ExpressVPN with Lightway Protocol

ExpressVPN has taken the less-travelled route of building its own VPN protocol from scratch instead of adopting WireGuard or sticking with OpenVPN. Lightway is the result. It is open source, has a deliberately small codebase, and has since been rewritten in Rust. It is out of beta and available across ExpressVPN's apps for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, iOS and routers. That means almost anyone with an ExpressVPN subscription can use it today.

This review focuses on what Lightway brings to the service. It is aimed at users who care about connection speed and reliability, such as streamers, travellers and people who switch networks often on mobile. It should also interest anyone who prefers lean, auditable security software to sprawling legacy codebases. Users who want an established, industry-standard protocol still have OpenVPN and IKEv2 available as fallbacks.

On paper, Lightway is a thoughtful piece of engineering. The roughly 1,000-line codebase, by ExpressVPN's own count, is far smaller than OpenVPN's or IPSec's. In principle, that makes it much easier to audit, and we see that as a meaningful security advantage rather than a marketing point. The move from C to Rust is also encouraging, since Rust's memory-safety guarantees remove a whole class of bugs common in C networking code.

Independent testing supports the speed claims to a degree:

• Cloudwards found Lightway UDP delivered ExpressVPN's fastest downloads, while Lightway TCP with ChaCha20 gave the best uploads.
• VPN.com placed ExpressVPN 8th of 22 for speed. That is solid but not class-leading.
• VPN.com also gave the service a Trust Score of 86/100, which is respectable.

The wider service adds to the appeal. It offers 3,000+ servers in 113 countries, up to 10 simultaneous devices, a British Virgin Islands jurisdiction and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

Several claims are ExpressVPN's own and remain unverified by the data we have. These include lower battery use, fewer connection drops and post-quantum protection, so we treat them with caution. The comparison with WireGuard is also murky, as the two may share similarities. Most importantly, we have no pricing information, so we cannot judge value for money.

Overall, Lightway looks like a real differentiator and a strong reason to consider ExpressVPN. The missing price data and reliance on vendor claims keep this from being a top-tier score.