Open-source DNSimple alternatives

CoreDNS is a DNS server and forwarder, written in Go, that chains plugins together, with each plugin performing a DNS function. It is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation graduated project and is released under the Apache 2.0 license. If a function is not available out of the box, it can be added by writing a plugin.

It can listen for DNS requests over UDP and TCP, TLS (DoT), DNS over HTTP/2 (DoH), DNS over HTTP/3, DNS over QUIC (DoQ) and gRPC. Its plugins cover serving zone data from files with DNSSEC and DNS support, acting as a primary or secondary server, signing zone data on the fly, load balancing responses, caching, and forwarding queries to other nameservers.

Backends include etcd and Kubernetes, which is why topics mention service discovery, and there are plugins for Prometheus metrics, query and error logging, Route 53 integration, query rewriting, DNS64 IPv6 translation, profiling and more. Each plugin is documented individually. It is run by operators on their own infrastructure.

Technitium DNS Server is an open-source DNS server that can act as both an authoritative and a recursive resolver. People host it themselves for privacy and security, and it works out of the box with little or no configuration. A friendly web console is reachable from any modern browser.

It can block ads and malware at the DNS level for an entire network. By forwarding queries over DNS-over-TLS, DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-QUIC, it limits what an internet provider can see or tamper with. A local DNS server also gives logs and statistics for understanding network activity, serves many queries from cache, and allows network-wide domain blocking. Repository topics also mention DHCP server functions and DNS-over-Tor.

The server is written in C# on .NET and runs on Windows, Linux, macOS and Raspberry Pi, with Docker support. It is released under the GPL-3.0 license, and the project site at technitium.com provides downloads and documentation. It is suited to home networks and organizations that want more control over name resolution.

This repository contains the sources for PowerDNS, a set of DNS server software. It includes the PowerDNS Authoritative Server, the PowerDNS Recursor and dnsdist, a DNS load balancer. All three can be built from the same repository, although they are also released separately as tarball, deb and rpm packages.

The authoritative server depends on Boost, OpenSSL and Lua and needs a compiler with C++17 support, and the project provides pdns-builder, a Docker-based build process for producing the different releases. Docker images are available, with the README mirrored to Docker Hub, and full documentation lives at doc.powerdns.com.

PowerDNS is copyright PowerDNS.COM BV and many contributors and is distributed under the GNU GPLv2, with the NOTICE file describing the exact license and exception. Bugs are reported on the GitHub issue tracker, and the changelog on the documentation site is the place to check for recent updates.

PowerDNS-Admin is a web interface for the PowerDNS Authoritative Server. It lets administrators manage forward and reverse DNS zones without using the command line, and it adds features aimed at teams, including user management with role-based access control and zone-specific permissions. It is written in Python and released under the MIT license.

Beyond zone editing it offers zone templating, activity logging, monitoring of PowerDNS service configuration and statistics, DynDNS 2 protocol support, easy IPv6 PTR record editing, full IDN and Punycode support and an API for zones and records. Authentication can use local users, SAML, LDAP with OpenLDAP or Active Directory, or OAuth through Google, GitHub, Microsoft Entra ID or OpenID. Two-factor authentication with TOTP is available.

The project is built and tested against the current stable PowerDNS Authoritative Server plus recent minor releases, and support for versions older than 5.0 has been dropped. The quickest way to run it is Docker, either from Docker Hub or with Docker Compose, and a direct installation guide is available. The Docker image is still named pda-legacy even though it is actively maintained.