Akamai Edge DNS vs Amazon Route 53 comparison

Akamai and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Akamai is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7. Akamai holds a 3.1% mindshare in MDP, compared to Amazon Web Services (AWS)’s 20.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Amazon Route 53 and Akamai Edge DNS compete in the DNS management sector. Amazon Route 53 is favored for pricing and customer support, while Akamai Edge DNS is seen as superior in features due to its robust capabilities.

Features: Amazon Route 53 offers domain registration, traffic management, and health checking, serving as a versatile solution for DNS management. Akamai Edge DNS focuses on performance optimization, high availability, and advanced security features like DDoS protection.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Route 53 provides seamless integration into AWS services, simplifying DNS management with accessible customer service. Akamai Edge DNS has a more complex deployment process but offers tailored support for effective implementation.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Route 53 is cost-effective with a pay-as-you-go model, yielding substantial ROI through low-cost setup. Akamai Edge DNS, although more expensive, is a worthwhile investment for organizations needing top-tier DNS performance and security, offering significant ROI through enhanced capabilities.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Edge DNS vs. Amazon Route 53 Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. Amazon Route 53

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

Mindshare comparison

As of December 2024, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.7%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 3.1%, up from 2.8% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Amazon Route 53 is 20.7%, down from 24.1% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

Michael Wills

Senior Network Systems Engineer at McKesson

Balances cost and functionality, speeds up provisioning, and reduces the DNS maintenance work drastically

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. It is great as an API-first platform for DNS and application traffic management. It is very simple to use. It allows us to rapidly provision and deprovision things. We are all around happy with the solution. From a metrics standpoint, the solution that we came from had no metrics. So, it has been great. Their service team is excellent in taking the time to provide reports for both growth and strategic planning. It has been great.

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reviewer2248722

Ecommerce Architect Manager at a retailer with 1,001-5,000 employees

Protects against troublesome bots, hackers, and different kinds of attacks

Integrating the tool into our existing network's architecture is a matter of redirecting from the Akamai instance over to a different cloud solution. Our security team is happy with the solution's infrastructure. Some security policies we have with Akamai control the overall configuration there. I've always been impressed with Akamai's overall approach and their suite of offerings. It's definitely a key player in the industry. Akamai is generally pretty innovative in terms of technologies, security level, web application firewall, and bot management. I can't really compare Akamai Edge DNS with other vendors, but I know Akamai does a good job. Akamai Edge DNS is a useful component in our infrastructure, hosting, and application side. I think it's just one of those must-have things. I think Akamai has some of its AI technologies plugged into the overall ecosystem. I haven't read up on it lately, but I'm sure it has some kind of offering for adapting to some of the attacks and keeping track of all the approaches. Akamai is a good vendor that comes up with a lot of innovations to protect against troublesome actors such as bots, hackers, and different kinds of attacks. They generally provide performance hosting and the Edge service to make the user experience for a site perform well and be efficient. Overall, I rate the solution an eight out of ten.

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Jithin Scaria

Senior Professional I-Software Engineer Lead at Capgemini

Provides clear documentation, easy to understand, simplifies management and efficiently handles our domain-related configurations and DNS records

For initial setup, we generally use provisioning tools for these kinds of DNS records. The choice often depends on the cloud provider and the Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tools the client prefers. We adapt our approach accordingly rather than focusing on a single method within Route 53. The documentation is very user-friendly. Even someone with no prior experience can easily understand it. It provides step-by-step instructions and explains things in a clear and concise way. You can find everything you need to know about Route 53 and its features in the documentation, including white papers. In addition to manual configuration, you can also use third-party tools like Terraform, Pulumi, or AWS CloudFormation templates to manage your Route 53 configurations.

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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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentally delete them."

"We can maintain control of the configuration, and it seems to be covering the use case that we need."

"The product's initial setup phase was very easy."

"The solution has a user-friendly dashboard."

