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BlueCat Edge vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive Summary

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

BlueCat Edge
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
9th
Average Rating
8.4
Reviews Sentiment
7.1
Number of Reviews
6
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM NS1 Connect
Ranking in Domain Name System (DNS) Security
8th
Average Rating
9.2
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
17
Ranking in other categories
Managed DNS (6th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2026, in the Domain Name System (DNS) Security category, the mindshare of BlueCat Edge is 2.9%, up from 2.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.2%, up from 2.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Domain Name System (DNS) Security Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM NS1 Connect2.2%
BlueCat Edge2.9%
Other94.9%
Domain Name System (DNS) Security
 

Featured Reviews

reviewer2284602 - PeerSpot reviewer
IT Engineer at a construction company with 10,001+ employees
Has enhanced DNS routing, an easy setup and good reliability
I would like to see improvements in threat detection and the ability to add categorization for blocking queries, such as those related to adult entertainment. Also, some features to filter out valid threats would be useful. Additionally, having a standardized location for query redirection without needing to stand up a server instance would be beneficial.
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

"IP Address Management (IPAM) is the most valuable."
"We implemented BlueCat Edge to solve the visibility and security issues we were having."
"Edge has reduced the complexity and has been more reliable."
"Scalability-wise, it's pretty good."
"The unparalleled visibility offered by BlueCat Edge is arguably the most critical benefit we receive."
"What I found most valuable is the ability to put it in place and integrate it very quickly. It allows us to create routing rule sets to route DNS traffic where it needs to go most efficiently in our environment."
"It allows us to easily monitor our subnets and routers."
"Going with NS1 has also improved the user experience for our users."
"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 solution's stability is absolutely perfect."
"In general, I would say that this has been the easiest solution to manage and implement."
"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 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."
"NS1 was the first solution that could express the logic we needed to be hidden behind the records, and we couldn't adapt any other solution to our needs."
"If you need an external DNS provider, NS1 has been a really good provider for us, giving us exactly what we were looking for and with more functionality than we need for the moment, functionality that we can buy additionally."
 

Cons

"The main improvement for BlueCat Edge's security configuration would be more granular control."
"A more graphical user interface would be a benefit."
"A more graphical user interface would be a benefit. It would be nice if I could click on a subnet and it would show me all of my links and everything."
"One pain point concerning DNS Edge is the inability to see per Edge endpoint, what devices are querying against it. They do have the capability for you to look at that data, but the data is roughly 24 to 48 hours old. I am looking for real-time data, and I cannot get that per Edge endpoint."
"I have concerns about several aspects of BlueCat's site management."
"I would like to see improvements in threat detection and the ability to add categorization for blocking queries, such as those related to adult entertainment."
"Its price is on the higher side."
"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.""
"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."
"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide."
"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"I would like to see the UI updated to allow me to do finer searches. I would also like to have the ability to get reports that can sort based on various metrics. For example, I would like to be able to say, "Show me the top 10 records by total queries" in an easy-to-digest format."
"I believe IBM NS1 Connect can be improved in several ways. The main concern I identified is the cost, which is higher than other solutions despite its uses."
"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."
"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"We find the current pricing model more reasonable compared to the previous per-IP pricing."
"I'm doing a costing and licensing comparison between the BlueCat DNS Integrity and Micetro by Men&Mice. BlueCat has given me a range instead of a specific price. They gave me a range of ten thousand to two hundred thousand USD. That was a bit too wide for the cost comparison. Based on what I'm seeing, they are definitely on the higher side and very expensive."
"The licensing model for BlueCat Edge seems very good, although I can't confirm if it's specific to our contract."
"One of the nice benefits of getting DNS Edge is that you buy the subscription, and you are allowed to deploy as many Edge endpoints as you need. You do not need a separate license for each one. If you deploy 20 of them, you will not be billed for that many. It is one subscription. You can deploy as many as you need and consume as much as you need. The cost comes in based on the number of IPs that you are consuming and running through DNS Edge. We have that pretty much locked in for what we need for internal purposes. Being able to save money on deploying Edge endpoints has saved us drastically from deploying other BlueCat products in lieu of that."
"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."
"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."
"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Financial Services Firm
15%
Manufacturing Company
10%
Outsourcing Company
10%
Construction Company
9%
Comms Service Provider
13%
Financial Services Firm
10%
Computer Software Company
10%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Large Enterprise6
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Small Business1
Midsize Enterprise4
Large Enterprise13
 

Questions from the Community

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for BlueCat Edge?
I'm not aware of the exact pricing and licensing as I was not part of the procurement process. However, there was a significant cost reduction thanks to BlueCat Cloud DNS managing external solutions.
What needs improvement with BlueCat Edge?
BlueCat should consider deploying feature enhancement requests faster, especially if they are simple to implement. They need to focus and deploy such features in the next version itself, which woul...
What is your primary use case for BlueCat Edge?
We have deployed BlueCat Edge across our organization globally. Regional-based queries are directed to BlueCat Edge, and they are resolved within the regions themselves. For instance, we have an An...
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

BlueCat DNS Edge
NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Swisslos, Cologne Bonn Airport, TYROLIT
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 BlueCat Edge vs. IBM NS1 Connect and other solutions. Updated: July 2026.
909,725 professionals have used our research since 2012.