NextDNS Review: Cloud DNS Protection That Actually Works

Here’s my NextDNS review after nearly two years running NextDNS across my whole network. No ads in my phone apps, no tracking scripts loading in the background, and my ISP sees nothing but encrypted queries to NextDNS servers. This is the 2026 pass: what’s new since my first look, how to set it up, what it costs, and where it falls down.

What NextDNS Does

NextDNS sits between your devices and the internet. Every time you visit a website, your device asks “where is example.com?” and NextDNS answers. The difference from your ISP’s default DNS is that NextDNS encrypts these queries and checks them against blocklists before responding. That is cloud DNS protection in one sentence: DNS-level ad blocking, malware domains that return empty answers, and no plaintext query log sitting at your ISP.

Because the check happens at the resolver, it covers every device on the network. Smart TVs, game consoles, printers, IoT gadgets. Things that will never run a browser extension get the same filtering as your laptop.

Diagram of how NextDNS handles a DNS query: devices send an encrypted DoH or DoT query, NextDNS checks blocklists and security feeds, then either blocks the domain with an empty answer or forwards it to an upstream resolver

What’s New in NextDNS (2025–2026)

Everything here shipped after my original write-up. I have not gone hands-on with each toggle yet, so treat this as a changelog with pointers to where each setting lives.

Bypass Age Verification

Shipped in August 2025 and available on every plan, including Free. NextDNS describes it as a way around age-verification walls, the ID or selfie checks some sites now demand, using DNS tricks on a preset list of domains. The privacy argument is straightforward: you shouldn’t have to upload a passport to read a website, and this pushes back on the wave of ID mandates like the UK Online Safety Act.

The toggle sits in profile Settings at my.nextdns.io/$id/settings. Family admins should know it is there. If you want age checks to keep working on a kid’s profile, leave it off. It’s per-profile, so one config can use it while another doesn’t.

Log Data Residency

You now choose where NextDNS stores your logs: the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, or Switzerland. If you’ve been filing GDPR paperwork or answering “where does this data live” questions, this closes a real gap in the cloud DNS protection story. Your filtered query logs can stay in your jurisdiction.

Tracker Insights and Expanded Analytics

Analytics now includes Tracker Insights. NextDNS says it shows who is tracking you and how much of your web traffic those trackers capture. It sits on top of the existing views I already liked: top blocked domains, queries by device, and the GAFAM breakdown. I cover the dashboard in the features section below.

NextDNS Features

Here’s what you get and what each feature actually does.

Security Features

The security tab is now 11 toggles. Three are new since my first review (Parked Domains, Top-Level Domains, and CSAM protection).

Privacy Features and Blocklists

For blocklists, the catalog is large (84 lists and actively maintained in nextdns/blocklists). You don’t need most of them. Two or three lists with good overlap beats ten lists that add false positives for no extra coverage.

My picks, from safest to most aggressive:

• NextDNS Recommended - the vendor’s own curated set. The right starting point if you don’t want to think about it.
• OISD - the go-to community list. Blocks most ads and trackers without breaking sites.
• AdGuard DNS filter - well-maintained, good balance.
• Steven Black’s Unified Hosts - another solid option with multiple variants.
• HaGeZi Multi - comes in Normal, Pro, Pro Plus, and Ultimate. This is the ladder to climb if you want more blocking and are willing to allowlist more breakage.

Under Native Tracking Protection, enable blocking for the device types you own. Apple devices, enable Apple. Windows PCs, enable Windows.

Parental Controls

Denylist and Allowlist

You can manually block or allow specific domains. The allowlist overrides blocklists when legitimate services get caught. The denylist lets you block domains that aren’t on any list. This is the first place to go when something breaks (or when something annoying doesn’t).

Analytics

The dashboard shows total queries and percentage blocked, top blocked domains, top allowed domains, queries by device (if you name them), queries over time, and the GAFAM traffic breakdown. Tracker Insights (the 2026 addition) layers the “who is tracking you” view on top of that.

