I have an Orbi960 mesh with Armor, there are some aspects of Nextdns I like such as ad blocking, how much does this diminish Armor, is it worth still keeping Armor?
They are essentially performing the same function, proxying your browsing through a 3rd party protection service, so it's not worth or not desirable to run both as this will only increase your latency. There are a few product feature differences, Armor on the router will perform a network scan and cover devices where you cannot install a VPN or firewall client/app. Armor has the Bitdefender privacy/email check to see if your email address has been involved in any known breaches. I'm not sure if nextdns has these features but it's sounds like nextdns is similar to Cisco's Umbrella. Where nextdns may score is it seems to include some of NG's Circle parental features as well. I'd compare features and see which is most useful to you and compare their market standing, ownership, hosting to ensure you are choosing a reputable and enduring product. Cost comparison as well. Can you trial either for a few months?
Thanks much, I wanted to get some of the ad / content filtering capabilities via NextDNS and was curious if I just changed the DNS hosts in the router config to point to NextDNS whether I could get the best of both worlds.
Depending on how the nextdns iOS app works you may only be able to run one of them not both if they each require the use of a VPN profile. If it’s just a smart DNS that you subscribe to and simply change DNS then you could potentially run both simultaneously but you might end up tunnelling the DNS requests over the Armor VPN before it heads off to the Next DNS, as I’m not sure if it would split tunnel, so that may cause some latency issues with some apps. The frame fragmentation might get a bit quirky.
I had Armor and nextdns, just setup the nextdns IP details in the routers admin page (192.168.1.1), both Armor and nextdns appear to operate fine together and I was able to get the benefits of both worlds.
