Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

Microsoft and IBM are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Microsoft is ranked #4 with an average rating of 8.3, while IBM is ranked #12. Microsoft holds a 20.3% mindshare in MDP, compared to IBM’s 2.7% mindshare. Additionally, 93% of Microsoft users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of IBM users who would recommend it.

Azure DNS

Read 32 Azure DNS reviews

8,327 Views
7,352 Comparison Views

93% willing to recommend

IBM NS1 Connect

Read 11 IBM NS1 Connect reviews

2,399 Views
1,203 Comparison Views

100% willing to recommend

Azure DNS

IBM NS1 Connect

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024

Azure DNS and IBM NS1 Connect compete in the DNS management category. IBM NS1 Connect appears to have the upper hand due to its flexibility in handling large-scale infrastructures with detailed traffic management features.

Features: Azure DNS integrates seamlessly with Azure services and offers the DNS Defender for strong security. Its ease of installation further enhances its appeal for Azure users. IBM NS1 Connect excels with geo-load balancing, real-time telemetry, and an extensive API functionality, all of which contribute to its adaptability in large infrastructures.

Room for Improvement: Azure DNS could improve in domain registration capabilities, pricing transparency, and support scalability for multi-cloud environments. IBM NS1 Connect might enhance its monitoring reliability, API simulation for DNS configurations, and refine reporting and search capabilities.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Azure DNS is versatile across public, private, and hybrid cloud environments, with Microsoft’s robust technical support system, though user experiences vary. IBM NS1 Connect focuses on public cloud deployment, benefiting from direct engagement with its technical support team, despite occasional responsiveness issues.

Pricing and ROI: Azure DNS benefits from Azure’s pay-as-you-go system, offering good ROI and pricing flexibility for Azure users. IBM NS1 Connect's competitive pricing favors high-volume users, providing reliable services with its extensive feature set valued by its users.

To learn more, read our detailed Azure DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect Report (Updated: December 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Azure DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

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Categories and Ranking

Azure DNS

Ranking in Managed DNS

4th

Average Rating

8.4

Reviews Sentiment

7.1

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 Azure DNS is 20.3%, down from 22.9% 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

Tushar-Patil

Senior Consultant at Hexaware Technologies Limited

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.

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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

"The best feature is the domain register. The other great feature is that whenever you create any resources, Azure DNS will automatically create a record for you."

"Azure DNS provides end-to-end P2P connectivity and enhances security, making it more secure and reliable."

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

"What I like about Azure DNS is that it doesn't have any issues and integrates quickly with other products. It has good integration, which is incredible. I also like that whenever you deploy private links and endpoints, Azure DNS gives you the option to select the Azure native DNS, private DNS, or go with the Azure custom DNS. It depends, but if you don't have any dependencies on the DNS, then, like many customers, you won't have DNS issues. Azure DNS is a very good solution that helps you with domains and other resources."

"From a security perspective, Microsoft is much better than other cloud providers."

"The tool is easy to manage and use."

"The most valuable feature of the solution is the simplicity of putting DBs."

"It is a very stable solution."

More Azure DNS pros

"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 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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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."

"Everything we download into our observability platform so that we can also track any changes in traffic behavior or things like that is also something that we use quite a lot. I'd say traffic management, the speed of updates, and observability are the top three things that we use."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

Cons

"Azure DNS does provide enhanced support for applications and includes several security features to protect against threats. One of the security features it offers is the ability to detect and prevent dangling DNS records, which can be used in cyber attacks. Dangling DNS records occur when a website owner creates a domain name but forgets to remove the CNAME record, leaving the domain vulnerable to takeover by malicious actors. Azure DNS includes security measures to identify and prevent such threats, helping to keep your DNS infrastructure secure. However, if Microsoft could add more security capabilities to the DNS, that would be great to detect and identify anomalies that are happening to prevent cyber threats."

"The solution lacks scalability."

"There are issues with the cloud systems."

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

"They should include more integration with other platforms."

"Azure DNS' documentation needs to improve."

"The process of creating a virtual mission could be improved."

"I would like to see more integration with other platforms, improved stability, enhanced security, and better pricing because there is always room for improvement."

More Azure DNS cons

"I would love to see improvement in the testing capabilities they provide. They have a simulate-filter feature so that you can simulate how your traffic would flow, based on their Filter Chains. I believe that was shut off for quite some time. Having that as a way to test our load-balanced CDN structure would be fantastic."

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

"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 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."

"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."

"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

"The solution is free."

"To use Azure DNS, I need to buy the license meant for Windows Server."

"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 pricing is expensive."

"The solution's price is reasonable."

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

"We have an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft. Their pricing is competitive. I would rate it a three and a half out of five."

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

More Azure DNS pricing and cost advice

"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."

"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."

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

16%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Manufacturing Company

Government

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 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 and IP address management platforms.

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

Amazon Route 53 vs Azure DNS

Compared 57% of the time

Cloudflare vs Azure DNS

Compared 28% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Azure DNS

Compared 5% of the time

Infoblox DDI vs Azure DNS

Compared 5% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Azure DNS

Compared 1% of the time

More Azure DNS Competitors

Cloudflare vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 41% of the time

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 19% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 18% 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

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

Azure DNS

December 2024

Download Azure DNS product report

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Also Known As

No data available

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Learn More

Microsoft

IBM

Overview

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.

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

M-Files

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

Azure DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect

December 2024

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