This is the working shortlist behind the bigger directory — the tools we actually open during a normal week, rather than every service that ever emailed us a press release. Nobody pays to be listed here; the day that changes, this paragraph changes first. Last full review: October 2026.
Registrars we'd use ourselves
- Namecheap — the general-purpose default. Decent at-cost renewal behavior, a WHOIS lookup we use weekly, and an interface that hasn't gotten dramatically worse, which in this industry counts as praise.
- Dynadot — good for drops and closeouts, and one of the cleaner expired-domain interfaces. Their marketplace is worth a browse even when you're not buying.
- Porkbun — consistently among the cheapest renewals on the popular gTLDs, which is the only pricing that matters. The name is ridiculous. The prices are not.
- Cloudflare Registrar — at-cost pricing, no upsells, and DNS that's better than anything on this page. The catch: you have to live inside the Cloudflare ecosystem to want it.
- Gandi — the old-school European option. Pricier than it used to be; still our reflex for .fr and the odd ccTLD.
WHOIS, history & research
- Who.is — quick web lookups when you don't want a terminal. Bookmark-fodder.
- ICANN Lookup — the official RDAP-based lookup. Plain, slow-ish, authoritative. When two tools disagree, this one wins.
- Whoxy — a WHOIS history API we've used for years; the free tier covers casual "who owned this before" checks. See also the WHOIS guide for why history matters more than the current record.
- DNS History — what the nameservers said, going back. Useful for spotting dormant-but-armed domains.
- Wayback Machine — not a domain tool until the day you catch a dropped name and want to know what its previous life did to it. Then it's the most important one on this page.
Appraisal (with our caveats attached)
- GoDaddy Domain Appraisal — free, instant, an algorithm. Treat as a sanity check on relative value, never as an expectation. See the appraisal hierarchy for why.
- Estibot — the old-timer of automated appraisals. Subscription worth it if you're valuing in bulk; overkill otherwise.
Drops, backorders & marketplaces
- DropCatch — the big hammer of drop catching. Wins a lot, prices accordingly.
- SnapNames — one of the originals, still worth a backorder slot. See the drop cycle page for why you place backorders at more than one.
- Sedo — marketplace and broker; where a lot of mid-market sales actually happen.
- Afternic — the distribution network of record for fixed-price listings. If your name is for sale anywhere, it's probably for sale here too.
- Escrow.com — for anything over lunch money, use escrow. Every horror story we've heard in fifteen years involves someone who didn't.
Dead tools we miss
A small memorial: DomainTools' free tier (2014 vintage) taught half the industry everything it knew; the old Domain-Sales database; and a tiny DNS checker called intodns that still works and still looks like 2009, which we mean as a compliment. Tools die, the directory carries on. Corrections and additions welcome via the contact page — we read everything, publish the useful bits.