Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Mapping DNS
I learned about LOC records some time around the start of the year from a post here on hackernews, and I've been slightly obsessed with the idea of mapping them ever since - and now I've finally done so! There ended up being a few more than I expected, but still very much within reasonable bounds.
Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
- 14D
Hi HN, I've been working on building a pipeline to create a DNS records database lately. The goal is to enable research as well as competitive landscape analysis on the internet. The dataset for now spans around 4 billion records and covers all the common DNS record types: A AAAA ANAME CAA CNAME HINFO HTTPS MX NAPTR NS PTR SOA SRV SSHFP SVCB TLSA TXT Each line in the CSV file represents a single DNS record in the following format: www.example.com,A,93.184.215.14 Let me know if you have any questions or feedback!
2024 · merklemap.com · its alternatives →
- 2
Tired of companies snooping through your DNS traffic? Don't you wish you could get advertisements with your DNS records? Today we're introducing the innovative, privacy-focused, ad-supported DNS resolver - DN$! Traditional DNS resolvers provided by your internet service provider, cloudflare, or google could be tracking your internet activity and selling it to third-party data vendors. We at DN$ want to fix that and cut out these nefarious actors (until we've amassed a critical number of users to exploit). In order to support such a radically new business model, our service needs to serve…
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 3
NsLookup▲72A simple and powerful tool for querying DNS records
2020 · nslookup.io · its alternatives →
- 4CS
Hey HN, Last weekend I vibe-coded a cool website that lets you do easy DNS record lookups. I know you can just use dig or nslookup, but oftentimes I'm too lazy to remember the syntax, and there are less technical users who need to manage DNS entries but aren't comfortable with the command line. We debug customer DNS issues often at ImprovMX, and we typically link to tools like mxtoolbox.com to point out DNS record issues. But those tools seem quite bloated and from the 2000s. I wanted something super clean & simple, and there were a few features I thought were ergonomically needed but…
2025 · inspector.improvmx.com · its alternatives →
- 5
DNS record lookups just as you like 'em
2017 · dnsrecords.io · its alternatives →
- 6
Long-simmering side project that is finally ready to see the light. HAMTs are a cool persistent data structure and implementing one has been a lot of fun. Beyond the code, there is likely some value in the extensive and largely complete implementation docs; basic benchmarks are linked in the README, too. Kind of aiming to be "the libavl for HAMTs". That is obviously a high and aspirational bar but a distinct possibility if it stirs up a little interest and/or contribution. Anyways, it's time for this to go out, collect feedback and maybe even some use outside of toy projects. Let me…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 7
- 8
Hey HN! We built DNS Directory (https://dnsdirectory.com), a free, searchable database of public DNS servers with live monitoring every 10 minutes. We needed to find an up-to-date list of DNS servers used by carriers around the world for a proxy fingerprinting / web-scraping project but we were shocked to find that it didn’t exist so we built it ourselves in an internal Hackathon We’re adding more features but so far we: Test 77K+ servers every ~10 minutes Allow filtering by uptime, location, security features (ad blocking, malware protection, DNSSEC) Show info on IPv6…
Dec 2025 · dnsdirectory.com · its alternatives →
- 9KE
My goal was to create a DNS server as simple as the LDAP server I've been contributing to (glauth) and here it is: https://github.com/fusion/kittendns A few things to know about it: - It is easy to configure using a Toml file - I am using it to bail my coredns/etcd instances when under attack - (yes, it also works as a service location server) - It comes with a simple, plain English, rule engine that doesn't do much at this point - It can be used with LetsEncrypt. I use it to retrieve certificates for my home servers. - RFC: all the nice ones :) Anyway, feedback is…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 10
