dig allows you to control things like retries and timeouts, choice of udp or tcp, choice of opcode (if you want to synthesise a NOTIFY message, say); it shows y

dig allows you to control things like retries and timeouts, choice of udp or tcp, choice of opcode (if you want to synthesise a NOTIFY message, say); it shows you the flags and the authority section so you can debug referrals, and the various EDNS options in case those matter. If you just want the answer then `host` is just fine - I use both of them a lot - but `dig` really shines when you need to get into the guts of the DNS.