DNSFilter Pricing in 2026: What $1 to $2.25 Per License Buys, and What It Can't See

DNSFilter publishes its prices, which already puts it ahead of most of the web security market. Core is $1.00 per license per month on an annual plan, Plus is $2.25, and Enterprise is quote-only. That is cheap. It is cheap for a reason that matters more than the number: DNS resolution is the least expensive place on the internet to make a filtering decision, and it is also the place that sees the least. This post walks through what each DNSFilter tier actually includes, where the add-ons stack up, and what a per-license price buys you when roughly 95 percent of web traffic is encrypted.

The short answer: DNSFilter costs $1.00 to $2.25 per license per month on annual billing, with a $240 or $750 annual minimum, plus optional add-ons like SecureTransit at $2.00 and SIEM data export at $0.25 per license per month. Every one of those dollars buys a domain-level decision. None of them buy the ability to read a URL path, inspect a file upload, or tell a personal ChatGPT login from a corporate one. dope.security's on-device secure web gateway does all three in one price, because it inspects HTTPS on the laptop instead of answering DNS queries in the cloud.

If you are weighing DNSFilter against a DNS product it often replaces, our Cisco Umbrella vs DNSFilter vs dope.security pricing breakdown covers the head-to-head. This post is about what DNSFilter's own price list tells you.

What DNSFilter's pricing tiers include

DNSFilter's pricing page lists three standard plans and two separate programs. The standard plans are Core, Plus, and Enterprise. MSPs get partner pricing starting at $150 per month with multi-tenancy and branding. Education customers get per-student pricing by quote. Everything below comes from DNSFilter's published pricing page as of November 2026.

Core: $1.00 per license per month

Core is $1.00 per license per month billed annually, or $1.15 billed monthly, with a $240 per year minimum ($23 per month). It covers phishing, malware, and botnet protection, content filtering across DNSFilter's categories, DNS encryption including DNS-over-TLS, Malicious Domain Protection, network deployment via router, DHCP, or firewall, and Windows and macOS roaming clients. You get email and chat support, scheduled reporting, per-user policies, 90-day report retention, and 9-day query log retention.

Plus: $2.25 per license per month

Plus is $2.25 per license per month annually, or $2.50 monthly, with a $750 per year minimum ($62.50 per month). DNSFilter calls it the most popular plan. It adds AppAware application blocking, CyberSight user behavior analytics including an AI usage report, roaming clients on iOS, Android, and Chrome, bundled guest Wi-Fi filtering, and identity integrations with Microsoft Entra and Active Directory. Plus replaced the old Pro plan, which DNSFilter has retired.

Enterprise: request pricing

Enterprise pricing, including minimums, is available only on request. DNSFilter's own FAQ says the sales team builds a quote for your environment. The feature grid shows Enterprise as the tier for the full roaming client set, prioritized case handling, an enhanced SLA, and consultation calls, several of which are listed as available "with Premium Support," which is a separate add-on.

The add-ons that change the math

The headline price is per license. Several of the things a security team would consider table stakes are priced on top of it. DNSFilter's pricing page lists these as add-ons, charged per license per month in line with your primary plan:

• SecureTransit at $2.00 per license per month. DNSFilter describes it as endpoint privacy enforced as policy. On a Plus plan, adding SecureTransit nearly doubles the per-seat cost from $2.25 to $4.25.
• Data Export to a SIEM such as Splunk or Microsoft Sentinel at $0.25 per license per month, on every tier including Enterprise.
• Premium Support add-ons for case prioritization, an enhanced SLA (30-minute email, 15-minute phone response targets), and two Zoom consultations per month. Prices are not listed.

Run the numbers for a 1,000-person company on Plus with SecureTransit and SIEM export. That is $2.25 plus $2.00 plus $0.25, or $4.50 per user per month, $54,000 per year before Premium Support. It is still a reasonable number. The question is what you have bought for it.

