best vpn for remote teams in 2025

the old vpn model is broken

For years, remote teams relied on a simple idea: punch a hole in the firewall and let employees tunnel in. That worked when everyone worked from an office. But today's teams are distributed, devices are personal, and threats are everywhere. The traditional "perimeter" VPN leaves your network exposed to lateral movement if any single device is compromised.1

Enter Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) — a model where no device is trusted by default, no inbound ports are left open, and access is granted per-identity, per-resource. It's not just a buzzword; it's a fundamental shift in how remote access should work.1

We looked at four solutions that represent the main approaches teams are adopting today.

1. twingate — best overall for modern teams

Best for: Teams that want Zero Trust without the operational headache.

Twingate replaces the traditional VPN with a ZTNA architecture. The key difference: there are no open inbound ports on your network. Instead, Twingate uses outbound-only connectors to establish secure, identity-based tunnels to specific resources. This eliminates the attack surface that traditional VPNs expose.1

It also prevents lateral movement — if a device is compromised, the attacker can't pivot across your network because Twingate only connects users to the exact resources they're authorized to access.1

Onboarding is straightforward: deploy lightweight connectors on your infrastructure, integrate with your identity provider (Okta, Azure AD, Google Workspace), and users install a client. No certificate management, no complex routing tables.

→ Check Twingate

2. openvpn — best enterprise standard

Best for: Organizations that need maximum flexibility and existing identity integrations.

OpenVPN has been the enterprise workhorse for years, and for good reason. It's battle-tested, supports a wide range of authentication backends (including Okta, LDAP, and SAML), and gives administrators fine-grained control over routing and access policies.3

OpenVPN's Access Server provides a management UI, user management, and logging — things that matter when you're running a team of 50 or 500. It also supports transitioning toward a ZTNA model by integrating identity-based access controls.3

The trade-off: it's more operational overhead than Twingate. You manage certificates, firewall rules, and the server infrastructure yourself.

→ Check OpenVPN

3. wireguard — best performance

Best for: Teams that prioritize raw speed and a minimal, auditable codebase.

WireGuard is a modern VPN protocol that's dramatically simpler than OpenVPN — about 4,000 lines of code vs. hundreds of thousands. That means a smaller attack surface, faster audits, and better performance, especially on mobile and low-power devices.1

It uses modern cryptography (Curve25519, ChaCha20, BLAKE2s) and is now baked into the Linux kernel. Latency is lower and throughput is higher than OpenVPN in most benchmarks.1

The catch: WireGuard is a protocol, not a management platform. You'll need to handle key distribution, IP allocation, and peer management yourself — or use a wrapper like Netmaker, Firezone, or Tailscale (which builds on WireGuard under the hood).

→ Check WireGuard

4. headscale — best for self-hosting & sovereignty

Best for: Infrastructure teams that cannot use a hosted control plane.

Headscale is an open-source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server. It gives you the same WireGuard-based mesh networking that Tailscale provides, but you own the coordination server — meaning no metadata about your network ever touches a third party.2

This matters for regulated industries (finance, healthcare, defense) where compliance policies forbid sending control-plane data — like which devices connect to which resources — to an external SaaS provider.2

The trade-off is operational complexity. You run the Headscale server yourself, manage DNS, handle backups, and stay on top of updates. It's not for teams that want to set and forget.

→ Check Headscale

how they compare side by side

which one should you pick?

• If you're building a remote team from scratch or migrating off an old VPN: Twingate. The Zero Trust model is genuinely more secure, and the operational overhead is lower than anything else here.
• If you need deep enterprise controls and your team already manages VPN infrastructure: OpenVPN is proven and flexible.
• If speed is your top concern and you have the ops chops to manage it: WireGuard (possibly via a commercial wrapper).
• If compliance requires full data sovereignty: Headscale gives you control, at the cost of operational work.

Disclosure: We may earn a commission if you purchase through our links. We only recommend tools we've researched and believe deliver real value for their use case.