boringtun VS wireguard-go

Compare boringtun vs wireguard-go and see what are their differences.

boringtun

Userspace WireGuard® Implementation in Rust (by cloudflare)

wireguard-go

Mirror only. Official repository is at https://git.zx2c4.com/wireguard-go (by WireGuard)
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boringtun wireguard-go
14 14
5,805 2,700
1.4% 3.6%
5.6 6.6
7 days ago about 1 month ago
Rust Go
BSD 3-clause "New" or "Revised" License MIT License
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
Stars - the number of stars that a project has on GitHub. Growth - month over month growth in stars.
Activity is a relative number indicating how actively a project is being developed. Recent commits have higher weight than older ones.
For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

boringtun

Posts with mentions or reviews of boringtun. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-01.

wireguard-go

Posts with mentions or reviews of wireguard-go. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-04-09.
  • Writing highly scalable backends in UDP
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2024
    Would you accept https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go/blob/master/tun/ne... as a solution? =)
  • WireGuard client that exposes itself as a HTTP/SOCKS5 proxy
    14 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 1 Apr 2024
    Maybe https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun or https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go ?
  • The Tailscale Universal Docker Mod
    22 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 8 Oct 2023
    It's likely just `tailscale serve https / `.

    https://github.com/tailscale/tailscale/blob/main/ipn/serve.g...

    And they also support direct embedding:

    https://tailscale.dev/blog/embedded-funnel

    I think this is built on the wireguard-go + gvisor mashup, that allows you to do this with just Wireguard:

    https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go/tree/master/tun/ne...

    One of my favorite applications of this is this little tool that turns Wireguard VPNs into SOCKS5 proxies (which you can selectively enable in your browser)

    https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/octeep/wireproxy

  • Speed tests for Tailscale, Wireguard and Zerotier
    2 projects | /r/selfhosted | 27 Feb 2023
    They added this pull-request to wireguard-go and i assume they have already included it in their new version.
  • Show HN: Wiretap – Transparent WireGuard proxy server without root
    3 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 21 Nov 2022
    Vanilla WireGuard doesn't provide a way to run a peer in userspace that can proxy traffic between another peer and an endpoint such as a web server because you need to be privileged to do thinks like work with raw packets. However, https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go is a userspace implementation of WireGuard and has recently incorporated Google's userspace networking stack. This project uses these two userspace tools to "fake" a privileged WireGuard peer that proxies TCP, UDP, and (a small subset of) ICMP. It was written as a pentesting/red team utility for my team but it can also serve as a general makeshift VPN when you don't have privileges on a box you want to proxy through.
  • How to program a vpn (for fun)
    4 projects | /r/learnprogramming | 28 Jul 2022
    How "scratch" do you want to go from? Do you want to write your own virtual network driver, or do you want to use an existing driver like Wintun? Either way learning about Wintun would be a good start. Then there's the protocol, regardless of what language you learn, the wireguard-go implementation is a very good example of how to implement a secure protocol with modern language.
  • Wireguard not working on Xen virtualization
    3 projects | /r/WireGuard | 15 Mar 2022
    https://github.com/cloudflare/boringtun https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go
  • Show HN: Onetun, a cross-platform WireGuard port-forwarder
    2 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 15 Oct 2021
    wireguard-go (the official userspace impl in golang) can do this since several months back. It uses gVisor's netstack as a tcp/udp provider to forward connections to its peer.

    Here's a demonstration of both a http-client and a http-server running over wireguard (a poor man's QUIC): https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go/tree/master/tun/ne...

    fly.io wrote about such setups not long ago too: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26315695

    And tailscale.com uses a similar setup (with netstack) on non-Linux/xBSD platforms: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28261683

  • Userspace WireGuard for armv7-linux-gnueabi
    1 project | /r/WireGuard | 10 Mar 2021
    I think you can try wireguard-go,
  • Netaddr.ip: a new IP address type for Go
    4 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 10 Mar 2021
    > The story begins in April 2019 with 89476f8cb5 in which David Crawshaw, aware of all these problems, created an IP type like:

    It's in a PR here: https://github.com/WireGuard/wireguard-go/pull/11/files

    Which mentions:

    > Typically throughout WireGuard, we've used [4]byte for v4 and [16]byte for v6, considering the Go standard library's choice of v6-mapped-v4 to be a mistake.

    It actually looks useful, there's something similar in wgtypes, and I wanted to use it recently [0] but that package unfortunately doesn't expose a way to write it out to a string/buffer, so I ended up almost replicating it.

    [0] https://github.com/OJFord/terraform-provider-wireguard/blob/...

    (There's a lot of ways of presenting/parsing/constructing the same config options there! I'm sure if I were more fluent in Go there's some more succinct way.)

What are some alternatives?

When comparing boringtun and wireguard-go you can also consider the following projects:

boringtun-example - A real world ping example of boring tun

set - Package set is a small wrapper around the official reflect package that facilitates loose type conversion and assignment into native Go types.

frp - A fast reverse proxy to help you expose a local server behind a NAT or firewall to the internet.

wireguard-install - WireGuard VPN installer for Linux servers

mullvadvpn-app - The Mullvad VPN client app for desktop and mobile

goja - ECMAScript/JavaScript engine in pure Go

wireguard-p2p - A tool for setting up WireGuard connections from peer to peer.

go - The Go programming language

openvpn-install - Set up your own OpenVPN server on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS or Arch Linux.

onetun - User space WireGuard port-forward in Rust

workers-rs - Write Cloudflare Workers in 100% Rust via WebAssembly

rust - Empowering everyone to build reliable and efficient software.