Logs, Retention and Data Residency

Query logs show every DNS request with timestamps, device info, and whether it was blocked or allowed. Retention is selectable from one hour up to two years, or you can disable logging completely. Storage location is your choice: United States, European Union, United Kingdom, or Switzerland.

Honesty note on “no logs”: even with logging off, the live query view in the dashboard still shows requests while you’re looking at it. That’s not retention, but it’s not invisible either.

More Settings Worth Knowing

A few settings that don’t fit the tables but matter:

• DNSSEC - automatic validation of DNS answers.
• Rewrites - override the DNS response for any domain. This is the split-horizon tool for home labs. Point home.example.com at 192.168.1.10 without running a local DNS server.
• Block Page - show a page when domains are blocked (I disable this).
• Anonymized EDNS Client Subnet - hides your IP from upstream resolvers.
• Cache Boost - improves response times.
• Query Name Minimisation - enforced, sends only what’s needed in each query.

Handshake (an experimental peer-to-peer naming system) is there too if you want to poke at it.

How to Set Up NextDNS

The whole happy path is seven steps. Budget ten minutes.

Step 1: Create Your Account

1. Go to NextDNS and click Try it now
2. Sign up with your email
3. You’ll get a unique Configuration ID (something like abc123)

This ID is your profile. You can create multiple profiles for different use cases.

Step 2: Configure Your Security Settings

In the Security tab, enable the protections you want:

Recommended settings:
- Threat Intelligence Feeds: ON
- Google Safe Browsing: ON
- Cryptojacking Protection: ON
- DNS Rebinding Protection: ON
- IDN Homograph Attacks Protection: ON
- Typosquatting Protection: ON

NRD (Newly Registered Domains) blocking is aggressive. It can break legitimate new services, so I leave it off unless I’m setting up a network for non-technical users. Same story for whole-TLD blocks and HaGeZi Ultimate. Dial those in later, not on day one.

Step 3: Add Your Blocklists

In the Privacy tab, click Add a blocklist and choose from the list. Start with NextDNS Recommended if you want zero decisions, or add two or three from the OISD / AdGuard DNS filter / Steven Black set. If you want more blocking and don’t mind allowlisting, climb the HaGeZi Multi ladder (Normal, then Pro).

Under Native Tracking Protection, enable blocking for the device types you own.

Step 4: Set Up Parental Controls (Optional)

Skip this if you don’t have kids on the network. Otherwise, the Parental Control tab lets you:

1. Block categories (porn, gambling, social media, etc.)
2. Set recreation times when blocks lift
3. Force safe search on search engines
4. Block bypass methods so VPNs and proxies don’t work

If you use these, also check the Bypass Age Verification toggle in Settings and decide whether you want it on.

Step 5: Connect Your Devices

NextDNS gives you several connection methods. Pick based on what you’re protecting.

DNS-over-HTTPS: https://dns.nextdns.io/YOUR_CONFIG_ID

sh https://nextdns.io/install

YOUR_CONFIG_ID.dns.nextdns.io

Step 6: Verify It’s Working

1. Visit test.nextdns.io. You should see “All good! You are using NextDNS”
2. From a terminal, the same check returns JSON:

curl -s https://test.nextdns.io
{"status":"ok","protocol":"DOH","profile":"abc123",...}   # using NextDNS
{"status":"unconfigured",...}                             # NOT using NextDNS

3. Check your dashboard. Queries should start appearing in the logs within a minute.

If the test fails: double-check your DNS settings. On some networks, the ISP forces their DNS and you’ll need DoH, DoT, or the native app to bypass that. Browser DoH won’t cover non-browser apps. A VPN that overrides DNS will also send queries past NextDNS until you point the VPN’s DNS at your config.

