What’s the difference between PPTP VPN and OpenVPN?

VPN services are more and more used to hide IP addresses and provide anonymity due to their simplicity and efficiency. Most of these services offer connections through PPTP protocol and some offer OpenVPN connections. Both are functionally the same, in that they both are VPNs (Virtual Private Networks). As far as anonymity, both offer encryption and they hide your IP address.

What is the difference between those two? Which one should you choose? Next, I will try to answer these questions.

PPTP (Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol)

PPTP is popular because it is easy to configure and it was the first VPN protocol that was supported by Microsoft Dial-up Networking.

The problem is that PPTP does not provide confidentiality or encryption. It relies on the protocol being tunneled to provide privacy.

A typical upgrade path for PPTP is L2TP/IPsec. The adoption of improved VPN technologies has been slow because PPTP is convenient and easy to configure, whereas L2TP/IPsec requires a shared key or machine certificates.

OpenVPN

OpenVPN is a free and open source virtual private network (VPN) program for creating point-to-point or server-to-multiclient encrypted tunnels between host computers.

OpenVPN uses the OpenSSL library to provide encryption of both the data and control channels. It lets OpenSSL do all the encryption and authentication work, allowing OpenVPN to use all the ciphers available in the OpenSSL package.

PPTP or OpenVPN?

Let’s compare these two on the following criteria:

Installation

PPTP is still offered as a way to connect due to its simplicity. You can set up a PPTP connection with no software at all. OpenVPN is a little more difficult to set up but with the right tutorials an average computer user should not encounter any problems.

Security

OpenVPN is considered to be extremely secure when compared to the PPTP VPN, and also more stable. Plus one for OpenVPN.

Mobile Devices

Iphone, Ipod Touch, Windows Mobile, all work with PPTP. These are very easily setup, and just a Host Name, Login and Password will have you connected. OpenVPN does not work on such devices.

Conclusion

To sum up, if you are looking for high security and privacy you should choose OpenVPN. If you need easy-to-setup VPN, PPTP is a good choice. For mobile devices, PPTP is the only solution.