Don’t look to large, well-known registrars. I would suggest that you look for local registrars in your area. The TLD registry for your country/area usually has a list of the authorized registrars, so you can simply search that for entities with a local address.
Disclaimer: I work at such a small registrar, but you are probably not in our target market.
I miss the days when Network Solutions had a permanent option to switch/sign-up with a PGP key, binding all future communications and change requests to it.
I forget how they handled key expiration/revocation...
Since you asked, I use Cloudflare for my registrar. I can’t really say if it’s objectively better or worse than anybody else, but they seemed like a good choice when Google was in the process of shutting off their registry service.
I use Cloudflare for everything I can and then currently use Namecheap for anything it doesn't support. I haven't tried Porkbun mostly because I'm okay with what I have already.
After Google ditched Domains I moved to Route53. I guess the only downside is that it doesn't handle some TLDs?
What you want from a registrar is to keep existing for many years and resilience to social engineering, and AWS seems like the next best thing to Google which you famously can't even talk to for a social engineering attempt. I expect AWS account management to be almost as good as Gaia, but don't really know how hard social engineering is.
I recently had to bail on Gandi. I had a special requirement, being Canadian, in that I didn't want to use a registrar in the USA. I found a Canadian registrar that seemed to have the technical stuff reasonably worked out (many don't) and had easy to understand pricing:
Not sure, I use dnsimple for dns and wrote my own little service to update my A record, no ip6 in my corner of the world so have not checked for AAAA record support.
CF sells domains at cost so you're not going to beat them on price, but the catch is that domains registered through them are locked to their infrastructure, you're not allowed to change the nameservers. They're fine if you don't need that flexibility and they support the TLDs you want.
What registrar do people recommend in 2025?