Did you try all of them?
What made you stick with the one you are currently using?
I became fully aware of Control D only yesterday as the name was vaguely familiar to me when I heard it and for Adguard DNS well I thought it was a normal-ish DNS service like 1 1 1 1, quad9, Google, etc… (not that user configurable).
I tried looking for some reviews and discussions comparing the 3 but found almost nothing about Control D and Adguard DNS but I did stumble upon Control D CEO 2 blog posts comparing Adguard DNS and NextDNS to Control D.
There seems to be not that much talk about these 2 unlike NextDNS which seems way more popular, if I’m correct then what made it way more popular and known?
I’ve tried all three and I currently use the free ControlD Ads & Tracking DNS resolver and I’ve been very happy with it. It filters a fair amount of garbage domains in my experience and I don’t want to spend time finely tuning the blocklists a DNS resolver uses. I use it over Adguard DNS because I noticed it blocks a few more domains in my observation.
I think most people talk about NextDNS because of the level of customizability it offers, if you want to finely tweak the blocklists and whatnot your resolver uses. It also has a pretty good web interface showing you all kinds of stats and whatnot.
You also have to keep in mind that ControlD is newer in comparison to either NextDNS or Adguard DNS by a few years, so there’s likely less people discussing it as it’s a little less known.
Only tried nextDNS and it’s fantastic. Fast and customizable.
Every once in a while it slows down quite a bit, latency goes from ~5ms to ~200ms or so
I use Adguard at home on my Synology NAS and NextDNS in combination. I am pretty happy with it so far.
I stick with adguard because i used Pihole before and like the Ability to assign my DHCP-Server to it.
The reason i also pay for NextDNS is, because it is so easy to setup. You have like 4 different ways to set it up and it is so Noob-Friendly, it even has an Android APP to activate it.
Also my Adguard works only in LAN, when im home, while NextDNS also works when im outside.
And NextDNS has an unofficial OpenSource-App: https://apt.izzysoft.de/fdroid/index/apk/com.doubleangels.nextdnsmanagement
Last Thing: While Adguard works pretty well, there are still some requests that were only Seen and blocked by NextDNS.
I bought Control D’s black friday deal last year and can’t really complain about their service. Also includes some nice blocklists. But their interface is a bit confusing and slow to use.
