Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Amazon Web Services (AWS) is ranked #2 with an average rating of 8.7, while IBM is ranked #12. Amazon Web Services (AWS) holds a 20.7% mindshare in MDP, compared to IBM’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 100% of Amazon Web Services (AWS) users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Amazon Route 53

Read 31 Amazon Route 53 reviews

7,731 Views
6,890 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 11 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

2,399 Views
1,203 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Amazon Route 53

IBM NS1 Connect

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Amazon Route 53 and IBM NS1 Connect are leading solutions in the DNS management and traffic policy sector. Amazon Route 53 appears to have an edge because of its integration with AWS services, appealing to users familiar with this ecosystem.

Features: Amazon Route 53 provides a scalable DNS management service, integrating seamlessly with other AWS services. It supports DNS failover and latency-based routing, essential for maintaining service reliability. IBM NS1 Connect is known for its robust DNS automation features and real-time telemetry, supported by its Filter Chain capability for geo-load balancing.

Room for Improvement: Amazon Route 53 users desire improved handling of multiple requests, comprehensive security options, and more detailed cost calculators. It also needs better integration with on-premises infrastructure. IBM NS1 Connect could enhance its monitoring reliability, simplify the configuration of its Filter Chain, and improve UI customization to better meet its users' needs.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Amazon Route 53 is noted for its seamless deployment across different cloud environments, with high customer service ratings, particularly for those with business support plans. Speed of support on lower-tier plans is a concern. IBM NS1 Connect, mainly used in public cloud environments, is praised for its responsive technical support, though its quality depends on the support tier.

Pricing and ROI: Amazon Route 53 offers a competitive pay-per-use pricing model. Some users find its pricing structure complex but valuable. IBM NS1 Connect is seen as fair, providing excellent ROI through its feature-rich offerings, including automation and telemetry, which enhance performance and reliability.

To learn more, read our detailed Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 824,053 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

Amazon Route 53

Ranking in Managed DNS

2nd

Average Rating

8.8

Reviews Sentiment

7.3

Number of Reviews

Ranking in other categories

No ranking in other categories

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

Managed DNS

Featured Reviews

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

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

Quotes from Members

We asked business professionals to review the solutions they use. Here are some excerpts of what they said:

Pros

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

"The solution effectively monitors the health of resources and provides good identity access management."

"The scalability is the most valuable feature."

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

"The feature for health check efficiently impacts the uptime and reliability of AWS servers including EC2 and EKS."

"The tool's most valuable feature is in the area of domain registration and routing DNS."

"You can host your zone and name servers here, and keeping track of records is easy."

"The solution is stable."

More Amazon Route 53 pros

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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

Cons

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

"There isn't room for recommending new configurations."

"The solution’s pricing could be reduced."

"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."

"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."

"The number of domain types available on AWS, such as the .br domain for Brazil, should be expanded."

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

More Amazon Route 53 cons

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

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

"The tool is a bit expensive."

"Amazon Route 53 is not that expensive."

"Amazon Route 53 is not an expensive solution."

"The pricing depends on usage and is moderate."

"We pay per use."

"Amazon Route 53 is an expensive solution."

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

More Amazon Route 53 pricing and cost advice

"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."

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

"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."

"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."

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

Educational Organization

22%

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

Manufacturing Company

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

Questions from the Community

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 resolution. We like the ability to view everything in the Azure portal - this makes...

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 recommending new configurations. However, the initial setup isn't something we ar...

See all answers

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 Providers provide all of the tools necessary for efficient and reliable DNS mana...

See all answers

Comparisons

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

Akamai Edge DNS vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 3% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Amazon Route 53

Compared 3% of the time

More Amazon Route 53 Competitors

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

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Amazon Route 53

December 2024

Download Amazon Route 53 product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Also Known As

Route 53

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Learn More

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

IBM

Overview

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.

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.

Sample Customers

Hess, Expedia, Kelloggs, Philips, HyperTrack

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

Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Free Report: Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect

Find out what your peers are saying about Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect and other solutions. Updated: December 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

824,053 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Amazon Route 53 vs. IBM NS1 Connect 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.