Cloudflare vs Infoblox DDI comparison

Cloudflare and Infoblox are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Cloudflare is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Infoblox is ranked #7 with an average rating of 8.8. Additionally, 95% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 100% of Infoblox users who would recommend it.

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Executive Summary

We performed a comparison between Cloudflare and Infoblox DDI based on real PeerSpot user reviews.

Find out in this report how the two Managed DNS solutions compare in terms of features, pricing, service and support, easy of deployment, and ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare vs. Infoblox DDI Report (Updated: July 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. Infoblox DDI

July 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

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.

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Binuprasad Madhu

Site Reliability Engineer at Fortinet

Jun 5, 2023

The API enables you to build a separate environment inside the solution

We use Cloudflare for our DNS service. We previously faced so many issues with our in-house DNS servers. Cloudflare provides a backup, so if you have any issues with your environment or something goes wrong with a software hostname and IP address, you can run the backup and experience zero…

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Ajmal Abbas

System Consultant DDI Lead at a tech services company with 10,001+ employees

Dec 5, 2022

Easy to set up with good discovery capabilities and the ability to expand

The solution offers everything from basic management to automation in DevOps and includes the blocks and solutions they have The solution has provided us with major scalability capabilities. We can automate a lot of things within Infoblox. The API is so robust and easy to use - plus, it can…

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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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

"The solution offers the flexibility to control configuration rules."

"The most valuable features of the solution are performance and security."

"The solution is stable, and the DNS servers are simple to use."

"The most valuable feature is the web application firewall."

"Cloudflare has many features."

"Its most significant benefit to date is the speed with which it refreshes DNS records on the internet once you change it. If you are changing a website or registering a new record, it is very quick."

"The most valuable feature of Cloudflare DNS is its global reach and it is always evolving."

"The simplicity of the overall dashboard makes it a great product for a user like me who has less understanding of the internet than a developer or other more technical people. It gives me peace of mind. I also love the easy customization of the Page Rules."

More Cloudflare pros

"Infoblox has more technology patents than any of its competitors."

"The best feature is the user interface."

"Infoblox DDI prioritizes DNS security, which is crucial for the security department."

"One of the benefits of implementing Infoblox DDI is that it supports both RADIUS and TACACS+."

"The most valuable feature of Infoblox DDI is its IP Address Management (IPAM) tool. This tool allows for the effective management of IP addresses and provides the capability to detect duplicates, hence its moniker "discovery." Another feature that I find particularly useful is the integration of DNS, which can be seamlessly integrated with your existing primary DNS server, making the overall experience much more seamless and efficient."

"It offers an easy initial setup."

"Infoblox DDI is a good tool if you want to centralize everything in your environment...It is a stable solution."

Cons

"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.""

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

"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

"If they improve on the placement of their data centers, it would be better. I'm living in a remote area. I would like to connect to them without any kind of lag."

"Support response time could be improved."

"I think the APIs are a little bit hard for us to work with. The APIs could be more open so that we could integrate better with our SolarWinds or our monitoring solution."

"The solution could be more user-friendly."

"The analytics, basically the dashboard, doesn't have much to it."

"The pricing could be improved."

"The product needs to improve its automation."

"There should be a specific price list for enterprise-level customers."

More Cloudflare cons

"Every vendor or organization cannot purchase Infoblox DDI because of some license issues."

"The recategorization part takes longer with Infoblox DDI compared to other companies like Symantec, Zscaler, and Palo Alto."

"They need to provide more training and tutorials than what's provided on the website."

"The solution is expensive."

"They need to reconsider their pricing for their SMB customers. It is a hurdle for them to manage the price."

"Regarding an upcoming release of Infoblox DDI, I would like to see an improvement in the existing integration with Ansible. Currently, the integration is not up to par and requires further enhancements, particularly in Ansible version 2.5. Additionally, the GUI is slow, it could be improved."

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Cloudflare's pricing is not much higher and is good for middle-level organizations."

"We are using the free tier of the solution."

"The price is reasonable."

"The cost primarily depends on the size of the organization."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The price of the solution is expensive."

"There are no additional costs beyond the standard licensing fees."

"The pricing for the service is reasonable, neither excessively cheap nor prohibitively expensive. It aligns well with the value of their solution."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The license of the solution is expensive, not including the hardware."

"I would say the pricing falls between average and expensive. It's not a cheap product."

"Infoblox DDI is an expensive product."

"Infoblox's subscription includes support."

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

19%

Financial Services Firm

13%

University

Comms Service Provider

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

14%

Financial Services Firm

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

17%

Computer Software Company

13%

Government

12%

Manufacturing 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

Which is the best DDoS protection solution for a big ISP for monitoring and mitigating?

Cloudflare. We are moving from Akamai prolexic to Cloudflare. Cloudflare anycast network outperforms Akamai static GR...

See all answers

Which would you choose - Cloudflare DNS or Quad9?

