No more typing reviews! Try our Samantha, our new voice AI agent.

IBM NS1 Connect pros and cons

Vendor: IBM

4.7 out of 5

13 reviews
100% willing to recommend

Pros & Cons summary

IBM NS1 Connect enhances geo-load balancing and redundancy with its Filter Chain, improving page rendering through low latency DNS queries. It supports traffic management with automation and metrics via its API-first platform and simplifies deployment with Terraform integration. Intelligent traffic steering and data manipulation are enabled by Filter Chain technology. Desired features include DNS registrar capabilities and a simpler API agent, while pricing transparency and improved monitoring systems are also needed for reliability and budget management.

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's Filter Chain feature is valuable for geo-load balancing, geo-fencing, and providing redundancy.

Low latency DNS queries enhance customer experience by improving page rendering times.

IBM NS1 Connect supports traffic management, speed of updates, and observability, with its API-first platform enabling automation and metrics gathering.

Integration with Terraform simplifies infrastructure deployment and configuration, reducing the need for human intervention.

Filter Chain technology allows intelligent traffic steering, while data sources facilitate manipulation of multiple records simultaneously.

CONS

The API lacks a feature similar to the UI's Filter Chain simulation for testing before deployment.

Becoming a DNS registrar is a desired feature.

There is complexity in deploying the NS1 client solution, and users would benefit from a simpler API agent.

Monitoring and telemetry systems need improvements to reduce false positives and enhance reliability.

Pricing transparency is needed, particularly when working with tight budgets.

IBM NS1 Connect Pros review quotes

Software Engineer at Abbott

Feb 20, 2026

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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: May 2026.

893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Principal Engineer at Hudl

Jul 21, 2022

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

reviewer1689438

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.

Read full review

Head of Reliability Engineering at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Feb 16, 2022

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.

Read full review

JM

VP of Technical Operations and Devops at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2021

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.

Read full review

Show 2 more reviews (out of 12)

IBM NS1 Connect Cons review quotes

Software Engineer at Abbott

Feb 20, 2026

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

Read full review

Senior Software Engineer at PwC

Feb 13, 2026

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

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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: May 2026.

893,244 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Principal Engineer at Hudl

Jul 21, 2022

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.

Read full review

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."

Read full review

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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

reviewer1689438

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.

Read full review

Head of Reliability Engineering at a financial services firm with 201-500 employees

Feb 16, 2022

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.

Read full review

JM

VP of Technical Operations and Devops at a consultancy with 5,001-10,000 employees

Jul 29, 2021

We would really like them to become a DNS registrar.

Read full review

Show 2 more reviews (out of 12)

Product Categories

Product Categories

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Quad9 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Amazon Route 53 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

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Dyn vs IBM NS1 Connect

Infoblox BloxOne DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Managed DNS Services vs IBM NS1 Connect

Constellix DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

See all alternatives

Product Categories

Product Categories

Popular Comparisons

Popular Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Quad9 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Amazon Route 53 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

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Dyn vs IBM NS1 Connect

Infoblox BloxOne DDI vs IBM NS1 Connect

Managed DNS Services vs IBM NS1 Connect

Constellix DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

See all alternatives

Related questions

40

When evaluating Managed DNS Providers, what aspect do you think is the most important to look for?

109

Why is Managed DNS important for companies?