Mullvad plans to remove support for OpenVPN in little over a year, on 2026-01-15
Mullvad plans to remove support for OpenVPN in little over a year, on 2026-01-15
mullvad.net
Removing OpenVPN 15th January 2026 | Mullvad VPN
Support will be removed on both client and server side.
The process of removing OpenVPN from our app starts today and may be completed much earlier.
TL;DR They are moving to wireguard only.
I'm ok with that.
Except the 5 device limit. With OVPN it means 5 connected devices, with WG it means 5 registered public keys.
Say you use the official Mullvad app and also setup some 3rd party WG client on your phone. That's now taking up 2 devices. Or perhaps you do have 6 devices, but you never have more than 2 of them running at once. With WG, that's still 6 devices regardless of them being connected or not, while with OVPN it will indeed be just 2 devices.
Can you not use the same keys for multiple devices like you'd normally be able to?
This is a great point, if they're gonna make this change, they should allow unlimited keys (or at least more than 5) and just limit the number of simultaneous devices on wireguard too. If that's feasable
That's a pity.
Is there something preventing you from having the same key ready for use on more than one device? So that two devices that are never connected at the same time can take turns using the same key?
That's true. I use user profiles on GrapheneOS and have to have each profile count as its own device in Mullvad, when obviously I'm not going to be using them simultaneously.
It just sounds easier to think about it with wireguard then. No surprises.
One of my devices uses three keys because out of the two local servers I have, they seem to go down every other month, so I need a failover.
I can only assume that is the main reason for this change. Pitty.
Wireguard is more elegant and performant, and has a smaller attack surface. OpenVPN, meanwhile, is a legacy protocol, and retiring it should be a good thing.
And when exactly did we declare openvpn a legacy protocol?
Can someone explain why this is good or bad?
Not great if you use the transmission-openvpn docker container. Guess I need to come up with a new plan.
Why not use a qbittorrent WireGuard one?
There's also Transmission-Wireguard by the same guy.
sometimes people keep a container for the vpn/proxy, and set up the other one to use the network of the other container
It was good to have it as a backup. I primarily use wireguard but now its a single point of failure.