3 answers
★ Best answer
Are you more of the type who just wants things to load fast or are you also concerned about privacy?
For pure speed in France, Cloudflare and Quad9 are solid, but what nobody tells you is that you can test directly on your machine with tools like `namebench` to see which one responds fastest from your specific connection, because it really varies depending on where you are!
In practice, I often ping from the command line before deciding, it takes two minutes and you know exactly where you stand instead of just following what people tell you on the internet.
Cloudflare (1.1.1.1) and Quad9 (9.9.9.9) are pretty solid for most people, but after that it depends on whether you just want speed or also security. Google DNS (8.8.8.8) is fast too but less control over privacy.
I've been using Quad9 for a while now and I've noticed it's really stable for my connection, but the real question is mostly about what you're trying to optimize. If you just want raw speed, the difference between the big DNS providers is honestly negligible - we're talking milliseconds you won't feel. That said, Quad9 has the advantage of blocking malicious domains natively, which can actually slow down lookups imperceptibly if you have a lot of blocks. Cloudflare 1.1.1.1 is competitive on latency, that's true, but personally I found it depends a lot on your region in France and your ISP.
What people often forget is that the real bottleneck isn't DNS but your connection itself and how close the destination servers are. So before switching, have you tried measuring your current latency with something like `nslookup` or `dig`? Because if your current DNS (the one from your ISP) is already decent, you might not feel a huge difference. Orange, Free, SFR don't have catastrophic DNS in 2026, especially not in the Paris region. In other areas or with some less common ISPs, yeah then you should look for an alternative.
My advice is to test for a few days with Quad9 or 1.1.1.1 and compare loading times on your usual sites. Do you have a machine running Linux/Mac or is it Windows? Because on mobile for example, changing DNS is less relevant than on a desktop computer.
lea65 asker
Yes, mainly on desktop PC. Quad9 interests me for the security. Thanks for the detail.
Your answer
Log into answer.