European Alternatives to Cloudflare DNS (1.1.1.1)

1.1.1.1 is the public DNS resolver of Cloudflare, a US company. Cloudflare operates it in partnership with APNIC, the registry for the Asia-Pacific region. It is free, supports encrypted lookups and is one of the best-known alternatives to the internet provider's resolver. Cloudflare's privacy commitment says it does not sell or share personal data from the resolver and does not retain the source IP of queries in non-volatile storage, with one exception: randomly sampled network packets from at most 0.05 percent of the traffic, used for troubleshooting and attack mitigation. Whoever wants the resolver to sit with a European operator has these options.

European alternatives to 1.1.1.1

• Quad9 (Switzerland): the closest match in spirit, because it also focuses on privacy and works across many locations. It adds filtering of known malware and phishing domains and is run by a Swiss foundation.
• DNS4EU (Czech Republic): a resolver run and hosted within the EU, with five variants from unfiltered to protective plus child protection and ad blocking. It launched in 2025 and is limited to individuals in Europe for the free offer.
• AdGuard DNS (Cyprus): the choice for network-wide ad and tracker blocking, with an optional account for own rules and statistics.
• CZ.NIC ODVR (Czech Republic): plain and unfiltered with DNSSEC validation, from the operator of the .cz registry.

What stays the same and what changes

A resolver does not make browsing anonymous, because websites still see the visitor's IP address. What changes is who sees the lookups and under which law. Cloudflare also runs a CDN and DNS hosting for websites, a different service from the 1.1.1.1 resolver; those are covered on European alternatives to Cloudflare. The comparison of all European resolvers is on public DNS servers and resolvers.