IBM NS1 Connect vs Managed DNS Services comparison

IBM and DNS Made Easy are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. IBM is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while DNS Made Easy is ranked #12 with an average rating of 8.0. IBM holds a 2.0% mindshare in MDP, compared to DNS Made Easy’s 0.6% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of IBM users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of DNS Made Easy users who would recommend it.

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 13 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

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1,761 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Managed DNS Services

Read 1 Managed DNS Services review

342 Views
342 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Managed DNS Services

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between IBM NS1 Connect and Managed DNS Services based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare, Amazon Web Services (AWS), BlueCat and others in Managed DNS.

To learn more, read our detailed Managed DNS Report (Updated: March 2026).

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

March 2026

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Helped 884,873 peers since 2012

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

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

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
Product	Mindshare (%)
IBM NS1 Connect	2.0%
Managed DNS Services	0.6%
Other	97.4%

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

DavidJackson1

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.

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Vijay Muddu

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.

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."

"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 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."

"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 has positively impacted my organization by providing controlled downtime, reduced downtime, and time saving through automation, as approximately forty to fifty percent of our time is saved through automation and enhanced visibility."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"It is a very robust and stable solution."

Cons

"To improve IBM NS1 Connect, I suggest additional monitoring services should be added in the dashboard and DNS timeout issues should be resolved."

"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."

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

"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 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."

"Pricing can be more transparent, especially when dealing with tight budgets."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"The tool fails to offer load-balancing options compared to products like Azure or Amazon Route 53."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

Government

No data available

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

By reviewers
Company Size	Count
Midsize Enterprise	3
Large Enterprise	10

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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...

See all answers

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Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 29% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 21% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 14% of the time

Constellix DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Dyn vs Managed DNS Services

Compared 24% of the time

BlueCat Integrity vs Managed DNS Services

Compared 17% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs Managed DNS Services

Compared 12% of the time

Cloudflare vs Managed DNS Services

Compared 10% of the time

More Managed DNS Services Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

March 2026

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

March 2026

Download Managed DNS Services 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

DNS Made Easy's Managed DNS service provides everything you need to keep your DNS online. All Managed DNS services are configured through our intuitive control panel, APIs, or with the many tools that have been developed to utilize our REST API.

DNS Made Easy

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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