DNSFILTER VS NEXTDNS

SECURITY SOLUTION

NextDNS and DNSFilter are both next-gen DNS security solutions. DNSFilter has spent nearly 6 years building a solution that is both easy to implement and a comprehensive threat protection tool. Still an early-stage startup, NextDNS has focused on usability over other features, while DNSFilter has a blended focus on both customer usability and bulletproof threat protection.

HIGHER QUALITY SECURITY FEEDS

NextDNS’ security options appear to be comprehensive at first glance, but a large portion of their lists (including ad blockers) are either publicly sourced or updated infrequently. Because NextDNS makes their lists public, we can see that a large portion of their security lists go several months without updating. When you solely rely on public lists to source and block threat domains, there’s a large margin of error. First, the people providing these lists might not be cybersecurity experts, thus their data could be inaccurate. But also, deceptive domains don’t remain deceptive forever. When you go long periods without updating deceptive domain lists, you inevitably run into false positives—meaning trying to access a domain that is no longer deceptive will result in that domain being blocked.

At DNSFilter, we source both public and private feeds for all of our categories (including our advertising category), but we do not wholly ingest those feeds the way NextDNS appears to. We check these lists ourselves to look for false positives or miscategorized domains. If a list doesn’t meet our standards, we don’t ingest it. And sometimes we will only ingest a partial list of domains.

While NextDNS relies on these public feeds for their ad blocking capabilities, at DNSFilter we take the use of public feeds a step further. We employ one of the maintainers of those public feeds, giving us an internal expert on ads and trackers who is actively working on our ad block categories.