Hey everyone. It's Sherub here, author of the Build your own DNS Server challenge on CodeCrafters. Currently it’s available in Rust, Go, and Python and is free while in beta. https://codecrafters.io/dns-server I've kept the challenge accessible but still challenging for an intermediate developer. This challenge, like others from CodeCrafters, is self-paced. You can use any tools you prefer (terminal, editor, etc.) to build the project. At the end of the challenge, you will have created a DNS forwarding server. The server can create and read DNS packets and respond to DNS…
2023 · app.codecrafters.io · its alternatives →
- 11
A high-performance DNS stub resolver for bulk lookups and reconnaissance (subdomain enumeration) - blechschmidt/massdns
2016 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 12OS
Hey Hacker News! I am madnuttah, I am a Windows/Linux Sysadmin and some folks may remember this username for "niche" mods I've made for Fallout and Skyrim and some C# UWP Windows Store Apps which I've retired because of Microsoft's unclear strategy abandoning things from one day to another. Why am I writing this? I wanted to be independent from the DNS servers of my provider, because they have often shined brightly with problems in the past instead of functioning properly, wanted to have a little bit more privacy and freedom back by fighting censorship via DNS, so I built my own Unbound…
2022 · its alternatives →
- 13
Discover obscure subdomains w/ this DNS recon tool 4 hackerz
2016 · dnsdumpster.com · its alternatives →
- 14
An experimental high-performance DNS query bruteforce tool built with AF_XDP for extremely fast and accurate bulk DNS lookups. - c3l3si4n/pugdns
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 15
DNS cleanup is security. We help you automate it.
Nov 2025 · its alternatives →
- 16
- 17
Vercel's Edge functions support custom deployment regions, and by querying DNS records through DoH, you can obtain the global resolution results of DNS.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18
- 19
wsgrok▲7I built it for myself because ngrok didn't let me add one more domain unless I paid $12 more. I probably should've looked for alternatives before building my own, but my grudge got in the way . Once I started, I wanted to make it better than the other options. Silly, I know. No one probably cares. I plan to open source it sometime next year because I’ve got other projects to finish first. It's free until I deplete my cloud credits, then it will switch to a tier-based model with a free option.
Jan 2026 · wsgrok.com · its alternatives →
- 20WR
Hi HN, I previously wore SWE/SRE hats on GCP. Later, I was on the other side, managing thousands of machines. The friction points of onboarding and operating cloud systems are personal problems to me. I’ve found it hard to keep track of all the random cloud resources floating around, especially as my team’s assets proliferated. Occasionally, there is a resource affecting an outage but no one remembers where it is. I am constantly frustrated by existing tooling. APIs can work, after you’ve navigated the byzantine documentation, but I often find myself doing ad-hoc tasks which are best…
2022 · listvms.com · its alternatives →
- 21
Hey! I'm a solo developer having fun learning Go. I have a side hustle and wanted to implement currency localization. I could use existing IP databases, but hosting on serverless is slow. So I built my own. I was surprised how fun it can be to use Go, and it's fast. Thankfully, Go's speed makes up for my dodgy code. Anyway, I'd love to get some feedback on my website/API. After a few weeks of testing and losing money on ads, I'm confident it's very reliable. This isn't a promo. It's basicly free (30k lookups/month), so there's no need to pay. Any advice or tips on how to grow and…
2024 · ipflare.io · its alternatives →
- 22
The blog of an engineer from Canada
2014 · willwarren.com · its alternatives →
- 23MN
Hello HNers. I'm launching my new service, Certician, and I'd love some feedback from HN users. A while back, I asked if anyone knew of any good, simple tools or services for monitoring SSL certificates [1]. I didn't find any compelling services, so I decided to build one. I tried to keep it simple, since it's self-run and bootstrapped. I know my landing page needs help. It's a lot harder to distill down a service (even a simple one) into compelling, actionable copy than I thought! I have to work at my real job today, so I'll only be able to reply when I have time to take a break for a…
2011 · its alternatives →
- 24
📎169 free DNS, email, TLS diagnostics in one place + more!
Jul 2026 · bypassed.me · its alternatives →
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Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →