons. It runs in the kernel on most platforms, avoiding the copying between kernel and user space that OpenVPN does, and it has no cipher negotiation — one modern cipher set is fixed in the protocol. The result is far less work per packet and a codebase around two orders of magnitude smaller.
No. The authentication it relies on, MS-CHAPv2, has been practically defeated for over a decade, and traffic captured today can be decrypted. If a provider still offers PPTP as an option, treat that as a warning sign rather than a feature.
Because any single figure would be misleading. Throughput depends on your hardware, the distance to the server, and the state of the network between you, so we show relative bands from the design characteristics of each protocol instead of inventing a number.
How likely a protocol is to work on a restrictive network such as a hotel, campus or corporate connection. Protocols with fixed UDP ports are the easiest to block. OpenVPN over TCP on port 443 is the hardest, because blocking it would also block ordinary HTTPS traffic.