Can someone explain the difference between warp and warp+? I’ve read the blog and the App Store description, both of which completely fail to identify the difference.
Hopefully I can! WARP uses a protocol called WireGuard to secure your Internet traffic. Your encrypted traffic flows over that protocol to the closest Cloudflare data center before it is released onto the public Internet.
WARP+ takes that one step further. Rather than releasing your traffic directly onto the Internet, we use all the data we have from our Argo product [1] to route your traffic to _another_ Cloudflare data center via the route over the Internet with the best possible performance. That data center will be closer to your traffic's destination, hopefully improving the performance. In effect your traffic will bypass Internet congestion and slow links with the goal of better time-to-first-byte performance.
Why should a user pay $4.99/month for Warp+ when they can pay less than that for a traditional VPN that masks their IP address? Does the performance benefit make up for the relatively weaker privacy?
For me, it’s a trust issue: it’s quite hard to evaluate VPN providers so many people might prefer to use a company with substantial visibility and other businesses at risk if they break their privacy guarantees.
If you are hoping to mask your IP you should probably use a traditional VPN and not WARP. WARP doesn't compete with VPNs, it is for everyone who would or could never use a VPN.
