I’ve been using Mullvad as my VPN provider for the last two years, and it’s just about time for me to renew. I thought I’d check in with the community and see what providers supporting Wireguard that people are happy with these days.
I did some subreddit searching before posting this, and I didn’t see a recent (within the last six months) discussion about this exact topic. But if I missed one, feel free to send me down memory lane; I’ll happily read it.
Mullvad has been mostly good to me. Some of their servers cause me the occasional headache, but that can happen with any provider. I previously used PIA via OpenVPN for many years. Unfortunately, PIA still doesn’t support Wireguard via router-based configurations, as far as I can tell. I ask their customer support once every six months or so, and they always say, “We’re working on it.”
I don’t use it on pfSense for policy routing or whatever because I think that’s dumb (BUT I do have another country Wireguard VPN attached to a Wireless SID on a VLAN so my tenants can watch Netflix in another country) .
It’s installed on all my workstations, my laptops, and my phone.
I have surfshark set up with pfSense since they launched it. I like having the ability to use both OpenVPN and Surfshark with them and have one of each set up and it use.
I’ve found that Wireguard can be lossy when under pressure with them and it impacts IPTV streams as a result so I’m keeping those streams on OpenVPN.
Initially signed up for 26 months for 64 bucks USD.
Host your own. Think I got a single core job from Linode for about £30 for the year. Static IP, IPv6 as standard. Even got pfSense CE running up on it (bit of tinkering) and run OpenVPN and Wireguard here.
1gbit link speed, 100TB bandwidth, (L3) dDoS protection as standard and the best of all, only you’re using it, so much better.
Tailscale is fantastic, but the pfSense package isn’t smooth running, can cause some quirks, like hanging at boot time (if you’ve chosen to add custom gateways).
NordVPN has been solid! Had a wireguard connection up for months without a hitch. Their pricing is like a sofa store, always on-sale, you’d be a mug to pay full price. If you get it at the right time, its a bargain and they claim to be zero log too.
I like that they’re so information-forward. They post a lot of stats on their website about the service as a whole and each individual server. Unfortunately, they don’t have many servers on the West Coast, and my latency to the Los Angeles server is a little higher than I’d prefer. I’ll keep an eye on this one, though. Thanks!
Tailscale is just Wireguard with an orchestration server, essentially. If you’re using Wireguard you basically are using the same VPN technology as Tailscale.
My understanding of Tailscale leads me to believe it’s better for site-to-site setups or other types of setups where you want to reach other devices on your VPN.
Is there a benefit to using it with the standard VPN provider use case?
I appreciate the advice! I’ll look into that. My primary concern would that hosting my own and only having a single IP and end point location would reduce my anonymity on the web. My current setup has traffic exiting in three different locations and I can easily swap IPs if needed.
I stumbled across your post while looking for something else, but you’re in a group of people like me who set up nordvpn with wire guard on pfsense. Is yours still working? I’m having a hell of a time getting wireguard working consistently, on pfsense and on my windows laptop.
While technically correct, Tailscale uses wireguard tech from point to point, the orchestration server handles NAT hole punching, relays, and access control lists. Tailscale also upgraded the wireguard protocol a bit with error control over UDP. It’s a subtle upgrade, but it helps when tunneling over UDP.