Step 7: Fine-Tune Your Settings

After a few days of use, check your logs:

• If legitimate sites break, add them to your allowlist
• If annoying domains slip through, add them to your denylist
• Adjust blocklists if you’re seeing too many false positives

The Settings tab has the rest: log retention (one hour to two years, or off), log data residency, DNSSEC, Rewrites, Block Page, Anonymized EDNS Client Subnet, and Cache Boost. I cover these in the features section above rather than repeating the list.

Running NextDNS Day-to-Day (Troubleshooting & Ops)

This is the section most reviews skip, and it’s the part that matters once NextDNS becomes a dependency.

Free-Tier Quota Exhaustion (Silent Degradation)

The free plan gives you 300,000 queries per month. When you hit the limit, NextDNS does not error out. It keeps resolving, but blocking silently stops. Ads creep back in with no warning anywhere in the UI. That’s the single worst UX of the free plan, and the reason a dashboard check is the first thing to do when “blocking stopped working.”

To watch it before the cliff: the NextDNS public API exposes query counts and config data. A ten-line script polling it weekly is enough to get a warning instead of a surprise.

When NextDNS Itself Is Down

For a Linux router or VPS, the CLI path is:

sh https://nextdns.io/install

It’s MIT-licensed, actively developed (v1.47.x, mid-2026), and caches locally so a NextDNS hiccup doesn’t take your resolver down immediately.

False Positives and Broken Sites

Occasionally a legitimate service gets caught by a blocklist. The usual culprits are the aggressive ones: NRD blocking, HaGeZi Ultimate, whole-TLD blocks. Cross-check back to Step 7. Dial the list back one notch rather than abandoning blocking, and allowlist the specific domain from the logs.

What I Like About NextDNS

Setup Takes Five Minutes

Create an account, get a configuration ID, and point your devices at NextDNS servers. That’s it. No server to manage, no Docker containers to maintain, no firewall rules to configure.

For router-level protection, you just change your DNS settings once and every device on your network gets coverage automatically. Smart TVs, gaming consoles, IoT devices, phones, laptops. Everything.

The Blocking Works Well

I’ve been running OISD, AdGuard DNS filter, and Steven Black’s list on my main profile for nearly two years. YouTube still shows some ads (those are harder to block at DNS level since they come from the same domains as videos), but everything else is clean:

• In-app ads on mobile games: gone
• Banner ads on websites: gone
• Tracking scripts from Facebook, Google Analytics, etc.: blocked
• Those annoying cookie consent popups on some sites: reduced

The dashboard shows what’s being blocked in real time. Watching my smart TV phone home to analytics servers only to get blocked is oddly satisfying.

Privacy Settings That Make Sense

You can configure NextDNS to keep zero logs. No retention of query data, no IP address storage, nothing. Or you can keep logs for debugging (helpful when something breaks) and delete them after a set period. And now you can pick which jurisdiction those logs live in.

The anonymized EDNS option hides your IP from upstream DNS resolvers. Combined with encrypted DNS protocols, this means neither your ISP nor the destination servers know exactly what you’re doing.

Multiple Configurations

You can create separate profiles for different use cases. I have one for my main network with aggressive blocking, another for my parents’ house with safer defaults, and a third for testing when I need to bypass filters temporarily. Rewrites are per-profile too, which makes the home-lab split-horizon trick possible without touching anything global.

What Could Be Better

The Free Tier Limit

300,000 queries per month sounds like a lot until you realize how chatty modern devices are. A household with a few phones, a smart TV, and some IoT devices can burn through that in two weeks.

When you hit the limit, NextDNS stops filtering and just passes queries through. You still have DNS service, but without the blocking, and with no warning that it happened. If you’re on the free tier and care about the blocking, watch your query count (the API makes this easy, see the ops section). The Pro plan removes the limit entirely.

YouTube Ads Still Get Through

DNS-level blocking can’t touch YouTube ads because they’re served from the same domains as the actual video content. Blocking those domains would break YouTube entirely. You’ll still need a browser extension alongside NextDNS for YouTube specifically. On Chrome that means uBlock Origin Lite now that classic uBlock Origin is gone with Manifest V2.

