One at a time

  • Shadowsocks: the oldest, lightweight and fast, with a relatively recognizable signature — fine where blocking is light.
  • VMess: V2Ray's native protocol, with timestamp verification; full-featured but slightly heavier handshakes.
  • VLESS: the lightweight successor to VMess, unencrypted by itself and used with TLS/REALITY. Better performance and the current mainstream.
  • Trojan: disguises traffic as ordinary HTTPS, relies on a real certificate, and resists blocking by "looking like a normal website".

Which to choose

If your provider offers several, prefer VLESS + REALITY or Trojan, and switch only if a line gets targeted.

A protocol is just "how the handshake works". Whether you connect, and how fast, depends far more on the server's bandwidth and your physical route to the data center than on the protocol's name.