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Picking a site-to-site tunnel between two offices, IPsec or WireGuard.

IPsec is the classic choice, supported by every firewall and well tested, but painful to debug when phase-1 or phase-2 do not match across vendors. WireGuard is faster, simpler to configure and steadier over flaky uplinks, but not every firewall supports it and you handle key management yourself.

Try this first

  1. 1Same firewall brand on both ends? IPsec is easy, use the wizard, no reason to switch.
  2. 2Different brands? IPsec hurts, WireGuard is usually cleaner, provided both ends support it (OPNsense, MikroTik, recent Fortinet, UniFi UDM).
  3. 3Dynamic IP on one side? WireGuard tolerates it better since it pairs statelessly, IPsec needs DDNS or a dynamic-IP-aware setup.
  4. 4Latency-sensitive traffic (VoIP, RDP)? Both work, but actually test, some IPsec stacks have default MTU issues that hang sessions.
  5. 5Make one side the 'master' for key rotation, put a 12-month calendar reminder on it, otherwise nobody rotates keys.

When to bring us in

You must meet FIPS-140 or a vendor audit requires certified crypto: WireGuard usually lacks that certification, go with IPsec on a certified firewall.

See also

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