WireGuard Pros and Cons: 3 Important Facts You Need to Know

In 2015, a new VPN protocol entered the scene: WireGuard®. Designed to be simple, secure, fast, and open-source, it aimed to improve on the weaknesses of older VPN technologies. But how well does it really deliver? In this article, we’ll explore the WireGuard pros and cons to help you decide if it’s the right VPN protocol for your needs. Understanding the WireGuard pros and cons is essential if you’re comparing VPN protocols for speed, security, or ease of use.

While WireGuard offers clear advantages, it also comes with some important limitations. In this guide, we’ll take a closer look at the main pros and cons of WireGuard VPN, and compare how it stacks up against other common VPN protocols.

Top 3 WireGuard VPN Advantages: Key Pros Explained

1. Simplicity: A Core Strength of the WireGuard Protocol

As one of the most popular choices for VPN admins, IPsec is a fairly simple protocol in principle. Its real complexity lies in negotiating the connection details via the IKE or IKEv2 protocol.

In comparison, WireGuard requires nowhere near this level of complexity, which is one of its key strengths when looking at the WireGuard pros and cons from a configuration perspective. WireGuard knows exactly one method for exchanging keys, one method for authenticating endpoints, one method for encrypting data, and one method for ensuring data integrity; meaning no negotiation needs to take place.

In terms of configuration, there is only an optional second pre-shared key encryption layer to ensure that WireGuard will still be secure with regard to quantum cryptography. However, this is also not negotiated; instead, both sides either use it or do not use it, but the sides must agree on this in advance. This simplicity is one of the key reasons why many users list it as a top pro when weighing the WireGuard pros and cons.

2. Speed: Why WireGuard VPN Is One of the Fastest Protocols

What about speed? Well, WireGuard is fast. Since there is nothing to negotiate, establishing a WireGuard tunnel basically just means performing a key exchange and the tunnel is considered up.

WireGuard is layered on top of UDP and uses the fastest available state-of-the-art encryption and is still considered top notch security.

Interestingly, the encryption methods (ChaCha20) and integrity protection (Poly1305) used by WireGuard are also available to IPsec as an extension. This performance advantage is often cited as one of the main benefits of WireGuard VPN. However, even when IPsec uses the same algorithms, WireGuard is still faster as the protocol has less overhead and is easier to process by CPUs and network equipment. When comparing performance across protocols, this level of speed consistently ranks high in discussions about the WireGuard pros and cons.

3. Fast Setup: Simple WireGuard VPN Configuration in Seconds

All network configuration in WireGuard is static. The client gets the VPN gateway address, along with a static IP address, a list of accessible remote networks, and optional DNS settings – all inside a simple, text-based config file.

This config file also contains the optional pre-shared key and the key pair of the client, as well as the public key of the server.

The config file is in fact so small that it fits into a QR-code — a feature that clearly stands out in the WireGuard VPN pros and cons comparison for individual users. This means instead of transferring the VPN configuration by copying a file, it can be transferred by scanning a QR-code. You install a client, the gateway shows you a QR-code, you scan it and you are all set, what could be easier than that? It’s one of the most praised features in any WireGuard pros and cons list aimed at personal or small team use.

P.S. Want to try it out? Check out our WireGuard VPN configuration guide →

Top 3 WireGuard VPN Limitations: Cons You Should Know

On first impressions, it appears WireGuard is the perfect VPN protocol in all regards — but a deeper look at the WireGuard pros and cons reveals some significant limitations. However, WireGuard VPN has three major drawbacks, as it misses two important features that are considered standard with all modern VPN protocols: client provisioning and verification of network parameters.

1. Enterprise Deployment: A Major WireGuard VPN Drawback

Scanning a QR-code to provision the config sounds pretty cool… unless you are a huge enterprise with 1,000 or more employees and need to deploy a unique VPN configuration to each of their multiple devices.

With other VPN protocols, all you need to tell the users is the address of the VPN gateway. They can then enter that address into the VPN client, click on connect, and get prompted for a username and password – i.e. the same login credentials they already use for pretty much everything else in their company.

Once authenticated, all further VPN configuration is pushed to them by the gateway. This entire process uses user databases that already exist and can be based on user network groups that already control network access.

I hear you ask: But can't something similar be built for WireGuard? The only option is developing some kind of enterprise deployment system that will integrate with your existing systems.

However, for this to work, you first have to invest the time and resources into building it; requiring coding skills or programmers to build it for you. Furthermore, if every company developed its own method, we would quickly have countless isolated solutions that are all different and can't work together, meaning any interoperability is out the window. Also whenever a central company service needs exchanging, you’ll need to start again from scratch and develop a new solution.

In contrast, other protocols offer you this functionality right out of the box. You don't have to build anything for them and their servers have pre-made plugin interfaces and either ship with plugins for common enterprise solutions, or the vendors of these enterprise solutions will provide plugins for you.

For larger businesses, this is a recurring complaint in many evaluations of the WireGuard pros and cons. This pretty much makes WireGuard a no-go for large organizations.

