NextDNS is a great product — we use them as the reference architecture in places. Here's where olladns is a better choice, where NextDNS is, and how to decide.
Pick NextDNS if you need global anycast PoPs today, native mobile/router agents, and the brand recognition of a 5-year-old product. Pick olladns if your team lives in Claude/Cursor/Continue and you want to configure DNS filtering by chatting with your AI editor, or if you need per-tenant scoped agent tokens with first-class actor-attributed audit. We overlap on ~80% of the feature surface — the 20% that differs is the deciding factor.
NextDNS has a great CLI and dashboard. olladns has an MCP server at mcp.olladns.com with 49 auto-generated + 5 curated workflows from our OpenAPI spec. Your engineer asks Claude "block tiktok.com during weekdays 9-5 for the marketing team" and Claude calls 3 of our tools to make it happen — no jumping to a dashboard, no remembering which menu item lives where. NextDNS doesn't have this and isn't building it.
Every other DNS-filter vendor (including NextDNS) treats the API as an "advanced feature" and the dashboard as the source of truth. We do the opposite: the console is read-only on purpose. Config goes through versionable, auditable, scriptable APIs. The result: zero drift between staging and prod, every change has an actor, no "someone clicked something" forensics.
Our API keys carry an explicit scope list (analytics:read, policies:write, etc. — 19 scopes total) and per-key expiry. Mint one for your CI bot with just the scopes it needs. Audit log tags every change with the specific token that made it (not just "a user did this"). NextDNS has API keys but they're full-capability — there's no per-key scope dispatch.
Our DGA classifier is a feature-based scorer (entropy, vowel ratio, n-gram, length) in ~280 lines of Rust you can read. When it flags a domain, you can see exactly which features triggered it. NextDNS uses opaque ML models from upstream feeds — you trust the verdict or you don't. For security-research-minded buyers, the explainability matters.
Every audit event fires a HMAC-SHA256-signed outbound webhook to subscribers. Plug into Slack, PagerDuty, Sentinel, or your own SIEM via one POST. NextDNS supports webhooks too but the audit-event integration is less direct.
Every device gets its own DoH URL — dns.olladns.com/dns-query/<tenant>--<slug>. Every analytics endpoint slices by device slug, so you can answer "which laptop looked up that phishing domain" without IP-based heuristics. NextDNS supports this too but charges per-device above their tier limits; we don't.
Push your owned domains (yourcompany.com, internal-tool.com) to /policies/protect-list. Our typosquat detector runs Damerau-Levenshtein ≤ 2 with homoglyph normalization on every incoming lookup — catches campaigns built around your specific brand. NextDNS detects generic lookalikes via its threat feed; per-tenant scoring against your owned brands is an olladns-specific capability.
NextDNS has 100+ PoPs across 6 continents. We're in one US region with Mumbai on the roadmap. If sub-20 ms p99 latency from Singapore matters more than agent-native config, NextDNS is the safer pick today.
NextDNS ships native macOS/Windows/iOS/Android apps and an open-source CLI that drops into OpenWrt, Asus-Merlin, pfSense, etc. olladns expects you to use OS-native DoH or your router's built-in DoH/DoT upstream — fine for sophisticated teams, friction for everyone else.
NextDNS has been live since 2019, has SOC 2 Type II, and has every Fortune-500 procurement team familiar with the name. olladns is in SOC 2 observation now; report expected Q3 2026. If your CISO's first question is "Are you SOC 2?", we can't say yes yet.
NextDNS ships ~100 curated lists; olladns ships 60 across 14 categories as of v0.72. The gap is small enough that "list breadth" stopped being a real differentiator. If a customer asks for a specific list neither of us has, adding it is one row in our migration table.
Both products do per-tenant routing via DoH path, both have safe-search enforcement, parental controls, custom block/allow rules where a bare domain also covers its subdomains, DNS rewrites, schedule-based blocking, query log + analytics, TLD blocking. The 80% overlap is real — DNS filtering has converged on a known shape. The 20% is where each product places its bets.