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IBM NS1 Connect pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.6 out of 5

16 reviews
100% willing to recommend

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Pros & Cons summary

IBM NS1 Connect is an API-first DNS and traffic management platform boosting automation and metrics with seamless Terraform integration. It leverages Filter Chain technology for smart traffic steering, supporting low latency and performance. Despite enhancing user experience with monitoring features, improvements in testing, monitoring services, and resolution of DNS timeout issues are recommended. The platform's cost is higher than alternatives, and technical support response time is slow, complicating customer engagement.

Buyer's Guide

Get pricing advice, tips, use cases and valuable features from real users of this product.

Prominent pros & cons

PROS

IBM NS1 Connect offers an API-first DNS and application traffic management platform that enhances automation and metrics gathering.

It integrates effectively with Terraform, simplifying infrastructure deployment and configuration.

Filter Chain technology in IBM NS1 Connect enables intelligent traffic steering and geo-fencing for optimized load balancing.

Low latency access and auto DNS traffic routing improve performance, reliability, and uptime, enhancing user experience.

Monitoring features in IBM NS1 Connect ensure high availability and quick response to any issues, maintaining a reliable service.

CONS

There is a need for improvement in testing capabilities, particularly the simulate-filter feature for testing load-balanced CDN structures.

Additional monitoring services and resolution of DNS timeout issues are suggested for the dashboard.

Challenges exist with the complexity of NS1's client solution, desiring a simpler API agent for platform communication.

The cost of IBM NS1 Connect is higher than other solutions like Route 53, Azure, and Cloudflare, with a need for more transparent pricing.

Technical support responses are slow, taking several weeks to respond to raised requests.

IBM NS1 Connect Pros review quotes

Senior Software Engineer at PwC

Feb 13, 2026

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.

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Assosiate Director at TIAA

Jul 9, 2026

The best benefits of using IBM NS1 Connect are the performance and availability of the product towards the cloud, and when comparing the performance with other products, I believe it is above par, as it is really helpful and gives me at least a 20 to 30% improvement in functionality.

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Data Protection Specialist at CompuCom

Jul 8, 2026

IBM NS1 Connect's API-driven architecture has helped my organization with digital transformation as it is an open standard.

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IBM NS1 Connect

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Alessandro Dasilva

Especialista De Produtos at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 23, 2026

IBM NS1 Connect has a positive impact on my organization, as I believe it improves security, availability, and DDoS attack mitigation because it detects failures and automatically redirects users to healthy resources.

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JS

Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 10, 2026

The auto DNS traffic routing helps during deployment or incidents by providing more reliability and faster performance.

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VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

Mar 4, 2022

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.

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Valentino Volonghi

Chief Technology Officer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 15, 2022

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.

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KS

Engineering Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 2, 2021

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.

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Director of Site Reliability Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 7, 2021

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.

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Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

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.

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IBM NS1 Connect Cons review quotes

Senior Software Engineer at PwC

Feb 13, 2026

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

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Assosiate Director at TIAA

Jul 9, 2026

The technical support is slow. You raise a PR, and then it takes several weeks for them to respond.

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Data Protection Specialist at CompuCom

Jul 8, 2026

I am not overall satisfied with the license and cost for IBM NS1 Connect because my pre-sales team interacts on that part regarding pricing.

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IBM NS1 Connect

Free Report: IBM NS1 Connect Reviews and More

Learn what your peers think about IBM NS1 Connect. Get advice and tips from experienced pros sharing their opinions. Updated: September 2026.

913,806 professionals have used our research since 2012.

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Alessandro Dasilva

Especialista De Produtos at a tech vendor with 10,001+ employees

Jul 23, 2026

I also think the cost is a bit high compared to other more traditional solutions such as Route 53, Azure, and Cloudflare.

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JS

Senior Consultant at a tech services company with 501-1,000 employees

Aug 10, 2026

I believe IBM NS1 Connect can be improved in several ways. The main concern I identified is the cost, which is higher than other solutions despite its uses.

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VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

Mar 4, 2022

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."

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Valentino Volonghi

Chief Technology Officer at a tech vendor with 501-1,000 employees

Feb 15, 2022

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.

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KS

Engineering Manager at a computer software company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Sep 2, 2021

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.

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Director of Site Reliability Engineering at a media company with 1,001-5,000 employees

Oct 7, 2021

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.

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Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Jun 8, 2022

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.

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Product Categories

Product Categories

Domain Name System (DNS) Security

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Quad9 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Google Cloud DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

BlueCat Integrity vs IBM NS1 Connect

Infoblox DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

G-Core Labs CDN vs IBM NS1 Connect

Dyn vs IBM NS1 Connect

Infoblox BloxOne DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

CloudFloorDNS Enterprise DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

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