Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

Akamai and IBM are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Akamai is ranked #10 with an average rating of 8.5, while IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5. Akamai holds a 1.5% mindshare in MDP, compared to IBM’s 2.0% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Akamai Edge DNS

Read 4 Akamai Edge DNS reviews

1,570 Views
1,115 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 13 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

1,815 Views
1,761 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Akamai Edge DNS

IBM NS1 Connect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Akamai Edge DNS and IBM NS1 Connect compete in optimizing DNS performance, with Akamai having an advantage in security and IBM NS1 Connect in traffic routing.

Features: Akamai Edge DNS includes DDoS protection, automated workflows, and advanced security measures. IBM NS1 Connect offers dynamic traffic management, AI-driven real-time analytics, and intelligent routing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM NS1 Connect facilitates a streamlined deployment process with comprehensive support, while Akamai Edge DNS involves detailed configuration despite having responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai Edge DNS requires a higher upfront cost due to its security features, with IBM NS1 Connect providing a more cost-effective solution through competitive pricing and efficient traffic management.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect Report (Updated: February 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

February 2026

Download the complete report

Helped 883,712 peers since 2012

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

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Domain Name System (DNS) Security (10th)

IBM NS1 Connect

Ranking in Managed DNS

9th

Average Rating

9.4

Reviews Sentiment

8.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 1.5%, up from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
Product	Mindshare (%)
IBM NS1 Connect	2.0%
Akamai Edge DNS	1.5%
Other	96.5%

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

Yaser Alakeel

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.

Read full review

DavidJackson1

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.

Read full review

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."

"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."

"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."

"The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks."

"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."

"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."

"The provisioning is great. They have an API service that is simple to use and very quick. The changes that we make are replicated worldwide in a matter of usually milliseconds, sometimes seconds. They are done very rapidly. That's something that's obviously priceless when we're dealing with things like DNS."

"Monitoring is really important for us. We really care about reliability, and we want to make sure that we can remove some points of presence in our sector and in our edge network really fast when we experience any problems. So, monitoring that NS1 provides for DNS is really important for us."

"Their Pulsar filters allow us to collect RUM metrics from our users so that we can determine the best paths for our users to take. That has been very useful in providing the best user experience, and for responding to and recovering from downtime of our multiple CDNs."

"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."

"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, and I also love it because it saves time through automation, saving around 30% to 35% of our time and also saving man-source, while our application uptime has improved by 40% to 45%, making it very cost-effective and affordable and hence providing a great return on investment."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

Cons

"Akamai Edge DNS is expensive, and the pricing is higher compared to Infoblox."

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."

"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."

"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones."

"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."

"We use the geo load balancing functionality and there are a couple of things that are helpful there. But the language itself is something we had to get used to a little bit. Some of my folks made a few mistakes in rolling out the Filter Chain...The Filter Chain setup is a bit hard to grasp at first. It would also be nice to have a way to simulate changes in addition to staging."

"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.""

"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."

"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."

"To improve IBM NS1 Connect, I suggest additional monitoring services should be added in the dashboard and DNS timeout issues should be resolved."

"We care about monitoring and telemetry work, and NS1 provides a pretty good system for monitoring. We can monitor our endpoints and points of presence around the world. If there are any issues, we can easily remove them from our network, but this area needs some improvement because it is not always reliable in NS1. In the past, we had a number of false-positive cases when the monitoring system told us about some problems in our infrastructure that were not true. NS1 is improving the system, and we are constantly talking about this with them. I know that they are releasing a new version of their monitoring system, which is really important for us, but this is a different area where we would expect them to improve."

"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."

"Pricing can be more transparent, especially when dealing with tight budgets."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

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."

"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."

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Financial Services Firm

12%

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

University

Comms Service Provider

12%

Computer Software Company

11%

Financial Services Firm

Government

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	10

Questions from the Community

What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?

See all answers

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.

See all answers

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.

See all answers

What needs improvement with NS1 Managed DNS?

IBM NS1 Connect can be improved by providing learning materials depicting flows that can help users who are completely new to networking, which would be great. Pricing can be more transparent, espe...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for NS1 Managed DNS?

My main use case for IBM NS1 Connect is to improve user experience, and it offers smart routing, which helps sites to be reliable and performance gets improved. In my organization, the use case inv...

See all answers

What advice do you have for others considering NS1 Managed DNS?

IBM NS1 Connect is an excellent traffic management system. It helps us to route traffic based on location, latency, and many other factors. The ability to automate DNS management is a key feature t...