Some Sites Break

Occasionally a legitimate service gets caught by blocklists. Affiliate links, certain CDNs, or obscure tracking domains that websites actually need to function. The allowlist feature handles this, but you need to notice the problem first and figure out which domain to unblock.

NextDNS Pricing (2026): Free Tier, Pro, Business & Education

NextDNS pricing is short enough to fit in one table. This is what the pricing page renders as of September 2026 (it geo-renders, so EU visitors see EUR; it’s roughly the same numerals elsewhere).

All prices are in EUR on the EU-rendered page. Cards, PayPal, and crypto accepted. Pro at €1.99/month (roughly $2, billed in your local currency) works out to under €24 a year for every device on your network. That’s cheaper than most VPNs and, for daily browsing, arguably more useful.

The free tier works for testing or light personal use. Most households need Pro. The Business and Education tiers (which used to be “custom” quotes) are now listed prices with per-seat scaling.

My Configuration (2026)

Here’s what I’m running:

Security tab: Threat Intelligence Feeds, Google Safe Browsing, Cryptojacking, DNS Rebinding, IDN Homographs, and Typosquatting all on. NRD off, TLD blocking off, Parked Domains on.

Privacy tab (blocklists): OISD, AdGuard DNS filter, and Steven Black’s Unified Hosts on the main profile. HaGeZi Multi Pro on the test profile when I want to see what tighter lists catch.

Settings: Logs at 1 hour retention (enough for debugging, no long tail), log residency in the EU, Anonymized EDNS on, Cache Boost on.

This catches most ads and trackers without breaking too many websites. I check the logs occasionally and allowlist domains when something legitimate gets blocked.

Who Should Use NextDNS

Who Should Look Elsewhere (NextDNS vs AdGuard Home and Others)

If you want complete control over your DNS infrastructure, the NextDNS vs AdGuard Home question is really managed convenience versus ownership. NextDNS gives you any-network coverage and someone else maintaining the service for about €2/month. AdGuard Home gives you unlimited queries, custom rules, and no subscription, and you own the uptime, the updates, and the blocklist curation.

AdGuard Home needs hardware to run on. A cheap Hetzner VPS (a €4-5/month box is plenty) works if you want it reachable from everywhere. For something at home, check the best home server mini PCs, an ASUS mini PC like the DC510 is more than enough, or run it on a NAS or Proxmox homelab box you already have.

Also compare Control D if you want per-device policies; I haven’t reviewed it, so I won’t pretend to tell you how it stacks up. And note that EU-friendly alternatives have thinned out: DNS0.EU shut down in October 2025 for lack of funding, so don’t count on it as a live option.

The tradeoff with self-hosting is maintenance. You handle updates, monitor uptime, and troubleshoot when things break. NextDNS handles all that for you.

NextDNS FAQ

Final Thoughts

After nearly two years, NextDNS is still the DNS layer I run everywhere. The 2025 and 2026 additions (log data residency, Bypass Age Verification, Tracker Insights) mostly widen the lead over rolling your own resolver. The free tier is a useful demo, but Pro is the real product at pocket-change prices.

This NextDNS review keeps the same honest asterisks as before: YouTube ads still get through, occasional false positives need allowlisting, and there’s no public status page to watch during an incident. Those are small problems against the convenience of encrypted, filtered DNS on every device you own, including the ones that can’t run an extension.

If you want network-level ad blocking without the infrastructure headache, it’s worth trying.

Related Articles:

• Manifest V3 Broke Your Ad Blocker? Block Ads Everywhere with NextDNS
• How to Block Ads, Malware & Stop ISP Tracking with NextDNS and AdGuard Home
• Best 125+ Docker Containers for Home Server in 2026
• How to Self-Host SearXNG - Privacy-Focused Metasearch Engine