Amazon Route 53 vs Google Cloud DNS comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7, while Google is ranked #6 with an average rating of 8.4. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 20.7% mindshare in MDP, compared to Google’s 16.2% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Google users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Google Cloud DNS and Amazon Route 53 are competing DNS management solutions. While Google Cloud DNS impresses with cost-effectiveness and ease of integration, Amazon Route 53 stands out with its extensive feature set and broader range of functionalities.

Features: Google Cloud DNS provides seamless integration with Google Cloud Platform services, automatic scaling, and low-latency resolution. Amazon Route 53 offers advanced features such as traffic flow management, health checks, and a wide range of DNS routing policies, catering to businesses needing detailed control and options.

Room for Improvement: Google Cloud DNS could enhance its feature offerings to match its competitor's range and detail. Additionally, it may benefit from broader support for non-Google environments. Amazon Route 53 could improve ease of use for non-AWS environments, offer more streamlined pricing, and simplify its setup process for users unfamiliar with AWS services.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Google Cloud DNS is known for its straightforward deployment for those already using Google Cloud services, providing efficient and effective support. Amazon Route 53, well-integrated with AWS, offers robust customer service but might require more setup familiarity with AWS services, making its deployment a bit more complex.

Pricing and ROI: Google Cloud DNS is valued for its competitive pricing model, offering low upfront costs and solid ROI for businesses within the Google ecosystem. Amazon Route 53, despite higher initial costs, delivers superior ROI through its comprehensive features, catering to complex enterprise needs willing to invest for enhanced functionality. The cost versus feature balance is a key consideration, with Google favored for budget-centric deployments and Amazon chosen for higher-end requirements.

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

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53 vs. Google Cloud DNS

December 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 824,053 peers since 2012

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 Amazon Route 53 is 20.7%, down from 24.1% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Google Cloud DNS is 16.2%, up from 15.3% 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.

Read full review

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.

Read full review

Shikar Singh

Solutions Architect / IT Program Manager at Optum

Constantly improving and adapting to customer needs

The effectiveness of Google Cloud DNS largely depends on where an organization stands in its cloud journey and its overall technology landscape. For those heavily invested in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and already embracing cloud solutions, Google Cloud DNS can be rated quite high, ranging from seven to nine out of ten.Deployment times for Google Cloud DNS can vary depending on the complexity of the infrastructure and configuration requirements. For straightforward setups and cloud-ready cases, deployment can typically be completed within a few minutes to an hour. However, in more complex infrastructure scenarios involving extensive configuration, deployment may take longer, possibly spanning days or weeks.

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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"Using Amazon Route 53 is located in a central place in Amazon AWS which makes it easier to manage every DNS entry in one place. You are able to manage your public and private DNS from there. We can create rules based on weight and globalization is impressive."

"The solution is cost-effective."

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

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

"The route mapping feature of Route 53 is valuable as it allows me to map services according to our requirements."

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

"Amazon Route 53 is easy to manage and install."

"We haven't faced any outages or issues directly related to Route 53. It has been 100% stable for me."

More Amazon Route 53 pros

"The initial setup process is easy."

"The most significant features are the internal and external endpoints using Google Cloud DNS, which are very beneficial for dependent apps."

"The tool is well integrated. We don’t need the interface of another provider. The product helps me manage my domain and write in Google Cloud."

"Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements."

"It is a scalable solution."

"Stability-wise, I rate the solution a ten out of ten."

"The scalability is good."

Cons

"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."

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

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"There could be improvements in the configuration process, particularly in the options provided during setup, such as subdomain configurations and certificate management."

"The tool's support services lack chat options offered to users, making it an area where improvements are required."

"The product’s security and disaster recovery features need enhancement."

"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’s pricing could be reduced."

"When we are looking at the model registry, it may be not clear sometimes. For example, if you use a single grid model and group or registry, it has a different SDK in the pilot. And it may be not so comfortable to use both of them because it is two different places for keeping things in order."

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

"It is difficult to manage the product if the person involved in the setup process doesn't know much about the solution."

More Amazon Route 53 cons

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment."

"It needs to provide better integration."

"More features around rules-based configurations would be beneficial."

"The UX of the product is an area with certain shortcomings where improvements are required."

"Migrating away from Google Cloud DNS can be difficult."

"The UI is tricky to understand for people who have not worked with DNS records. People with little to no experience with DNS records can find it hard to understand. For example, you need to know the hallmarks to input records since they need to be matched in a specific format."

"The solution's price could be better."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

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

"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."

"Amazon Route 53 is an expensive solution."

"The tool is a bit expensive."

"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."

"It can be expensive compared to some other providers."

"We pay per use."

"Amazon Route 53 is not that expensive."

"The pricing depends on usage and is moderate."

More Amazon Route 53 pricing and cost advice

"It is expensive but cost-effective."

"The product is expensive."

"I am not sure about the pricing. However, I can give you a rough estimate which is like ten cents per month per zone."

"The cost of using Google Cloud DNS can be relatively high compared to other options, especially considering the cloud environment. I would rate it 6 out of 10. Cheaper alternatives might be desirable, but the decision depends on various factors such as vendor lock-in, organizational adaptability, and alignment with other technologies in use."

See which vendors are best for you

Use our free recommendation engine to learn which Managed DNS solutions are best for your needs.

See recommendations

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

16%

Comms Service Provider

Manufacturing Company

Financial Services Firm

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

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

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

What do you like most about Google Cloud DNS?

Google Cloud DNS continues to evolve based on customer feedback and technological advancements.

See all answers

What is your experience regarding pricing and costs for Google Cloud DNS?

Pricing and support are really good. There are no complaints about the pricing.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Google Cloud DNS?

I am not heavily involved with Cloud DNS, but from an end-user perspective, the customization part could be improved....

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 41% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 19% 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

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Azure DNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 64% of the time

Cloudflare vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 20% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 3% 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

Quad9 vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 67% of the time

Cloudflare vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 21% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 3% of the time

Azure DNS vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 2% of the time

Verisign Public DNS vs Google Cloud DNS

Compared 1% of the time

More Google Cloud DNS Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53

December 2024

Download Amazon Route 53 product report

Buyer's Guide

Google Cloud DNS

December 2024

Download Google Cloud DNS product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Route 53

No data available

Learn More

IBM

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Google

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.

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.

Google Cloud DNS is a scalable, reliable and managed authoritative Domain Name System (DNS) service running on the same infrastructure as Google. It has low latency, high availability and is a cost-effective way to make your applications and services available to your users. Cloud DNS translates requests for domain names like www.google.com into IP addresses like 74.125.29.101. Cloud DNS is programmable. You can easily publish and manage millions of DNS zones and records using our simple user interface, command-line interface or API.

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

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack

MeilleursAgents

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53 vs. Google Cloud DNS

December 2024

Free Report: Amazon Route 53 vs. Google Cloud DNS

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

DOWNLOAD NOW

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon Route 53 vs. Google Cloud DNS report.

See our list of best Managed DNS vendors.

We monitor all Managed DNS reviews to prevent fraudulent reviews and keep review quality high. We do not post reviews by company employees or direct competitors. We validate each review for authenticity via cross-reference with LinkedIn, and personal follow-up with the reviewer when necessary.