Cloudflare vs Quad9 comparison

Cloudflare and Quad9 DNS are both solutions in the Managed DNS category. Cloudflare is ranked #1 with an average rating of 8.4, while Quad9 DNS is ranked #4 with an average rating of 6.0. Additionally, 95% of Cloudflare users are willing to recommend the solution, compared to 50% of Quad9 DNS users who would recommend it.

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Executive SummaryUpdated on Sep 29, 2024

Cloudflare and Quad9 are both top-tier DNS services offering secure and reliable solutions. Cloudflare seems to have the upper hand due to its robust performance and excellent support, while Quad9 is preferred for its superior security features.

Features: Cloudflare offers robust performance, DDoS protection, and additional security features. Quad9 provides strong security with malware blocking, privacy protection, and enterprise-level security features.

Room for Improvement: Cloudflare can improve integration and reduce over-sensitivity in blocking content. Quad9 could enhance customization options and reduce query response times.

Ease of Deployment and Customer Service: Cloudflare is straightforward to deploy and supported by responsive customer service. Quad9 also offers easy deployment but lacks efficient customer service compared to Cloudflare.

Pricing and ROI: Cloudflare is seen as cost-effective with a good ROI and reasonable setup costs. Quad9 has higher setup costs but justifies it with a security-focused ROI.

To learn more, read our detailed Cloudflare vs. Quad9 Report (Updated: October 2024).

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. Quad9

October 2024

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Categories and Ranking

IBM NS1 Connect

Featured Reviews

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.

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Spencer Malmad

Owner at Tech Exchange

It's easy to set up because you point the DNS to it, and it's working in under 15 minutes

Cloudflare is highly scalable. Cloudflare is a system with a web portal that the end users like me see. It's a console where we can adjust the DNS, caching, and security features all in that console. Cloudflare owns thousands of servers across the world that cache the data. It's a powerful solution. When clients sign up for Cloudflare, they're getting this monster content delivery network, security, and a web application firewall in one. It's all rolled into one, and it's massive. Unless you have your website hosted on a massive hosting provider, there's no way that you can deliver the amount of data that Cloudflare can provide to the end users. If you have static content, there's no way that you can ever match what Cloudflare can do. Obviously, there are competitors to Cloudflare that do the same, but I'm saying other types of solutions. Let's say you go with F5. Great, that's on-prem. That's in your colo. You can't deliver as much data to the internet as you can with a CDN. You don't have to spend $20,000 on a net scaler, F5, or whatever Cisco's selling now. You don't have to buy that. You pay them $50 a month or $150 a month. It's totally worth it because even in five years, you'll never get the performance value, not just the actual ROI. You have to consider how much throughput you can get with Cloudflare.

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Louis Geoffroy

President at IDEBUG

It's easy to use and set up, but I've faced performance problems

I have experience with Quad9 and most other filtering solutions. Quad9 was working well initially, but it started slowing, so I switched to OpenDNS. I recently checked Tom's Hardware, an IT review site, and read a review of seven DNS filters. Open DNS was ranked the fastest, and Quad9 was second. Google was on there too, but they said it didn't filter enough.

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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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 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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect pros

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

"The solution provides good load balancing and protection against DDoS attacks."

"I like Cloudflare's application gateway and DDoS protection."

"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."

"Smaller businesses have seen great ROI due to the low investment and strong performance."

"New and innovative way to protect the client's data."

"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."

"It is a stable solution. I rate the stability a ten out of ten...I rate the scalability a ten out of ten."

More Cloudflare pros

"The most valuable feature of Quad9 is that it is a free solution."

"Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall."

Cons

"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 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 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 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."

"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."

"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."

More IBM NS1 Connect cons

"Cloudflare's free plan is limited to 5,000 records for their free plan. They should increase that. For example, if I create a domain called abc.com and a subdomain called a.abc.com, my record count will be two. I can make a maximum of 5,000 subdomains. However, if we use our own DNS hosted on another provider, there is no limit. Their free plan also lacks name server customization."

"The solution could use more analytics on the backend to give us more insights into everything. More reports would be helpful."

"There are some issues with the CDN services."

"I would like Cloudflare to offer a dedicated account manager for large enterprise clients like us."