"The initial setup is good and straightforward."

"The most valuable feature is that it works very well."

"It stands out for its user-friendly interface, seamless integration with other AWS services, and ability to efficiently manage DNS, making it a valuable tool for various deployment scenarios, including those involving Kubernetes on AWS."

"The scalability is the most valuable feature."

"Amazon's customer support is very good with a quick response time."

"The main DNS resolution is really, really fast."

More Amazon Route 53 pros

Cons

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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.""

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle."

"CNAME flattening is a feature that Akamai does not support."

"The product could improve its price."

"The platform is more complicated to learn than one of its competitors."

"A general area for improvement with AWS services is that while AWS quickly releases new services, sometimes these services are not as mature as expected, which can be frustrating."

"The solution should include more robust and secure services for hardening sites."

"It may not always be easy to integrate with on-premise infrastructure, especially with the complexity of the resolver and other factors involved. Improvements could be made to enhance the ability to integrate seamlessly."

"The solution’s pricing and technical support could be improved."

"When you add a new DNS record instructing the solution to map one thing to another, it has to propagate to all the networks, which takes some time."

"Supporting DNS check is one feature missing in the solution."

More Amazon Route 53 cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Since Akamai is the industry leader, I imagine the solution would be a little more expensive than some other vendors."

"Amazon Route 53 is an expensive solution."

"The tool is a bit expensive."

"The pricing depends on usage and is moderate."

"Amazon Route 53 is not an expensive solution."

"We pay per use."

"The price of the solution could be a little bit lower compared to Google DNS, which has more features than Amazon."

"The price of Amazon Route 53 is reasonable."

"Amazon Route 53 is not that expensive."

More Amazon Route 53 pricing and cost advice

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

13%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

What do you like most about NS1 Managed DNS?

For starters, Managed DNS from NS1 is an easy way to get the job done. Whether you're a novice or a pro, Managed DNS ...

See all answers

What do you like most about Akamai Edge DNS?

It is a very stable solution since it has a security feature that allows you to recover zone files if you accidentall...

See all answers

What needs improvement with Akamai Edge DNS?

The solution has a fairly complex setup with our cloud vendors, including Microsoft, Salesforce, and Oracle.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Akamai Edge DNS?

Some of the use cases we looked at are site forwarding for the root domain to another record so we can maintain contr...

See all answers

Azure DNS or Amazon Route 53?

Azure DNS is a hosting service of DNS domains. It has excellent operating time and performance, resulting in fast res...

See all answers

What do you like most about Amazon Route 53?

The most valuable features of the solution are the DNS, routing, and traffic features.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Amazon Route 53?

In my project, everything is already configured, and we focus on monitoring and health checks. There isn't room for r...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 41% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 6% 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

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 4% of the time

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Cloudflare vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 29% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 9% of the time

Quad9 vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 7% of the time

Azure DNS vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 6% of the time

More Akamai Edge DNS Competitors

Azure DNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 64% of the time

Cloudflare vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 20% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 4% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 3% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 1% of the time

More Amazon Route 53 Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

December 2024

Download Akamai Edge DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53

December 2024

Download Amazon Route 53 product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Akamai Fast DNS

Route 53

Learn More

IBM

Akamai

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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.

Discover Akamai DNS and its benefits of high availability and performance, and resilience against DDoS attacks backed by a fully guaranteed uptime SLA.

Amazon Route 53 is a highly available and scalable cloud Domain Name System (DNS) web service. It is designed to give developers and businesses an extremely reliable and cost effective way to route end users to Internet applications by translating names like www.example.com into the numeric IP addresses like 192.0.2.1 that computers use to connect to each other. Amazon Route 53 is fully compliant with IPv6 as well.

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

Otto Group

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. Amazon Route 53

December 2024

Free Report: Akamai Edge DNS vs. Amazon Route 53

Find out what your peers are saying about Akamai Edge DNS vs. Amazon Route 53 and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

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