Quad9: public, secure and free DNS resolver

Pros

It doesn’t log the IP address of the users

It is free

It is no-profit

It prevents users from accidentally landing on malicious domains such as phishing domains, C2 command-and-control domains, exploit kit compromised domains, and such.

The resolver - optionally - can route all DNS queries from all apps on your device to the Quad9 anycast servers over a DNS-Over-TLS encrypted connection.

Cons

No manual filtering

Quad9 is slower than other public dns resolver as Clouflare DNS, Google DNS or OpenDNS: South America 11 ms; North America and Oceania 13 ms; Africa 18 ms; Europe 20ms; Asia 53 ms.

Why Quad9?

Quad9’s main attraction is its curated blocklist that will prevent you from visiting domains that host malicious content. In that regard, the service outscores the competition in various third-party tests.

On the downside though, the performance hit of the extra protection is quite severe. Quad9 is outperformed comprehensively by many of the public DNS services including our current favorite, Cloudflare DNS. Furthermore, you can use Cloudflare’s alternate DNS servers to block malware though it doesn’t perform as well as Quad9 in independent tests. Also, while Quad9 does offer an Android app, so do many of its peers.

All things considered, there are two types of users who could want to use Quad9. The service will be of use primarily to users for whom blocking malware at the DNS-level is important, even if it comes with a performance penalty. Secondly, Quad9 will resonate with users who’d rather trust their DNS queries to a non-profit entity instead of a for-profit corporation. If you belong to either camp, you’ll be well satisfied with Quad9. However if performance is paramount, then look elsewhere.

Homepage:

https://www.quad9.net/