Cloudflare vs Quad9

[djdelarosa25]

Looking to use a different DNS provider than my ISP because they block porn sites (lol). Firing up DNSBench, here are the results:

 

Seems like Cloudflare is far and away the fastest for cached, though for uncached and DotCom, they're just around average. Ignoring UltraDNS and whatever NTT America is, Quad9 is the next well-known provider that provides average speeds for cached but is considerably better than Cloudflare for uncached and DotCom.

 

Here's the tabular data for the two DNS providers.

 

   1.  0.  0.  1 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  - Cached Name   | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.011 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
  - Uncached Name | 0.010 | 0.112 | 0.244 | 0.071 | 100.0 |
  - DotCom Lookup | 0.032 | 0.036 | 0.041 | 0.002 | 100.0 |
  ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
                     one.one.one.one
          CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US

    1.  1.  1.  1 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  - Cached Name   | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.010 | 0.000 | 100.0 |
  - Uncached Name | 0.010 | 0.115 | 0.266 | 0.070 | 100.0 |
  - DotCom Lookup | 0.169 | 0.199 | 0.239 | 0.030 | 100.0 |
  ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
                     one.one.one.one
          CLOUDFLARENET - Cloudflare, Inc., US
 

9.  9.  9.  9 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  + Cached Name   | 0.037 | 0.037 | 0.044 | 0.001 | 100.0 |
  + Uncached Name | 0.038 | 0.095 | 0.391 | 0.082 | 100.0 |
  + DotCom Lookup | 0.042 | 0.064 | 0.108 | 0.030 | 100.0 |
  ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
                      dns.quad9.net
                 QUAD9-AS-1 - Quad9, US

 

149.112.112.112 |  Min  |  Avg  |  Max  |Std.Dev|Reliab%|
  ----------------+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
  + Cached Name   | 0.046 | 0.047 | 0.059 | 0.002 | 100.0 |
  + Uncached Name | 0.048 | 0.117 | 0.398 | 0.099 | 100.0 |
  + DotCom Lookup | 0.051 | 0.071 | 0.119 | 0.022 | 100.0 |
  ---<-------->---+-------+-------+-------+-------+-------+
           rpz-public-resolver1.rrdns.pch.net
                 QUAD9-AS-1 - Quad9, US

 

Also, Quad9 has malware protection, which is a plus.

What do you guys think, which of the two should I go for?

[Alex Atkin UK]

More importantly, Cloudflare is pure DNS, no meddling.  Quad9 as I understand it DO meddle, they are meant to block certain hosts, so its a rather different thing.  This is also why I don't touch OpenDNS, I don't want anyone messing with my DNS but me, any overrides I do on the router with unadulterated DNS coming into it via Cloudflare.

 

Plus its not all about response time, for better security you can use DNS over TLS which will sacrifice some speed for the benefit of your ISP not being able to snoop on or intercept your DNS lookups.

If I weren't using DNS over TLS, I'd probably use full DNS resolution on the router, as you aren't relying on a third-party DNS cache being accurate that way.