See all answers

Comparisons

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Compared 10% of the time

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Compared 8% of the time

Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 8% of the time

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Compared 29% of the time

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Compared 21% of the time

Managed DNS Services vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 6% of the time

Constellix DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

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Compared 5% of the time

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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS

March 2026

Download Akamai Edge DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

February 2026

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Also Known As

Akamai Fast DNS

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Overview

Discover Akamai DNS and its benefits of high availability and performance, and resilience against DDoS attacks backed by a fully guaranteed uptime SLA.

Akamai

Why

In a 24/7 world, customers demand applications, websites, and content that load instantly and are always on. When those connections are unreliable or slow, businesses don’t meet customer expectations, causing customers to leave. When that occurs, revenue may suffer.

What

IBM NS1 Connect delivers the high-performance, reliable, secure network connectivity that businesses need to meet increasingly sophisticated customer expectations. Leveraging a global network with a 100% uptime SLA, IBM has the capacity and scale to meet the needs of any business. IBM NS1 Connect takes performance to the next level, powering the sophisticated needs of enterprises with complex network infrastructures.

How

IBM NS1 Connect provides network connectivity solutions that give networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect also enables IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

Details

IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service that provides authoritative, premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience. Revenue-generating applications require authoritative DNS resolution to keep critical applications and websites online. Unless your DNS infrastructure is always-on and resilient, network reliability and user experience will suffer, your network reliability may suffer, resulting in poor user experiences if revenue-generating critical applications and websites are not online. IBM NS1 Connect’s always-on, API-first architecture provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world with premium DNS and advanced, customizable traffic steering. It also enables your IT teams to efficiently monitor networks, deploy changes and conduct routine maintenance.

IBM NS1 Connect uses the Domain Name System (DNS) to ensure that websites and applications are:

Online, all the time: Global network with 100% uptime SLA and DDoS protection
Fast: Top tier response and propagation times, custom traffic steering to optimize connections
Cheaper to run: Far less expensive than self-hosting
Automation friendly: API-first platform with Ansible/Terraform integrations and support for Pliant rapid network automation
Easier to troubleshoot: Unique DNS data insights offering

Designed for enterprises looking to optimize their DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect is a managed service delivering authoritative DNS and advanced traffic steering that improves application performance and network resilience and provides fast, secure connections to users anywhere in the world. NS1 Connect streamlines DNS management by automating both simple and complex DNS configuration tasks via API and preconfigured integrations, so you can spend more time on higher-value work.

IBM NS1 Connect is delivered through our unified delivery platform. The cloud-based platform gives networking teams the visibility, control and automation needed to help ensure your business stays online by steering traffic to the ideal network connections for any given moment. IBM NS1 Connect solutions also enable IT teams to identify network performance anomalies through deep insights into DNS data flows, allowing them to identify configuration problems or network issues that affect performance so they can quickly resolve them.

For enterprises looking to further optimize DNS performance, IBM NS1 Connect offers rich DNS data analytics to streamline the identification of the root cause of anomalies within traffic.

IBM NS1 Connect Features

Global anycast DNS network: Enjoy fast connections to consumers around the globe through an anycast network with 26 points of presence (PoPs).
100% uptime SLA on DNS resolution: Maximize uptime and revenue generation with resilient, always-on, authoritative DNS.
API-first architecture: Integrate and automate workflows with NS1 Connect's well-documented API; every line of code starts as an API call, all functionality is available through the API.
Real-time user monitoring (RUM)-based traffic steering: Uses real-time intelligence on network performance and availability to direct DNS connections to the best available application resource; the widest range of filter options and data sources in the industry, not data that is extrapolated from sampling; the most flexible, granular controls for your network.
Built-in resilience: Add a single-tenant, redundant DNS layer and manage it from a single control plane as your primary DNS.
Managed DNS for China: Improve performance for the Chinese mainland by segmenting traffic with NS1 Connect’s Managed DNS for China.
DNS insights: Get a better understanding of DNS traffic patterns by mining your DNS data to identify security issues, misconfigurations and performance issues.
DDoS protection: Cap your query-based spending with protection against unexpected surges in traffic from distributed denial-of-service attacks.
Uptime monitor: Quickly identify issues and automatically adjust DNS traffic steering configurations with native health check alerts.
DevOps tool integrations: Preconfigured integrations with leading DevOps tools including Ansible and Terraform to help automate routine maintenance, manage data sources and feeds.
Propagation speed: fastest propagation in the industry, measured in seconds not minutes; worldwide propagation in under five seconds.
Independence: neutral arbiter between infrastructure services (CDNs, clouds).

IBM NS1 Connect helps enterprises modernize and optimize networking infrastructure to provide customers with faster connections to websites, applications, services and content.

IBM

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

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

February 2026

Free Report: Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

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