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IBM NS1 Connect vs Quad9 comparison

IBM and Quad9 DNS are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. IBM is ranked #12, while Quad9 DNS is ranked #5 with an average rating of 7.0. IBM holds a 1.2% mindshare in MDP, compared to Quad9 DNS’s 33.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 50% of Quad9 DNS users who would recommend it.
IBM NS1 Connect
Read 11 IBM NS1 Connect reviews
  • 1,739 Views
  • 552 Comparison Views
100% willing to recommend
Quad9
Read 2 Quad9 reviews
  • 26,165 Views
  • 3,350 Comparison Views
50% willing to recommend
 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

IBM NS1 Connect and Quad9 are competitors in the DNS management sector. IBM NS1 Connect leads in scalability and enterprise-grade features, while Quad9 is superior in security and ease of use.

Features: IBM NS1 Connect offers advanced traffic management, robust analytics, and high scalability, suitable for larger enterprises. Quad9 integrates threat prevention, ensures privacy, and focuses on straightforward security, ideal for businesses prioritizing cybersecurity.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM NS1 Connect provides comprehensive deployment options with extensive support for complex IT environments. Quad9 offers easy deployment and quick customer support, accessible for smaller teams and allowing fast implementation.

Pricing and ROI: IBM NS1 Connect requires higher initial setup costs, reflecting its enterprise focus, with promises of long-term ROI for large organizations. Quad9 presents a cost-effective solution with low upfront costs and quick ROI, attractive to small and medium-sized businesses seeking efficient DNS security without large investments.

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Buyer's Guide
IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9
June 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

IBM NS1 Connect
Ranking in Managed DNS
12th
Average Rating
9.6
Reviews Sentiment
8.0
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
Quad9
Ranking in Managed DNS
5th
Average Rating
6.0
Reviews Sentiment
7.9
Number of Reviews
2
Ranking in other categories
Internet Security (8th)
 

Mindshare comparison

As of July 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 1.2%, down from 1.4% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Quad9 is 33.2%, up from 29.9% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills - PeerSpot reviewer
Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically
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. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.
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Benoit Tellier - PeerSpot reviewer
No maintenance required, free service, but more free features would help
We were using Quad9 to prevent our users from accidentally landing on suspicious websites There's no reporting, but we're hoping that our users have been able to avoid malicious websites. The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution. Quad9 could improve by having any…
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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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
"The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution."
"Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall."
 

Cons

"We would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"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 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."
"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."
"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 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 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 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."
More IBM NS1 Connect cons
"It used to work fine for all the devices, but it started to slow and become non-responsive. I would have to reload the page two or three times before all the pages loaded. With OpenDNS, I only need to load the page once."
"Quad9 could improve by having more free features, such as custom DNS filtering."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."
"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 price of Quad9 is free."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
10%
University
6%
Comms Service Provider
19%
Computer Software Company
18%
Hospitality Company
8%
University
5%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
No data available
 

Questions from the Community

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Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?
Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service that offers great redundancy and advanced security with built-in unmetered and ...
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Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect Logo
Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect
Compared 33% of the time
Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect Logo
Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect
Compared 24% of the time
Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect Logo
Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect
Compared 22% of the time
Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect Logo
Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect
Compared 7% of the time
Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect Logo
Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect
Compared 5% of the time
More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors
Cloudflare vs Quad9 Logo
Cloudflare vs Quad9
Compared 81% of the time
Google Cloud DNS vs Quad9 Logo
Google Cloud DNS vs Quad9
Compared 15% of the time
Cisco Umbrella vs Quad9 Logo
Cisco Umbrella vs Quad9
Compared 2% of the time
Akamai Edge DNS vs Quad9 Logo
Akamai Edge DNS vs Quad9
Compared 0% of the time
Verisign Public DNS vs Quad9 Logo
Verisign Public DNS vs Quad9
Compared 0% of the time
More Quad9 Competitors
 

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide
IBM NS1 Connect
June 2025
IBM NS1 Connect reportDownload IBM NS1 Connect product report
Buyer's Guide
Managed DNS
June 2025
Quad9 reportDownload Quad9 product report
 

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
No data available
 

Overview


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

Quad9 enhances internet security by dynamically blocking malicious domains using real-time threat intelligence. It’s designed to protect users from cyber threats without compromising performance or privacy.

Quad9 offers DNS security that prevents access to harmful domains while ensuring user privacy and high-speed service. It operates by filtering DNS queries, enhancing online safety without logging personal data. Established on trusted threat intelligence, it balances efficient protection against cyber threats with minimal impact on internet speed.

What are the key features of Quad9?
  • Real-time Threat Blocking: Uses advanced threat intelligence to block malicious domains instantly.
  • Privacy-focused: Does not log personal data, ensuring user anonymity.
  • Global Coverage: Provides fast and reliable DNS resolution worldwide.
  • Free Service: Offers complete protection at no cost to users.
What benefits does Quad9 offer?
  • Enhanced Security: Reduces risk of malware and phishing attacks by filtering harmful domains.
  • Improved Performance: Maintains fast internet speeds despite added security measures.
  • Anonymous Usage: Prioritizes privacy by refraining from logging or storing personal user data.

In industries like finance and healthcare, where data protection is crucial, Quad9 is implemented to enhance security protocols. Its no-cost approach and efficient threat blocking make it suitable for integration into existing security frameworks, particularly where privacy preservation and threat mitigation are priorities.

Quad9 DNS
 

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
CISCO, Netlab, proofpoint
Buyer's Guide
IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9
June 2025
Free Report: IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9
Find out what your peers are saying about IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9 and other solutions. Updated: June 2025.
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We monitor all Managed DNS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.