2. Configuration Management: Static WireGuard Settings Are a Challenge

The other problem is that WireGuard’s network configuration is static. Of course, this is not an issue if the configuration never has to change, but that's a very unrealistic scenario in the long run. Every time the configuration needs to be changed, all employees will need to manually update their VPN config by re-downloading a config file or re-scanning a QR-code — a clear disadvantage in the WireGuard VPN pros and cons debate for enterprise environments.

With client provisioning, VPN config is managed in a central place and updating all clients is a no brainer: Users don't have to do anything following a config change, as the next time they connect, they automatically get the updated config pushed.

3. Network Configuration Issues: Why WireGuard Can Fail Silently

This directly brings us to the final issue with WireGuard: As network configuration is not negotiated, users won't notice if their network configuration is outdated.

Other VPN protocols will check your configuration and inform you of any issues. For example, if the configuration cannot be updated automatically, the connection will at least fail with an error letting the user know what is wrong about that configuration, so the users can fix it by themselves or inform their admin.

In comparison, if you use the wrong private IP address with WireGuard, your client will connect but you will not be able to reach anything remotely, having no idea what the problem is. If the remote networks have changed, your connection will come up just fine but the wrong kind of traffic will be routed over the VPN tunnel and again, you won't notice that. If the DNS settings have changed, DNS will stop working for you and many users will not be able to distinguish a DNS problem from a routing problem, so they won't know that bad DNS settings might be the issue.

WireGuard does not view this as a priority, as the idea was never to duplicate existing functionality. Routing is controlled by remote routing tables, access restrictions are enforced by a remote firewall and DNS is optional anyway.
With every modern VPN gateway having a routing table and a firewall, there is no need for WireGuard to manage any of this, hence the static configuration. The problem? Neither the routing table nor the firewall will let you know on connect that your VPN settings are wrong, they will just not forward your traffic, forward it incorrectly, or drop it right on the spot.

This often results in users contacting the admin with the phrase "My VPN connects but then nothing works", leaving them to figure out what the problem is without any detailed error message or information.

These invisible failures are among the most frustrating elements noted in real-world tests of the WireGuard pros and cons, especially in corporate setups. This again deems WireGuard a poor choice in enterprise environments.

That is — unless you’re using VPN Tracker. With VPN Tracker’s built-in Team Connection Management, you can fully automate the deployment of WireGuard VPN connections across your entire organization. Simply upload individual connection files to your VPN Tracker Team, assign them to specific users, and publish — no manual setup required on the user side. This solution eliminates the need for in-house provisioning tools and turns one of the biggest WireGuard cons into a non-issue for IT teams.
Learn how to share WireGuard connections with your team →

Final Verdict on WireGuard Pros and Cons: Fast but Feature-Limited

So how successful is WireGuard VPN when weighing the WireGuard pros and cons? As mentioned above, there’s no doubt that WireGuard VPN has its plus points – particularly for individual users looking for a fast and easy way to connect to their home network. For this reason, you can find WireGuard as a VPN option on many popular consumer devices, including ASUS routers. This widespread adoption highlights the practical advantages of WireGuard VPN, especially for home users. Still, these advantages must be balanced with the known WireGuard pros and cons to determine suitability for your setup.

Activate WireGuard VPN on an ASUS device

In spite of this, some vendors, probably after weighing the WireGuard Pros and Cons, have already decided not to use WireGuard directly but instead to embed it into a proprietary protocol which provides those missing features like client provisioning and verifying connection parameters. In this case, WireGuard is merely used as a tunnel protocol for traffic. WireGuard acts as IPsec in that scenario, whereas the proprietary protocol acts as IKE.

However, this again leads to various isolated solutions, to vendor-specific protocols that are incompatible with each other and that are, above all, no longer open. In fact, these protocols are usually not even documented in any form, making it impossible to integrate them into third party solutions, meaning customers may end up in a vendor lock-in, which kills one of the fundamental goals of the WireGuard protocol.

The goal of WireGuard was never to help vendors develop their own easier, faster VPN protocols, but after weighing the WireGuard Pros and Cons, that's exactly where it might end up in the long run.

In this regard, it could be argued that IPsec and OpenVPN are both better solutions, as IPsec is truly an open protocol and OpenVPN, despite having its own flaws, has at least received enough features in the meantime that there is no need to embed the protocol in another protocol. It remains the same, open source protocol.

"WireGuard" and the "WireGuard" logo are registered trademarks of Jason A. Donenfeld.

WireGuard VPN with VPN Tracker: A Smarter Choice for Apple Devices

VPN Tracker is the leading secure remote access solution for Mac, iPhone, and iPad — fully compatible with WireGuard VPN and all major protocols, including IPsec (IKEv1 + IKEv2), OpenVPN, L2TP, and more. If you’re weighing the WireGuard pros and cons, VPN Tracker makes it easy to test and use multiple VPN technologies side by side — all in one professional, Mac-native app.

And for teams using WireGuard, VPN Tracker eliminates one of the protocol’s biggest drawbacks: manual setup. Simply upload your team’s WireGuard connections, assign them to users, and deploy them instantly — no training, no file sharing, no friction.