Azure DNS vs BlueCat Integrity comparison

Microsoft and BlueCat are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Microsoft is ranked #3 with an average rating of 8.4, while BlueCat is ranked #5 with an average rating of 8.9. Microsoft holds a 20.7% mindshare in MDP, compared to BlueCat’s 4.8% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of BlueCat users who would recommend it.

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Download the report

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

BlueCat Integrity and Azure DNS compete in the domain name system (DNS) solutions market. Azure DNS holds an upper hand due to its seamless integration with Azure services, making it advantageous for cloud deployment.

Features: BlueCat Integrity is noted for its stability, flexibility, and comprehensive DNS, DHCP functionalities, alongside a user-friendly interface. It offers strong automation and API integration, along with security compliance. Its Linux-based foundation enhances reliability. Azure DNS stands out with features like DDoS protection, exceptional integration with Azure services, and robust DNS management, which include security benefits such as Defender for DNS.

Room for Improvement: BlueCat Integrity could improve its reporting capabilities, multi-factor authentication support, and broaden its IPv6 feature set. It has limited integration with cloud services and documentation needs enhancement. Azure DNS requires clearer domain registration processes and enhanced visibility for troubleshooting. Its scalability is challenged in multi-cloud and hybrid environments, and it could improve security features further.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: BlueCat Integrity is praised for its flexible deployment options across on-premises and hybrid clouds, aided by professional service offerings for complex integrations. Its customer support, though occasionally slow, is knowledgeable and dedicated. Azure DNS offers smooth integration within Microsoft's ecosystem but lacks specialized enterprise support, often requiring external expertise for advanced settings.

Pricing and ROI: BlueCat Integrity is priced at an enterprise level, shifting from perpetual licenses to subscriptions, considered costly but returns value through operational efficiency. Azure DNS pricing is based on Azure service usage, usually seen as more affordable due to Microsoft package inclusions. Its cost-effectiveness suits smaller deployments, while BlueCat caters to large-scale robust needs.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity

October 2024

Download the complete report

Helped 814,649 peers since 2012

Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.8%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of Azure DNS is 20.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of BlueCat Integrity is 4.8%, up from 0.9% 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

Jun 8, 2022

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

Tushar-Patil

Senior Consultant at Hexaware Technologies Limited

Feb 7, 2024

Offers good performance and helps its users with disaster recovery

Azure DNS has improved our company's domain management and resolution reliability since it provides most of the solutions, especially whatever is required in our organization. My experience of integrating Azure DNS into our company's existing cloud services was easy. For the security and privacy aspect, my company mostly relies on Microsoft. I don't have the expertise to comment on whether Azure DNS has influenced our company's operations from a security and privacy perspective. Azure DNS is a really good product when it comes to scalability and performance for our company's workload. Azure DNS has helped my company with the disaster recovery phase. The product uses cloud features, and since my company has separate regions, we have a backup tool or a backup deduplication technology. The implementation of Azure DNS in our environment benefits the entire organization, but four to five people have access to the solution. I rate the overall product a nine to ten out of ten.

Read full review

Ian Slade

Sr. Manager Network Engineering and Architecture at SAIC

Apr 30, 2024

It improves our security by providing a single source of IP address usage and contact information

As a defense contractor, we must meet many compliance standards regarding logging, configuration, and administrative access. BlueCat is one of the few products that combines all the compliance components in a secure, reliable solution. Integrity requires some technological expertise and a full-time employee to run the system. It is one of several technologies that my group manages, but maintenance requires minimal effort. Upgrading and deploying the solution is a bigger task, but it is easy to maintain once it is running. BlueCat Integrity offers a single pane of glass view for our IP address space. From the GUI interface, you can see all the IP addresses and roll them up to the colored views of usage and availability. That capability is critical because we have multiple groups that are off on their own in a cloud environment. We can avoid IP address overlap by checking that as we add different projects. While I've worked at this company, we've had more than 50 acquisitions. As we acquire these companies, some IP addresses may overlap. We can integrate those, see the spaces, and adjust.

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

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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

"It is a scalable solution."

"The most valuable feature is the ease of installation."

"We use the solution to host IP addresses, sites like microsites."

"Azure DNS provides value beyond its user-friendly interface and easy learning curve."

"The most valuable features of Azure DNS are the DNS forwarder and the DNS additional record editions."

"It is a scalable solution."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a stable product."

"The DNS resolution is the most valuable feature."

More Azure DNS pros

"The most valuable features of BlueCat Integrity are the user-friendly UI and the permission management."

"The most valuable features are scalability and cloud infrastructure."

"BlueCat Integrity's scalability and user-friendliness are the most valuable features."

"Since implementing BlueCat, we have experienced fewer problems, anomalies, and strange issues."

"Adaptive DNS's best feature is DDoS protection, which stops malware and network security attacks."

"The most significant advantage of BlueCat is its foundation on open-source software, specifically BIND and ISC DHCP."

"The most valuable aspect is its user-friendly interface. It is straightforward to use."

"Managing our BDI infrastructure globally is simple, and BlueCat's personalized relationship with us is valuable to our organization."

More BlueCat Integrity 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"The security features and stability needs to be bettered."

"The solution lacks scalability."

"Azure needs to add domain registration to the DNS service."

"Azure DNS' documentation needs to improve."

