Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

Akamai and IBM are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Akamai is ranked #9 with an average rating of 8.5, while IBM is ranked #12. Akamai holds a 1.2% mindshare in MDP, compared to IBM’s 1.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Akamai users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Akamai Edge DNS

Read 3 Akamai Edge DNS reviews

1,195 Views
997 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 11 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

2,224 Views
1,121 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Akamai Edge DNS

IBM NS1 Connect

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Akamai Edge DNS and IBM NS1 Connect compete in optimizing DNS performance, with Akamai having an advantage in security and IBM NS1 Connect in traffic routing.

Features: Akamai Edge DNS includes DDoS protection, automated workflows, and advanced security measures. IBM NS1 Connect offers dynamic traffic management, AI-driven real-time analytics, and intelligent routing.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: IBM NS1 Connect facilitates a streamlined deployment process with comprehensive support, while Akamai Edge DNS involves detailed configuration despite having responsive customer service.

Pricing and ROI: Akamai Edge DNS requires a higher upfront cost due to its security features, with IBM NS1 Connect providing a more cost-effective solution through competitive pricing and efficient traffic management.

To learn more, read our detailed Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect Report (Updated: January 2025).

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

January 2025

Download the complete report

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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

Akamai Edge DNS

Ranking in Managed DNS

9th

Average Rating

8.6

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

Domain Name System (DNS) Security (10th)

IBM NS1 Connect

Ranking in Managed DNS

12th

Average Rating

9.6

Reviews Sentiment

8.0

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

Mindshare comparison

As of February 2025, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Akamai Edge DNS is 1.2%, down from 1.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 1.2%, down from 1.6% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

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.

Read full review

Adam Surak

VP of Infrastructure & Security at Algolia

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.

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

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

"I haven't had any problems with the stability of Akamai Edge DNS in the past five years."

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

"The high availability of Akamai Edge DNS is impressive due to their numerous POPs, which help in supporting all attacks, including DDoS counterattacks."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

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 only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones. The price is higher than competitors, and Akamai should offer a better pricing model."

"The only area that needs improvement is the pricing for DNS zones."

"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."

"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.""

"There could maybe be additional ways to manage traffic. There are no major improvements we're looking for. It's a very complete solution."

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

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose it."

"Everything can always be cheaper, but as it is today the pricing is fair."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Government

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

10%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

Questions from the Community

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 accidentally delete them.

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 control of its overall management.

See all answers

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Comparisons

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Compared 8% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Akamai Edge DNS

Compared 7% of the time

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Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 45% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 20% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 6% of the time

Infoblox DDI 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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Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

January 2025

Download Akamai Edge DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

February 2025

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Also Known As

Akamai Fast DNS

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Overview

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

Akamai

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

Sample Customers

Otto Group

Avast Software, Bloomberg L.P., BBC, Carfax, CNBC LLC, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Disney Streaming, Dropbox, EBAY Inc, Gannett Media Corp, Salesforce, Wayfair, Workday

Buyer's Guide

Akamai Edge DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

January 2025

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