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Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect comparison

 

Comparison Buyer's Guide

Executive SummaryUpdated on Nov 4, 2024
 

Categories and Ranking

Azure DNS
Ranking in Managed DNS
3rd
Average Rating
8.4
Number of Reviews
31
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
IBM NS1 Connect
Ranking in Managed DNS
12th
Average Rating
9.6
Number of Reviews
11
Ranking in other categories
No ranking in other categories
 

Mindshare comparison

As of November 2024, in the Managed DNS category, the mindshare of Azure DNS is 20.7%, down from 22.6% compared to the previous year. The mindshare of IBM NS1 Connect is 2.8%, down from 3.3% compared to the previous year. It is calculated based on PeerSpot user engagement data.
Managed DNS
 

Featured Reviews

Tushar-Patil - PeerSpot reviewer
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.
Michael Wills - PeerSpot reviewer
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.

Quotes from Members

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

Pros

"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."
"One of the key benefits of Azure DNS is its integration with other Azure services. As it is a solution developed by Microsoft, it is easy to integrate with other Azure offerings. Azure DNS also includes Defender for DNS, a feature that protects against anomalies and threats on the DNS. This added security is provided directly by Microsoft. The integration and security features of Azure DNS make it a valuable option for users of the Azure cloud platform."
"The most valuable feature is the ease of installation."
"The most valuable feature of the solution is that it is a stable product."
"The setup is relatively straightforward."
"It is a scalable solution."
"It is a very stable solution."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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 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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
 

Cons

"The scalability could improve."
"Azure DNS' documentation needs to improve."
"I would like to see more integration with other platforms, improved stability, enhanced security, and better pricing because there is always room for improvement."
"I would like to see more security features and protection."
"Azure needs to add domain registration to the DNS service."
"The product must be integrated with additional security features."
"Azure DNS could improve by having more updates."
"What needs improvement in Azure DNS is visibility in terms of troubleshooting. It's similar to the area for improvement in Azure Network Watcher, where I can see how the source is going out if I'm troubleshooting a source destination. I can also see the destination. As for seeing how the packet travels, that's what should be improved. It's still lacking in visibility. Suppose I'm looking into backend machines, and if I'm hitting another NPM machine or any machine on the other side, there should be visibility. The tool should tell you that a specific machine is passing through a VPN gateway or route table, routing to a third-party firewall, and then dropping. Azure DNS should show an accurate answer to help the customers, which is its area for improvement."
"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 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 would really like them to become a DNS registrar."
"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."
"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."
 

Pricing and Cost Advice

"I would describe Azure DNS as a cheaply priced product."
"The solution is free."
"The pricing is expensive."
"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 moderately priced."
"The solution's price is reasonable."
"We have an enterprise license agreement with Microsoft. Their pricing is competitive. I would rate it a three and a half out of five."
"To use Azure DNS, I need to buy the license meant for Windows Server."
"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."
"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."
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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews
Computer Software Company
17%
Financial Services Firm
11%
Manufacturing Company
7%
Government
7%
Computer Software Company
14%
Financial Services Firm
12%
Comms Service Provider
10%
University
8%
 

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...
What do you like most about Azure DNS?
The tool is easy to manage and use.
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.
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...
 

Comparisons

 

Also Known As

No data available
NS1 Managed DNS, NS1
 

Learn More

 

Overview

 

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
Find out what your peers are saying about Azure DNS vs. IBM NS1 Connect and other solutions. Updated: October 2024.
814,649 professionals have used our research since 2012.