What a DNS price actually buys

Every DNSFilter plan, from Core to Enterprise, makes its decision at the same point: when a device asks "what is the IP address for this domain?" That is the strength of the model. It is fast, it works on any device that can point at a resolver, and it needs no certificate on the endpoint. It is also the ceiling. A DNS resolver sees chat.openai.com. It does not see which account is logging in, what is being pasted into the prompt, or which file is being uploaded. We have written about this gap in detail in whether DNS filtering is enough in 2026 and in what DNS-layer security catches and what it cannot.

DNSFilter is honest about where it sits. Its product line is called a DNS-first platform, its newest bundle is marketed as five security suites on one DNS-first engine, and it lists an AI Governance and Controls product that works at the same layer. The AI usage report inside CyberSight tells you which AI domains your users resolved. That is useful visibility. It is not control over what leaves the company inside an encrypted session.

DNSFilter vs dope.security: what each dollar covers

Here is the comparison that matters when the renewal lands. Each line pairs what the DNSFilter price includes with what the same job looks like on dope.security's on-device SWG.

• Inspection point: DNSFilter decides on the domain name at resolution time, on every plan. dope.security decrypts and inspects the full HTTPS request on the device, so the URL path, headers, and payload are all visible to policy.
• Encrypted traffic: DNSFilter encrypts the DNS query itself (DNS-over-TLS) but never sees inside the HTTPS session that follows. dope.security performs SSL inspection locally, with the data never leaving the laptop for a third-party data center.
• Uploads and DLP: DNSFilter has no file inspection on any tier; a resolver cannot see a file. dope.security's Dopamine DLP reads the document on the device and classifies it by meaning, then blocks PII, PCI, PHI, and source code before the upload leaves, with no regex rules to write.
• Personal vs corporate AI accounts: DNSFilter can allow or block an AI domain and report on who resolved it. dope.security's Cloud Application Control allows the enterprise ChatGPT or Claude tenant and blocks the personal account on the same domain, which requires reading a header inside decrypted TLS.
• Add-on stacking: DNSFilter prices endpoint privacy (SecureTransit) and SIEM export separately, and gates premium support behind another add-on. dope.security includes SSL inspection, URL filtering, cloud app controls, shadow IT and AI discovery, endpoint DLP, SIEM integration, and one-click SSO as part of the product, with pricing published on one page.
• Agent footprint: DNSFilter's roaming client is lightweight because it only redirects DNS. dope.security's agent is also lightweight, under 100 MB of RAM, and it is doing the full inspection job, not just the lookup.
• Console: both products have one console. The difference is what you can do from it: DNSFilter manages domain policy and reports; dope.console pushes URL, app, tenant, and DLP policy to every endpoint in under a minute.

The honest summary: DNSFilter is a very good DNS filter at a fair price. dope.security is a secure web gateway that happens to also do DNS-level blocking as a side effect of seeing everything. If your requirement ends at "block bad domains and report on categories," DNSFilter is cheaper. If your requirement includes anything that happens after the domain resolves, you are comparing a DNS bill against a DNS bill plus whatever you buy to cover the rest.

Is DNSFilter cheaper than a secure web gateway?

Per license, almost always yes. Per protected outcome, it depends on what you need protected. The teams we talk to who outgrow DNS filtering usually hit one of three triggers: an auditor asks how uploads to personal cloud storage are controlled, a CISO asks which employees are pasting customer data into personal AI accounts, or a user hits a phishing page on a legitimate shared domain that DNS cannot distinguish from the real thing. None of those are solved by moving up a DNSFilter tier, because every tier sits at the same layer.

That is why teams evaluating a DNSFilter alternative tend to compare against an on-device SWG rather than another resolver. The incremental cost is not DNS plus SWG; it is replacing the DNS line with a single product that covers DNS-level outcomes and the HTTPS layer underneath.