Cloudflare DNS is a very fast, very reliable public DNS resolver. It is an enterprise-grade authoritative DNS service...

See all answers

What do you like most about Cloudflare?

Cloudflare offers CDN and DDoS protection. We have the front end, API, and database in how you structure applications.

See all answers

What do you like most about Infoblox DDI?

Infoblox DDI is a good tool if you want to centralize everything in your environment...It is a stable solution.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Infoblox DDI?

Every vendor or organization cannot purchase Infoblox DDI because of some license issues.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Infoblox DDI?

Infoblox DDI can be used as a DHCP server, DNS server agent, gateway, and access management tool.

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 23% of the time

Amazon Route 53 vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 15% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 8% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 6% of the time

Azure DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 3% of the time

More IBM NS1 Connect Competitors

Quad9 vs Cloudflare

Compared 50% of the time

Azure DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Azure Front Door vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Akamai vs Cloudflare

Compared 4% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

More Cloudflare Competitors

BlueCat Integrity vs Infoblox DDI

Compared 37% of the time

VitalQIP vs Infoblox DDI

Compared 15% of the time

Azure DNS vs Infoblox DDI

Compared 13% of the time

Cisco Prime Network Registrar vs Infoblox DDI

Compared 9% of the time

More Infoblox DDI Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

August 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

September 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Infoblox DDI

August 2024

Download Infoblox DDI product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Cloudflare DNS

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IBM

Cloudflare

Infoblox

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.

Cloudflare is a highly-regarded Content Delivery Network (CDN) and a Distribution Denial of Service (DDoS) protection solution. The robust global cloud platform that is Cloudflare ensures users are able to connect to the internet quickly, securely, and reliably. Cloudflare is one of the world's largest networks in the marketplace today. Using Cloudflare, businesses, educational entities, NGOs, vloggers, bloggers, and anyone else with an internet presence can use the solution and experience more secure, faster websites and applications.

Currently, there are millions of internet locations on Cloudflare, and the Cloudflare network continues to grow every day by the thousands. The solution is able to fulfill the requests for millions of websites seamlessly and serves on average 45 million HTTP requests per second.

Cloudflare has safe, secure data centers in close to 300 cities worldwide to ensure every client request is filled as quickly as possible. It is Cloudflare’s edge network that makes this possible by keeping content and other services as close to each client as possible, so the information requests are always only seconds away.

Many organizations that work in democracy, civil society, human rights, or the arts are able to access Cloudflare highest levels of protection for free via Project Galileo. Additionally, official election websites can be secured from hacking and fraud through Cloudflare’s Project Athenian, also at no additional cost.

Cloudflare can also help organizations of all sizes develop a robust zero-trust strategy to ensure the highest levels of productivity and profitability. Employees, stakeholders, and end-users have a greater level of satisfaction and overall improved user experience, which can, in turn, result in higher revenues and overall ROI. Zero-trust and BYOD ( bring your own device) access ensure end-users and employees always have the best resources and technology available to them at all times.

Cloudflare Benefits

Cloudflare has many benefits. Some of its most valuable benefits include:

Faster load times
Robust DNS security
Intuitive cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF)
Free universal SSL
Image Enhancement
Automatic Browser Caching
Next-generation cloud load balancer
Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
Rate Limiting
Minification
Zero-trust capabilities
Cost-effective
Reduced carbon footprint

Reviews from Real Users

“Many websites require an SSL certificate because they sell stuff and want SSL. Cloudflare comes with an SSL certificate built in. It's automatic. You sign yourself up for Cloudflare, and an SSL certificate automatically protects your website. If you have a connection between your website and your host, the server, Cloudflare, and the host, you don't necessarily need a certificate.” Spencer M., Owner at Tech Exchange

“What I like best about Cloudflare is that my company can use it to trace and manage applications and monitor traffic. The solution tells you if there's a spike in traffic. Cloudflare also sends you a link to check your equipment and deployment and track it through peering, so it's a valuable tool.” Daniel P., Network engineer at Ufinet

“The most valuable feature of Cloudflare is the GUI. You are able to control the solution very well through the interface. There is a lot of functionality that is embedded in the service.” A PeerSpot user who is a Competence Center Manager at a tech services company.

Network landscapes are rapidly evolving, driven by trends in hybrid and multi-cloud transformation, the IoT and distributed workforces. Infoblox is uniquely able to support organizations in this challenging environment because our solutions support DNS, DHCP and IP address management. These are the critical network services collectively known as DDI that make all network interactions possible.

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

Trusted by over 9,000,000 Internet Applications and APIs, including Nasdaq, Zendesk, Crunchbase, Steve Madden, OkCupid, Cisco, Quizlet, Discord and more.

Adobe, Aflac, UCSD, Airbus, Amgen, Apple

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. Infoblox DDI

July 2024

Free Report: Cloudflare vs. Infoblox DDI

Find out what your peers are saying about Cloudflare vs. Infoblox DDI and other solutions. Updated: July 2024.

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