Consul Compared to Other DNS Tools

Examples: NS1, AWS Route53, AzureDNS, Cloudflare DNS

Consul was originally designed as a centralized service registry for any cloud environment that dynamically tracks services as they are added, changed, or removed within a compute infrastructure. Consul maintains a catalog of these registered services and their attributes, such as IP addresses or service name. For more information, refer to What is Service Discovery?.

As a result, Consul can also provide basic DNS functionality, including lookups, alternate domains, and access controls. Since Consul is platform agnostic, you can retrieve service information across both cloud and on-premises data centers. Consul does not natively support some advanced DNS capabilities, such as filters or advanced routing logic. However, you can integrate Consul with existing DNS solutions, such as NS1 and DNSimple, to support these advanced capabilities.