Control D Reviews

Been a great experience. Staff has been great to work with. Product is easy to deploy with their provisioning scripts.

The layout is easy to navigate and configure. Advanced DNS settings are available but the interface isn't complicated. Service itself has been super fast and reliable. Support has been amazing. Very quick and knowledgeable. Provisioning scripts work great.

Sometimes one setting will affect/negate another. This isn't always apparent. Some of it may be my knowledge set on DNS.

I've been using Control D since it came out. I like the company's philosophy as well as Windscribe. I'm happy to support them and recommend ControlD to my colleagues.

Incredibly feature rich and powerful tool for a fraction of the cost of the competition. Great blocking features with regular updates meeting more and more needs monthly.

Not many. It's young, so it has some growing to do, but they've been quick with updates and responsive to suggestions.

I am pleasantly surprised with the service. Never heard of ControlD before and was recommended by a co-worker. Didn't dig it initially but it really grew on me, especially since there is an update every week with something new. I plan to use this long term.

Been using the business beta for about 3 months now after being a user of the consumer service for 8 months. The service is very different from other DNS platforms I used before (Umbrella, dnsfilter) and there is a bit of a learning curve but after you "get it" there is no going back.

DNS resolution is very fast I'm seeing about ~5ms and DNS-over-HTTPS3 is supported. I don't know any other DNS service that has this.

Onboarding was very straight forward, we use Ninja and the provided tutorial was very useful. I onboarded 250 clients in a manner of minutes, seriously.

We use this for malware blocking and some general content filtering and it does the job. No false positives so far.

UI is very opinionated initially, but there may be a method to the madness. Its like the Cybertruck, at first you go WTF, but then you love it.

One thing thats missing is is SIEM integration which would be nice to have.

Great experience.
Easily deployed.
Easy to write bypass or override.
Great support. Always willing to do the deep dive.
These folks are genius.

Best support you can find.
These guys know their stuff.
Easy to use.
Easy to manage.
Easy to deploy.

The system doesn't automatically catch errors that I make when doing setup.

This is the best we have found for a DNS based filtering system. An optional 'local client' that could handle things like captive portals, local domains, and application blocking would widen the possible use-cases further.

Easy deployment and set up.
Fantastic, responsive customer service.
Easy and intuitive admin portal and UI.
Reasonable pricing.

Captive portals and local domains made things difficult for our use-case, but this is a fundamental limitation of DNS based filtering.

Again overall a great experience for us we had a few conference calls for some onboarding and regardless of what technician we work with everyone seems quite responsive which is nice and also rare in today's day and age.

This is a great tool for serverless environments that need DNS filtering. The entire team that we have worked with is always very responsive and it's a pleasure getting to know their product better.

Cost always comes into play but it is quite cheap per seat.

Control D has been a breath of fresh air for me. I'm responsible for a medium -sized network for a non-profit church and school. We have around 3000 members in our congregation and over 320 students in our 3K-8 grade school. Our church and school primarily utilizes Apple, Dell (Windows & Linux), and BenQ hardware and software.
Over the last 10 years or so, I've trusted a few different solutions from the days of an on-premise Microsoft ISA server, to Untangle, to DNSFilter, then on to NextDNS, and now ControlD. Of these products, I'm confident in saying I've had the best experience and quality service with Control D.
-Microsoft ISA server is no longer supported and just doesn't fit the bill in 2024.
-Untangle no longer made sense as it runs more or less as a squid proxy, which tended to slow things down and miss things that should clearly be in a filtering category. It worked ok back in the day, but in 2024 it just can't support our needs.
-DNSFilter has an overcomplicated interface that lacks common sense features in common sense places that I needed such as local DNS resolution when remote devices are on-site. Another issue I ran into is the only way to get an iPad to work with DNSFilter is to install a client on every iPad and manage it through our MDM. Unfortunately, you need their top paid plan to get that ability which is very expensive for the number of devices and people we have. Speaking of the client, I also experienced many instances where the client itself on an iPad or Windows computers would just simply stop working and not filter anything. In regards to our iPads, each iPad would essentially have to create a VPN tunnel back to DNSFilter in order to provide DNS resolution, which seemed very inefficient. When I reached out to their support regarding my issues, it wasn't a very positive experience. At times I felt like they didn't know what I was talking about or that it was always me that must of had something misconfigured. Maybe it was, but I didn't appreciate that attitude for the amount of money we were paying. It would have been great if they could have worked with me a bit more (cared) in diagnosing the problems I had with their service.
-NextDNS worked good for a long time, but I started having problems with their resolvers not acting the way they were configured in the web interface. Their portal and interface is very nice. It's very cleanly laid out and very easy to configure. They have a lot of great features, but are lacking in the amount of filter categories I would like to see. Instead, I had to rely on their third-party filters for some extra stuff, which didn't catch everything either. It came down to adding A LOT of blacklist items, which became too much to manage. I also didn't see a lot of development going on with the project, which I was ok with until the product stopped functioning properly. The main problem I ran into with NextDNS is their resolvers weren't blocking the bad stuff I had configured it to block in their portal. Overall NextDNS was great and it worked, until it didn't. The experience was also random like at times it would be filtering, but then it just passed all traffic without any type of warning or logging, even with debug mode on. There would be times when the nextdns-cli client I had running on a few Linux servers would be unable to contact the NextDNS resolvers through DoH. In the meantime, I had no external DNS resolution until connection was reestablished. So, not sure what's up with that, but NextDNS doesn't really have a way to contact support. From what I found, most of their support relied on the community and their forum. There wasn't a direct phone number or email address to use to get ahold of anyone. All that being said, and at the price point they are offering NextDNS, it's a pretty good solution. I just couldn't continue to rely on it as a rock-solid solution for my organization.
-ControlD has been rock solid, as mentioned earlier. I've worked with their team regarding some features and active development things, which they've implemented one way or another. Control D's staff is very responsive to their customers and potential customers. I wanted to write this review to give you a comparison with other products I tried and also tell you what a great experience I've had with Control D.

-Easy to configure and set up
-Works seamlessly with Apple iPad's
-Accurate results (it does what it is supposed to at all times)
-Fast DNS resolution
-Very functional web interface
-Lots of up-to-date supporting documentation
-Packed with features and filter sets that just make sense (and actually work!)
-Actively being developed, maintained, and supported
-Support is fantastic and great customer service!
-Fair pricing

-Can be difficult to configure for a non-IT person, but thankfully you can rely on up-to-date documentation and talking to a human for support.

We've used other DNS platforms like NextDNS and DNSfilter before, and Control D is by far our favorite. Performance is the same as Cloudflare (fast!) and the features are great too. The community is very active, and you can even talk to the devs and owners directly in their Discord. There is something new being released almost every week. I hope they don't stop this cadence.

This is a very highly customizable DNS platform, that is not overly complicated. Can block malware, trackers and even ads! Browsing with it enabled makes browsing the Internet a lot more palatable. Works on mobile without any software and the redirection feature is quite excellent as it eliminated the need for VPNs for our company.

Router deployment was especially easy. We use Ubiqiti, and the process was copying a single command and running it in SSH on the router. A+

Honestly, can't think of any. Would love to have a monthly report of all activity being emailed to me, but the devs say it's already on the roadmap.