When DNSFilter is the right answer

Fairness matters here, because DNSFilter earns its reviews. If you run guest Wi-Fi, a fleet of unmanaged or IoT devices that cannot take an agent, or an MSP practice that needs multi-tenant filtering at $150 per month to start, a DNS-first product is the correct tool and DNSFilter is a strong one. Its roaming clients are simple, its categorization is good, and its support gets consistent praise. The point of this post is not that DNS filtering is bad value. It is that DNS filtering has a fixed ceiling, and the price list cannot raise it. Buy DNSFilter for the devices and networks where DNS is the only option. For the managed laptops where your sensitive data actually lives, the comparison is against a secure web gateway, and that is where the per-license math stops being the interesting number.

What the switch looks like in practice

The fear with any SWG is the deployment. The DNS model got popular partly because pointing a resolver is easy. The on-device model has caught up. When Greylock Partners moved off a DNS-first product to dope.security, the firm went from first proposal to signed contract in 27 days, deploying via Intune in phases. Another DNS-filtering customer reached 2,000 machines in two days. The agent installs silently through your MDM, SSO is one click, and policy lands on every endpoint in under a minute, which is the part DNS vendors used to own.

The other practical point is cert pinning. Any SWG that inspects TLS will meet apps that refuse inspection. dope.security surfaces those SSL errors in the console so an admin can add a bypass in a few clicks, instead of maintaining a blind bypass list by hand.

The bottom line on DNSFilter pricing

DNSFilter's price list is transparent, its tiers are sensible, and $1.00 to $2.25 per license is a fair price for domain-level filtering with good reporting. The thing to be clear-eyed about is that the ceiling is set by the layer, not by the tier. Paying for Enterprise, SecureTransit, and Premium Support gets you a better-supported DNS product; it does not get you upload control, prompt DLP, or tenant-level AI governance, because a resolver cannot see those things. An on-device secure web gateway can, at a single published price, with a deployment that takes days rather than quarters.

Want to see what your DNS bill is not covering? Watch a dope.security demo or start a free trial and run it next to DNSFilter on a handful of laptops.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does DNSFilter cost per user?

DNSFilter's published pricing is $1.00 per license per month for Core and $2.25 for Plus on annual billing, or $1.15 and $2.50 billed monthly. Core has a $240 per year minimum and Plus has a $750 per year minimum. Enterprise pricing is quote-only. Add-ons such as SecureTransit ($2.00) and SIEM data export ($0.25) are charged per license per month on top.

Does DNSFilter have a minimum spend?

Yes. DNSFilter's pricing FAQ lists a minimum of $23 per month for Core and $62.50 per month for Plus. Enterprise minimums are available on request, and education and MSP programs have their own minimums. MSP partner pricing starts at $150 per month.

Does DNSFilter inspect HTTPS traffic or file uploads?

No. DNSFilter makes its decisions at DNS resolution, so it sees the domain being requested but not the URL path, headers, prompt text, or files inside the encrypted session. That is true on every tier. dope.security inspects HTTPS on the device, which is how its Dopamine DLP can block a sensitive upload and its Cloud Application Control can separate personal and corporate AI accounts.

Can DNSFilter block personal ChatGPT but allow ChatGPT Enterprise?

Not by itself. Personal and enterprise ChatGPT accounts share the same domain, and separating them requires reading or injecting an HTTP header inside decrypted TLS, which a DNS resolver cannot do. DNSFilter's CyberSight AI usage report can show which AI domains were resolved. dope.security enforces the tenant split on the endpoint as a standard feature.

Is DNSFilter cheaper than dope.security?

Per license, DNSFilter's Core and Plus tiers are typically cheaper than a full secure web gateway. The comparison changes once you add SecureTransit, SIEM export, and premium support, and it changes completely if you also need upload DLP, tenant-level AI control, or URL-path filtering, none of which any DNSFilter tier provides. dope.security publishes its pricing and includes those capabilities in the base product.

What does the DNSFilter Plus plan add over Core?

Plus adds AppAware application blocking, CyberSight user behavior analytics with an AI usage report, roaming clients for iOS, Android, and Chrome, bundled guest Wi-Fi filtering, and Microsoft Entra or Active Directory identity integration. It replaced the retired Pro plan and costs $2.25 per license per month annually with a $750 annual minimum.