"While it's stable, there's always room for improvement to ensure it remains reliable."

"The CDN integration could be improved."

"I would like to see more security features and protection."

"Domain registration is one of the problems. We need to go to application services or web apps to purchase the domain instead. If that were to be equivalent to AWS's Route 53 that would be good. But, it is not as flexible as that."

More Azure DNS cons

"One crucial area for development is IPv6 support."

"The integration has room for improvement."

"The ease of use is where I got to give a little knock on them. Once you start using the tool, it becomes very easy. It's actually quite easy to use. The problem that I run into is documentation. The documentation could be a little bit richer. Documentation has always been a little pet peeve for me with them."

"Some areas need improvement, especially the issue with stale entries in the BlueCat tenancy. I have heard that it is already fixed in BlueCat Integrity 10. I have not used that yet."

"One complaint about the interface is BlueCat's handling of subzones."

"The technical support is slow and has room for improvement."

"Adaptive DNS only supports AWS for network automation and cloud computing and would be improved if it also supported other options like Azure or Google Cloud."

"BlueCat Integrity can improve by increasing the amount of updates it releases."

More BlueCat Integrity cons

Pricing and Cost Advice

"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."

"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."

"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."

"The price is low and it's a reasonable price for that product."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

"The solution itself is free but you need to pay for the Microsoft Azure infrastructure and host your domains in Azure to use it."

"In my opinion, DNS is inexpensive. The pricing depends on how you use it, but overall, it's quite affordable. It typically costs just a fesw cents, and Microsoft even offers ten thousand free hits per month."

"The solution is free."

"The solution is moderately priced."

"We use the tool's free version."

"I would describe Azure DNS as a cheaply priced product."

More Azure DNS pricing and cost advice

"BlueCat Integrity meets our expectations and aligns with our budget forecast."

"Overall, I would say that it is priced fairly, though perhaps a bit on the high side."

"BlueCat Integrity is a little expensive, but it's worth the price because it offers the flexibility and features we need in our space. We have more than 25,000 employees, and it makes sense for a network of our size. It's required for us to be compliant in the defense industry. Given the restrictions we face, we must be able to easily show that we've complied with all the regulations."

"BlueCat Integrity is more cost-effective than Infoblox."

"I am not sure about the exact pricing, but I believe their cost is lower compared to Infoblox."

"BlueCat Integrity is affordable."

"While BlueCat falls on the expensive side, its exceptional customer service and consistent quality justify the cost."

"Compared to other solutions, BlueCat Integrity offers a competitive price."

More BlueCat Integrity pricing and cost advice

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

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

12%

Comms Service Provider

10%

University

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

Computer Software Company

17%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

10%

Healthcare Company

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 Azure DNS?

The tool is easy to manage and use.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Azure DNS?

The web interface to manage the solution must be made easier. The tool must provide seamless integration between DHCP...

See all answers

What do you like most about BlueCat Adaptive DNS?

This inherent stability, derived from its Linux-based architecture, provides a well-established and reliable platform.

See all answers

What needs improvement with BlueCat Adaptive DNS?

We're still reviewing our architecture and design. We are having some challenges when it's integrated into our VMware...

See all answers

What is your primary use case for BlueCat Adaptive DNS?

We use BlueCat appliances and the Integrity platform for our DACP environment. That's on the internal side. All of ou...

See all answers

Comparisons

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 41% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 20% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 19% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 7% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Amazon Route 53 vs Azure DNS

Compared 58% of the time

Cloudflare vs Azure DNS

Compared 27% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Azure DNS

Compared 5% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs Azure DNS

Compared 4% of the time

Quad9 vs Azure DNS

Compared 1% of the time

More Azure DNS Competitors

Infoblox DDI vs BlueCat Integrity

Compared 49% of the time

Infoblox IPAM vs BlueCat Integrity

Compared 23% of the time

SolarWinds IPAM vs BlueCat Integrity

Compared 8% of the time

Cloudflare vs BlueCat Integrity

Compared 6% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs BlueCat Integrity

Compared 2% of the time

More BlueCat Integrity Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

October 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Azure DNS

November 2024

Download Azure DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

BlueCat Integrity

November 2024

Download BlueCat Integrity product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

No data available

BlueCat Adaptive DNS, BlueCat Automation Manager, BlueCat DDI

Learn More

IBM

Microsoft

BlueCat

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.

Azure DNS is a hosting service for DNS domains, providing name resolution using Microsoft Azure infrastructure. By hosting your domains in Azure, you can manage your DNS records using the same credentials, APIs, tools, and billing as your other Azure services.

BlueCat Integrity is a comprehensive DNS security solution that provides visibility and control over all DNS traffic on your network. It offers real-time threat detection and response, as well as policy enforcement to ensure compliance with security standards. With its advanced analytics and reporting capabilities, Integrity enables you to identify and mitigate security risks before they can cause damage. It also integrates with other security tools to provide a complete security ecosystem. Whether you're a small business or a large enterprise, BlueCat Integrity can help you protect your network from DNS-based attacks and ensure the integrity of your DNS infrastructure.

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

M-Files

Computer Sciences Corporation

Buyer's Guide

Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity

October 2024

Free Report: Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity

Find out what your peers are saying about Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.

DOWNLOAD NOW

814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.

See our Azure DNS vs. BlueCat Integrity 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.