European alternatives to Cloudflare 1.1.1.1

1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare’s free public DNS resolver, launched in 2018 and answered from the company’s anycast edge network in roughly 330 cities. It is the default recommendation almost anywhere the question comes up, because it is fast from nearly everywhere, it is trivially easy to configure, and the address is short enough to remember.

Three variants sit on separate addresses rather than behind settings: 1.1.1.1 resolves everything, 1.1.1.2 blocks malware, and 1.1.1.3 blocks malware and adult content. All of them validate DNSSEC and are reachable over DNS over HTTPS and DNS over TLS, and Cloudflare additionally publishes a JSON query API that most resolvers do not, plus the 1.1.1.1 and WARP consumer apps. Cloudflare states that it does not write client IP addresses to disk and discards query logs within 25 hours, and commissions an annual third-party review of that claim.

Switching away is unusually cheap. A resolver is a setting on a device or a router rather than an account, there is nothing to export and no identity to migrate, and the change takes effect the moment it is saved. What a reader is actually choosing is whose network sees every domain their devices look up, and under which country’s law that company answers a legal demand — which is the whole of the comparison with the European resolvers below.