What are the best public DNS providers?

Question

4

Options
Considered

28

User
Recs.

Sep 12, 2023

Last
Updated

Here’s the Deal

4 Options Considered

Best public DNS providers	Price	Release Date	Author
-- Cloudflare 1.1.1.1	free	April 1, 2018	APNIC and CloudFlare
-- Quad9	-	-	-
-- Google Public DNS	-	-	-
-- OpenDNS	Free / Paid	-	-

See Full List

I Recommend...

Built By the Slant team

Find the best product instantly.

4.7 star rating

Try it now - it's free

score 9 · Answer 1

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

Top Con

It's Cloudflare

Top Pro

DNS over HTTPS

This DNS serves queries over HTTPS - making it more secure and queries encrypted at rest. See More

Maxim Kamalov's Experience

Maintains privacy and very fast: https://medium.com/@nykolas.z/dns-resolvers-performance-compared-cloudflare-x-google-x-quad9-x-opendns-149e803734e5 See More

Specs

Release Date:April 1, 2018

Author:APNIC and CloudFlare

Top Con

Has conflicts with some ISPs and routers

Because of the nature of 1.1.1.1 not being reserved - some routers use this IP address space to serve their admin web consoles. However, some manufacturers have been notified and are deploying updates. See More

Top Pro

Privacy-focused

Being a joint effort with APNIC and CloudFlare, 1.1.1.1 aims to be more privacy-focused. They have taken a lot of steps to ensure none of your data will be in their Anycast servers. See More

DecentShulsaga's Experience

It’s faster than google’s See More

Top Con

No privacy

US job. See More

Top Pro

As easy to type as 8.8.8.8 and faster

This is one of those DNSes that use a rare IP range, which is using single digits to denote their IPv4 address, so keystrokes are saved. It’s also more private, fast, and surprisingly amazing. See More

RickZeeland's Experience

Cloudflare scores very well amongst the public DNS providers, a good utility for benchmarking this is the free DNS Benchmark utility by Gibson Research. See More

Top Con

Might be slow in some areas

Some DNS queries from places like India might be slower than anticipated. But anyone from places like US or Hong Kong should be fine. See More

See All

Answer 2

Quad9

Top Con

No real privacy

Owned by US and UK and hosted around the world, based on sponsors/affiliates networks infrastructure and is filtered [aka: !censored!]. So privacy word is used only for marketing-advertising purposes. See More

score 1 · Answer 3

Google Public DNS

Top Con

Another way for Google to spy on you

Top Pro

Fast

Top Con

Master of anti-privacy

See All

score 3 · Answer 4

OpenDNS

Top Con

No real privacy

US job. See More

Top Con

Failed queries redirect to search

Instead of returning a 404 error when OpenDNS can't resolve a domain name, it redirects you to a search provider. See More

The Slant team built an AI & it’s awesome

Find the best product instantly

What are the best public DNS providers?

4 Options Considered

Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

My Recommendation for Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

My Recommendation for Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

It's Cloudflare

DNS over HTTPS

Has conflicts with some ISPs and routers

Privacy-focused

No privacy

As easy to type as 8.8.8.8 and faster

Might be slow in some areas

Quad9

My Recommendation for Quad9

My Recommendation for Quad9

No real privacy

Google Public DNS

My Recommendation for Google Public DNS

My Recommendation for Google Public DNS

Another way for Google to spy on you

Fast

Master of anti-privacy

OpenDNS

My Recommendation for OpenDNS

My Recommendation for OpenDNS

No real privacy

Failed queries redirect to search

Don't see your favorite option? Add it.

One sec!