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Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Categories and Ranking

Akamai Edge DNS
Ranking in Managed DNS
10th
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
10th
Average Rating
8.6
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
4
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM NS1 Connect
Ranking in Managed DNS
6th
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
8th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 2.1%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.7%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM NS1 Connect2.7%
Akamai Edge DNS2.1%
Other95.2%
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

YA
Head of Service Delivery at onme
Ensures global distribution and DDoS protection while offering seamless integration and low latency DNS responses
For user experience, Akamai Edge DNS should allow notes to be added for each record, as this is something Infoblox supports. Without notes, managing changes in DNS records can be difficult, especially for large companies with over 1,000 records, as they may not know who requested changes without proper documentation. I requested this feature two years ago, but it has not been added yet. Akamai Edge DNS could also improve its AI capabilities.
DavidJackson1 - PeerSpot reviewer
Software Engineer at Abbott
Smart routing has improved uptime and performance and enables real-time automated traffic control
The best features IBM NS1 Connect offers, in my opinion, are real-time monitoring, intelligent traffic routing capabilities, and being API driven. The intelligent traffic routing and API-driven features of IBM NS1 Connect have helped my team by allowing routing based on user location, endpoint switching based on latency, and DNS response time. Additionally, IBM NS1 Connect has API integration. IBM NS1 Connect positively impacts my organization by making our website load faster and enhancing the user interface to be more intuitive and user-friendly. It's very economical and cost-effective. I also love it because it saves time through automation, saving around 30% to 35% of our time and also saving man-source. Our application uptime has improved by 40% to 45%. Although there have been a few outages, the service uptime has significantly improved our trust with clients. It is very cost-effective and affordable, hence providing a great return on investment.

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:
 

Pros

"It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them."
"The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks."
"I recommend Akamai Edge DNS because it is distributed globally and prevents DDoS attacks."
"I haven't had any problems with the stability of Akamai Edge DNS in the past five years."
"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."
"IBM NS1 Connect has positively impacted my organization by providing controlled downtime, reduced downtime, and time saving through automation, as approximately forty to fifty percent of our time is saved through automation and enhanced visibility."
"From a maintenance standpoint, mainly in terms of maintenance provisioning and deprovisioning, since we do not really see the internals of the SaaS solution, the reduction would be drastic, and it would be a tenth of the time."
"One of the features that is non-standard and that is very useful is the filtered DNS. We have set up our external VPN, which is what all our employees connect through, to use this feature. It's geolocation-aware. In that way, for India we set it up so that these are the servers that should be supporting things, and in the UK these servers, in the U.S. these servers, and in Sweden these ones."
"IBM NS1 Connect has a positive impact on my organization, as I believe it improves security, availability, and DDoS attack mitigation because it detects failures and automatically redirects users to healthy resources."
"The auto DNS traffic routing helps during deployment or incidents by providing more reliability and faster performance."
"For starters, it integrates with Terraform and a lot of our infrastructure is effectively built out using Terraform. That makes all this stuff extremely easy... when we deploy, all the entries are created and configuration is done."
"We find that the low latency access to DNS queries has a direct effect on the customer experience. Visiting a site, whether it's an AdTech-based solution or marketing tech, the fact that whatever we're rendering on a page can be rendered better than the industry standard, in terms of time, ensures a better user experience."
"The Filter Chain is one of the most valuable features, for geo-load balancing and geo-fencing. The Filter Chain is the most useful because it allows us to do several things. With geo-fencing we can redirect a particular user to a particular answer. That's very valuable for us. Filter Chains with monitoring is our strategy to provide redundancy."
 

Cons

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."
"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."
"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones. The price is higher than competitors, and Akamai should offer a better pricing model."
"Akamai Edge DNS is expensive, and the pricing is higher compared to Infoblox."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide."
"The Filter Chain simulation is really good in the UI, but it would be nice to have something similar in the API so that we could simulate and test things before we deploy them."
"The reporting metrics are great from an API standpoint, but it would be a little bit nicer if there was some type of dashboard around that. There should also be some type of reporting that's more executive-level focused."
"We use our client in our infrastructure to communicate with NS1. This client is a bit complex in the way that it is set up. NS1 has their own client solution that you can deploy into your platform to do this, but even that is a bit complex. So, I would like a very simple, thin, light API agent that we can deploy into our platform to communicate with NS1. That would be welcome."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"When we first deployed, we flipped the switch, and it didn't work as well as we expected. It wasn't a complete outage, but we had issues in some places with some customers. The NS1 team went out of their way to resolve it on Thanksgiving. We have a post about it on our blog. We called it "Black Thursday.""
"I also think the cost is a bit high compared to other more traditional solutions such as Route 53, Azure, and Cloudflare."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"Since Akamai is the industry leader, I imagine the solution would be a little more expensive than some other vendors."
"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."
"We pay about $30,000 a month. We used to pay about $20,000 with Dyn every month, for lower volume than we're doing right now, but it had none of the features that we have available with NS1, so it was worth it for us. It seems competitive for us, given that we're doing 4.5 billion requests."
"NS1's pricing is much more aggressive than its competitors in the market and you get more value out of what you pay for it."
"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."
"From a cost standpoint, it's certainly not the most expensive out there, and it's also not the cheapest, but it does well to balance the cost and the functionality/reliability."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
12%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Computer Software Company
9%
University
7%
Comms Service Provider
12%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
Government
7%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?
For user experience, Akamai Edge DNS should allow notes to be added for each record, as this is something Infoblox supports. Without notes, managing changes in DNS records can be difficult, especia...
What is your primary use case for Akamai Edge DNS?
As a reseller company for Akamai, my typical use case for Akamai Edge DNS is its distribution worldwide, providing DDoS attack prevention which is crucial in current times.
What advice do you have for others considering Akamai Edge DNS?
I recommend Akamai Edge DNS and rate the overall solution a ten out of ten. Akamai Edge DNS should improve its AI more to enhance the product's capabilities.
What needs improvement with NS1 Managed DNS?
The aspect that needs improvement about IBM NS1 Connect is that the integration with AI is not seamless at this moment. That particular portion needs to be re-evaluated. We were able to increase th...
What is your primary use case for NS1 Managed DNS?
I have worked on both deployment models of IBM NS1 Connect in the company's environment and in the clouds. I utilize IBM NS1 Connect's Intelligent Traffic Steering feature.
What advice do you have for others considering NS1 Managed DNS?
I purchased IBM NS1 Connect through AWS Marketplace. We do use analytical tools built into the product. I rate this product 9 out of 10.
 

Also Known As

Akamai Fast DNS
NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Otto Group
Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday
Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect and other solutions. Updated: June 2026.
909,153 professionals have used our research since 2012.