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IBM NS1 Connect vs Managed DNS Services 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

IBM NS1 Connect
Ranking in Managed DNS
9th
Average Rating
9.4
Reviews Sentiment
8.1
Number of Reviews
13
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Managed DNS Services
Ranking in Managed DNS
12th
Average Rating
8.0
Reviews Sentiment
6.0
Number of Reviews
1
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of March 2026, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.0%, up from 1.2% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Managed DNS Services is 0.6%, up from 0.0% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS Mindshare Distribution
ProductMindshare (%)
IBM NS1 Connect2.0%
Managed DNS Services0.6%
Other97.4%
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

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.
Vijay Muddu - PeerSpot reviewer
Manager server admin and security at Vivaconnect
Cost-effective and helpful in the updation of DNS records
I improve the uptime of my company's website by opting for free DNS-related services offered by Google and other vendors, which are available in the market. You need services like Amazon Route 53, AWS, or DNS Made Easy when you want fast resolutions and updates. I can use some free DNS services like GoDaddy if terms of request come into my website, but its resolution is slow. DNS Made Easy helps me with the DNS query in a very fast manner. DNS Made Easy works very fast if any changes I want to make, especially in scenarios where I change my server ID in the DNS records in GoDaddy. Within a fraction of a second, it globally updates the DNS records so that my new server can reach everywhere. The valuable feature of the product to manage high traffic volume stems from the fact that the DNS resolution part is good and very fast. The DNS updation part is also very fast. The DNS records are very quickly updated. The tool also provides a failover option. With the automatic failover option, users can configure the DNS automatic failover to multiple DNS records, where if one of my nameservers fails, it is possible to switch to another nameserver. I can add multiple IPs to my single domain, and if one of my IPs fails, it can use the automatic failover for my present IP. The product provides help during failovers and helps add multiple nameservers. The tool updates DNS records very fast while also serving the DNS queries at a fast rate. The GoDNS feature of the product has impacted my company's global website performance since it works at a very fast rate. As soon as you update any of the IPs, the GoDNS feature works at a drastically super fast speed. If I want to change my website's IP right away, the GoDNS feature takes only 10 seconds to update the IPs at a global level. The API integration is not an area I used to streamline our company's DNS management process since I prefer to use the dashboard manually. The product is very cost-effective compared to other products in the market, like AWS or Amazon Route 53. The transition time offered by the product is super fast. Those people who don't want to spend much money on cloud services offered by AWS or opt for other third-party services that may be very expensive can opt for DNS Made Easy since it is a fast and cost-effective solution. I rate the tool an eight out of ten.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"It is a very robust and stable solution."
 

Cons

"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."
"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."
"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."
"To improve IBM NS1 Connect, I suggest additional monitoring services should be added in the dashboard and DNS timeout issues should be resolved."
"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."
"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.""
"Pricing can be more transparent, especially when dealing with tight budgets."
"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."
"The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 tool offers paid services at a very cost-effective rate."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Comms Service Provider
12%
Computer Software Company
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
Government
7%
No data available
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
By reviewers
Company SizeCount
Midsize Enterprise3
Large Enterprise10
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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...
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...
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...
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Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
No data available
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday
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