Cloudflare's free plan and ice.domains free DNS are both excellent, genuinely free DNS services - but they're built for different jobs. Cloudflare bundles DNS with a CDN/proxy platform and asks your whole domain to live inside it; ice.domains offers pure, unlimited authoritative DNS that works alongside anything. Here's an honest comparison to pick the right one.
Feature comparison
| Cloudflare Free | ice.domains Free DNS | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $0 | $0 |
| Anycast network | Yes - one of the largest | Yes - 50+ global PoPs |
| DNS records per zone | 200 | Unlimited |
| Zones | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| DNSSEC | Yes | Yes, one-click |
| API | Yes | Yes, REST + DDNS endpoint |
| CDN / proxy / WAF | Yes - its core product | No - DNS only |
| Secondary DNS (slave mode) | Paid (Enterprise) | Free |
| Vendor lock-in | Must use CF nameservers for the whole domain; registrar-locked if registered there | None - plain authoritative DNS, leave anytime |
| Query analytics | Basic | Included |
When Cloudflare is the better choice
- You want a CDN, caching, or WAF in front of your website - that's Cloudflare's actual product, and the free tier is generous.
- You need proxying/origin-hiding - the orange-cloud proxy masks your server IP.
- You're already deep in the Cloudflare ecosystem (Workers, Pages, R2) - keeping DNS there is convenient.
When ice.domains free DNS is the better choice
- You just want DNS - clean authoritative hosting without a proxy layer between users and your servers, and without being nudged toward paid products.
- You hit Cloudflare's 200-record limit - large zones, multi-tenant apps, and heavy SaaS verification records blow past it fast. Here records are unlimited.
- You need dynamic DNS - a simple token-based DDNS update API is built in; on Cloudflare you have to script the API yourself.
- You want free secondary DNS - redundancy across providers is Enterprise-only at Cloudflare, free here.
- Your domain is registered at Cloudflare Registrar and you want DNS elsewhere - ironically, that requires moving the registration; whereas ice.domains DNS works with domains registered anywhere, including domains that stay at other registrars.
Can I use both together?
Yes, and it's a strong setup: run your website's public zone on Cloudflare for the CDN, and use ice.domains for zones that don't need proxying - internal tooling, API subdomains delegated via NS records, home-lab DDNS hostnames, or as an independent secondary provider where your primary allows zone transfers.
Switching from Cloudflare to ice.domains
- Export or copy your records from the Cloudflare dashboard (note which ones were proxied - they'll now expose the origin IP, so make sure that's acceptable or keep those on Cloudflare).
- Recreate the records in your free ice.domains zone - takes a few minutes.
- Change your nameservers at the registrar to
ns1.ice.domains/ns2.ice.domains.