Google Cloud DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

Google and IBM are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Google is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4, while IBM is ranked #12. Google holds a 6.5% mindshare in MDP, compared to IBM’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Google users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Google Cloud DNS

Read 7 Google Cloud DNS reviews

5,055 Views
4,670 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 11 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

2,000 Views
995 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Google Cloud DNS

IBM NS1 Connect

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Google Cloud DNS and IBM NS1 Connect are competing products in the domain name system space. Google Cloud DNS appears to have the advantage in terms of ease of deployment, while IBM NS1 Connect offers more advanced features.

Features: Google Cloud DNS provides high availability, low-latency DNS serving, and seamless integration with Google Cloud services. It is focused on reliability and integrates well with existing solutions. IBM NS1 Connect stands out with advanced traffic management capabilities, including the use of Filter Chains for geo-load balancing and comprehensive automation integration with tools like Terraform.

Room for Improvement: Google Cloud DNS can enhance its advanced traffic management functionalities and increase flexibility with multi-cloud environments. Additionally, expanding automation capabilities would benefit users seeking infrastructure-as-code solutions. IBM NS1 Connect might improve user interface smoothness and access to beginner guides for new users. Enhancements in speed and efficiency of deployment processes could address some concerns.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Cloud DNS offers straightforward deployment with easy integration within the Google Cloud ecosystem. Its support is efficient and consistent with Google Cloud’s overall service. In contrast, IBM NS1 Connect provides customizable deployment options and robust customer support, focusing on user-specific needs and flexible deployment scenarios.

Pricing and ROI: Google Cloud DNS is recognized for competitive pricing and strong return on investment, catering to budget-conscious users. IBM NS1 Connect justifies its potentially higher cost through specialized features that leverage sophisticated traffic management, resulting in significant ROI due to increased efficiencies and robust performance capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Google Cloud DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

April 2025

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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

Google Cloud DNS

Ranking in Managed DNS

6th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

IBM NS1 Connect

Ranking in Managed DNS

12th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of May 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Google Cloud DNS is 6.5%, up from 6.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

Shikar Singh

Solutions Architect / IT Program Manager at Optum

Constantly improving and adapting to customer needs

The effectiveness of Google Cloud DNS largely depends on where an organization stands in its cloud journey and its overall technology landscape. For those heavily invested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and already embracing cloud solutions, Google Cloud DNS can be rated quite high, ranging from seven to nine out of ten.Deployment times for Google Cloud DNS can vary depending on the complexity of the infrastructure and configuration requirements. For straightforward setups and cloud-ready cases, deployment can typically be completed within a few minutes to an hour. However, in more complex infrastructure scenarios involving extensive configuration, deployment may take longer, possibly spanning days or weeks.

Read full review

Adam Surak

VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

Handles customer-facing records and upstream selection logic with good efficiency

We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses. If we have about 1,000 endpoints, that translates to around 150,000 records. Assuming there's an even distribution, so every time a server fails or an endpoint goes on a level, we would have 150 updates. With NS1, we have one, so this had an even more significant effect. There are situations where we have thousands of specific records sharing the same responses. In that case, there is one update instead of thousands and thousands. When we chose Managed DNS in 2014, it was the only solution that could do what we wanted, but I'm not sure about the current state of the market. The NS1 API is an API on top of a managed DNS. It's not an afterthought. It's not like the solution existed. Someone was sending updates by email. Then a product manager came along and said, "Hey, there is this cool thing. It's called an API. Maybe we should do it?" And they are like, "Okay. Let's do it." In the case of NS1, they thought about how to use an API to manipulate and retrieve the stuff. It's supposed to be API-driven. Also, NS1 doesn't have hidden features that would not be available over the API. Even their dashboard is built on top of the API. You can leverage all the functionality programmatically. That's what we do. We don't use their native integrations because we have been customers before these integrations and real-time telemetry existed. Our solution isn't leveraging either of those. Instead, we leveraged their API integration, which was the first thing that existed. Indeed, the API is at the core of how we use Managed DNS. No one goes to the dashboard or manually clicks anything. Everything goes via the API, and we perform hundreds of changes every minute. The API automatically drives everything, so that's the integration we leverage. We don't use the Pulsar Active Steering feature because we don't have a website. Our solution is being used as an API for other solutions. You can put the Pulsar agent on the website and feed NS1 the information. In our case, we are integrating into third-party sites. We cannot put our JavaScript on their websites for NS1 to provide the data, so we don't.

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

"The tool is well integrated. We don’t need the interface of another provider. The product helps me manage my domain and write in Google Cloud."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"The initial setup process is easy."

"The scalability is good."

"It is a scalable solution."

"The most significant features are the internal and external endpoints using Google Cloud DNS, which are very beneficial for dependent apps."

"Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements."

"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."

"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."

"It massively speeds things up. Today, we allow developers to deploy services and have externally facing DNS scrapers that are created automatically without the addition of human intervention."

"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."

"We leverage two things from Managed DNS that we couldn't do with any other solution. One is their filter chain technology, which allows us to shift some of the intelligence we need for the traffic steering to the DNS. The second one is data sources, which enables us to manipulate multiple records simultaneously using NS1's internal message DOS. In our case, we are trying to direct the traffic in over 150,000 different NS1 records to an arbitrary set of repeating responses."

"The fact that it's an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management is one of the reasons we looked into NS1. We use it for a lot of automation and metrics gathering and it's been great."

"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 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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

Cons

"Migrating away from Google Cloud DNS can be difficult."

"More features around rules-based configurations would be beneficial."

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment."

"The UX of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"The UI is tricky to understand for people who have not worked with DNS records. People with little to no experience with DNS records can find it hard to understand. For example, you need to know the hallmarks to input records since they need to be matched in a specific format."

"The solution's price could be better."

"It needs to provide better integration."

"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."

"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"It is expensive but cost-effective."

"The product is expensive."

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment. I would rate it 6 out of 10. Cheaper alternatives might be desirable, but the decision depends on various factors such as vendor lock-in, organizational adaptability, and alignment with other technologies in use."

"I am not sure about the pricing. However, I can give you a rough estimate which is like ten cents per month per zone."

"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Educational Organization

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

14%

Comms Service Provider

11%

Financial Services Firm

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about Google Cloud DNS?

Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud DNS?

Pricing and support are really good. There are no complaints about the pricing.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud DNS?

I am not heavily involved with Cloud DNS, but from an end-user perspective, the customization part could be improved. More features around rules-based configurations would be beneficial.

See all answers

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Comparisons

Quad9 vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 75% of the time

Cloudflare vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 13% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 4% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 2% of the time

More Google Cloud DNS Competitors

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 41% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 23% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 22% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud DNS

April 2025

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Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

April 2025

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Also Known As

No data available

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Overview

Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google. It has low latency, high availability and is a cost-effective way to make your applications and services available to your users. Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 74.125.29.101. Cloud DNS is programmable. You can easily publish and manage millions of DNS zones and records using our simple user interface, command-line interface or API.

Google

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

MeilleursAgents

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

Google Cloud DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

April 2025

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