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BlueCat Integrity vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Review summaries and opinions

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

ROI

Sentiment score
8.8
BlueCat Integrity enhances ROI by reducing ownership costs, downtime, and labor, while increasing reliability and operational efficiency.
Sentiment score
8.0
IBM NS1 Connect improved performance, reduced costs, and enhanced efficiency through automation, benefiting application uptime and customer experiences.
As we are migrating other tools into this one, there can be 30% to 40% cost savings.
 

Customer Service

Sentiment score
7.7
BlueCat Integrity offers expert technical support, appreciated for its rapid response and personalized service, but sometimes inconsistent.
Sentiment score
9.1
IBM NS1 Connect offers exceptional customer support with expert guidance, responsiveness, and reliability, consistently exceeding customer expectations in DNS services.
 

Scalability Issues

Sentiment score
8.4
BlueCat Integrity is scalable and adaptable for diverse environments with efficient expansion, though users note licensing costs and robustness improvements.
Sentiment score
8.3
IBM NS1 Connect efficiently scales to meet traffic demands with automation, low error rates, and global operational reliability.
I would rate the scalability of the solution a seven out of ten.
 

Stability Issues

Sentiment score
8.5
BlueCat Integrity is highly stable, resilient, and consistently achieves significant uptime, with issues mostly due to external factors.
Sentiment score
8.2
IBM NS1 Connect offers high stability and reliability, with minimal downtime and excellent performance even during high-demand situations.
 

Room For Improvement

BlueCat Integrity needs enhancements in automation, UI, support, IPv6, and ease of use for better functionality.
IBM NS1 Connect can improve by enhancing API, bulk changes, traffic management, DNS configurations, testing, and dashboard usability.
The API aspect could be improved with more use cases and better handling of object attributes.
 

Setup Cost

BlueCat Integrity's pricing is competitive, offering value and cost-effectiveness, with expenses averaging $20,000 annually for large networks.
IBM NS1 Connect provides competitive, value-driven pricing, satisfying enterprises with fair costs for high request volumes and advanced features.
Our licensing model with BlueCat Integrity is cheaper than Infoblox.
 

Valuable Features

BlueCat Integrity provides robust, scalable network management with automation, security features, and minimal maintenance for efficient IT infrastructure handling.
IBM NS1 Connect offers geo-load balancing, automation, and real-time telemetry with integration capabilities, enhancing performance and user experience.
It has an understandable GUI interface.
 

Categories and Ranking

BlueCat Integrity
Ranking in Managed DNS
3rd
Average Rating
8.8
Reviews Sentiment
7.4
Number of Reviews
24
Ranking in other categories
IP Address Management (IPAM) Tools (1st), DDI (1st)
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
 

Mindshare comparison

As of August 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of BlueCat Integrity is 2.0%, up from 1.0% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

Sham Prabhakaran - PeerSpot reviewer
User-friendly interface, exceptional support, and enables a lot of time savings
The overall benefit of using BlueCat Integrity is that it allows access to servers and troubleshooting of servers, which is not offered by some of the other market products. When you use BlueCat Integrity, you learn more than VDI. You get hands-on experience with Linux. You get to learn more things when you are using BlueCat Integrity. They also offer exceptional customer service. BlueCat Integrity provides a single-pane-of-glass view of our IP address space. Within this single pane of glass, we can also have multiple views. I can create multiple subblocks and configure them, for example, country-wise. It drastically reduces human error, reducing it by 80% to 85%. BlueCat has helped our organization reduce downtime. We can monitor the online status of services with the help of SNMP. We can use all three SNMP variables, such as SNMPv1, SNMPv2, and SNMPv3. With the help of that, we can monitor server health. It has helped save a huge amount of time in the domain and record creation process. It saves about 90% of our time. BlueCat Integrity has relieved engineers from manual tasks, freeing up time for other projects. It relieves engineers in a huge way. It relieves the DDI engineers from touching the Linux bind servers or DB servers. Using BlueCat Integrity saves a huge amount of time. With that time, we can handle other projects. I use REST APIs. I create scripts, and we have our gateway, so we create our own gateway workflows. We use BlueCat automation to create around four to five thousand objects. It saves about two minutes per object.
Adam Surak - PeerSpot reviewer
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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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
14%
Manufacturing Company
12%
Financial Services Firm
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Comms Service Provider
11%
Financial Services Firm
9%
University
6%
 

Company Size

By reviewers
Large Enterprise
Midsize Enterprise
Small Business
 

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about BlueCat Adaptive DNS?
This inherent stability, derived from its Linux-based architecture, provides a well-established and reliable platform.
What needs improvement with BlueCat Adaptive DNS?
They can improve their support for the CDNV application, which is Cloud Discovery and Visibility. I had to chase BlueCat support a lot for this application, and the support was not good. The CDNV a...
What is your primary use case for BlueCat Adaptive DNS?
We use it for getting an IPAM solution in AWS, which is our first use case. The second use case is we also use it for our on-premise networks to manage the IP ranges. We have distributed all the IP...
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Also Known As

BlueCat Adaptive DNS, BlueCat Automation Manager, BlueCat DDI
NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
 

Overview

 

Sample Customers

Computer Sciences Corporation
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 Integrity vs. IBM NS1 Connect and other solutions. Updated: July 2025.
865,295 professionals have used our research since 2012.