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 #3 with an average rating of 6.0. IBM holds a 1.2% mindshare in MDP, compared to Quad9 DNS’s 32.7% 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

1,913 Views
960 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Quad9

Read 2 Quad9 reviews

27,426 Views
22,645 Comparison Views

50% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Quad9

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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.

To learn more, read our detailed IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9 Report (Updated: April 2025).

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9

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

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

Quad9

Ranking in Managed DNS

3rd

Average Rating

6.0

Reviews Sentiment

7.9

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Internet Security (8th)

Mindshare comparison

As of May 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 32.7%, up from 29.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

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.

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Benoit Tellier

IT Telehealth Specialist at Clinical & Support Options

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…

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Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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

"Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall."

"The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution."

Cons

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"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 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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"Quad9 could improve by having more free features, such as custom DNS filtering."

"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."

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"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."

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

"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."

"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

Comms Service Provider

19%

Computer Software Company

19%

Hospitality Company

Media Company

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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What do you like most about Quad9?

Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall.

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What needs improvement with Quad9?

We've had performance problems with Quad9. It isn't responding fast enough.

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 39% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 23% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 23% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 6% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Cloudflare vs Quad9

Compared 81% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Quad9

Compared 15% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Quad9

Compared 2% of the time

Verisign Public DNS vs Quad9

Compared 0% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs Quad9

Compared 0% of the time

More Quad9 Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

May 2025

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

May 2025

Download 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

April 2025

Free Report: IBM NS1 Connect vs. Quad9

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