"Cloudflare doesn't have a reverse lookup. We can only do a DNS lookup to get the IP address from the hostname. It doesn't work if you want to look up the hostname from an IPA address."

"Support response time could be improved."

"I believe they currently have this feature, but there will most likely be integration with APIs so we can control some features through API."

"We're facing challenges due to an upgrade in the machine learning model. The problem arises from some users abusing the APIs, resulting in an influx of suspicious traffic. Cloudflare's learning model mistakenly identifies this traffic as human. Consequently, it assigns it a higher trust score, akin to legitimate human traffic, causing complications in our architecture. Previously, such traffic would have been categorized as suspicious, enabling us to apply appropriate blocking rules. However, we encounter difficulties distinguishing between genuine and suspicious traffic with the new categorization. Despite these challenges, overall, Cloudflare remains the preferred solution compared to Azure, AWS CloudFront, and Google Cloud Armor."

More Cloudflare cons

"Quad9 could improve by having more free features, such as custom DNS filtering."

"It used to work fine for all the devices, but it started to slow and become non-responsive. I would have to reload the page two or three times before all the pages loaded. With OpenDNS, I only need to load the page once."

Pricing and Cost Advice

"The cost of this product is one of the reasons that we chose 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."

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

"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 price is reasonable."

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

"It's a premium model. You can start at zero and work your way up to the enterprise model, which has a very high pricing level."

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

"The product's pricing is minimal compared to other products."

"A free version of the solution is available."

"The solution has many features but there are ones that you need to pay for. Sometimes you have to find out which is available for free and which you have to pay for."

"In terms of licensing costs, we don't pay for licensing for Cloudflare. We only establish communication, then for peering, Cloudflare takes care of the cross-connection in different data centers."

More Cloudflare pricing and cost advice

"The price of Quad9 is free."

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Comparison Review

it_user68487

Security Expert with 51-200 employees

Nov 6, 2013

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Web Application Firewall

CloudFlare vs Incapsula: Round 2 Web Application Firewall Comparative Penetration Testing Analysis Report v1.0 Summary This document contains the results of a second comparative penetration test conducted by a team of security specialists at Zero Science Lab against two cloud-based Web…

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Top Industries

By visitors reading reviews

Computer Software Company

15%

Financial Services Firm

11%

Comms Service Provider

University

Educational Organization

25%

Computer Software Company

13%

Comms Service Provider

Financial Services Firm

Computer Software Company

18%

Comms Service Provider

15%

Media Company

Hospitality Company

Company Size

By reviewers

Large Enterprise

Midsize Enterprise

Small Business

No data available

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 ...

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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 Quad9?

Setting up Quad9 is straightforward if you know what you're doing, and it's easy to use overall.

See all answers

What needs improvement with Quad9?

We've had performance problems with Quad9. It isn't responding fast enough.

See all answers

What is your primary use case for Quad9?

Quad9 is a DNS filter, so it filters unwanted malware. It's one of the five layers of protection I use. I have a rout...

See all answers

Comparisons

Akamai Edge DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 19% 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

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs IBM NS1 Connect

Compared 5% of the time

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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

Amazon Route 53 vs Cloudflare

Compared 3% of the time

Google Cloud DNS vs Cloudflare

Compared 2% of the time

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Google Cloud DNS vs Quad9

Compared 12% of the time

Cisco Umbrella vs Quad9

Compared 2% of the time

Verisign Public DNS vs Quad9

Compared 1% of the time

Hurricane Electric Free DNS vs Quad9

Compared 1% of the time

Neustar UltraDNS vs Quad9

Compared 1% of the time

More Quad9 Competitors

Product Reports

Buyer's Guide

IBM NS1 Connect

November 2024

Download IBM NS1 Connect product report

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare

November 2024

Download Cloudflare product report

Buyer's Guide

Managed DNS

November 2024

Download Quad9 product report

Also Known As

NS1 Managed DNS, NS1

Cloudflare DNS

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IBM

Cloudflare

Quad9 DNS

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 offers DDoS protection, security, DNS management, and CDN services to enhance website performance and security. Users benefit from improved load balancing and comprehensive security features, making it a reliable choice for managing web traffic and protecting against cyber threats.

Cloudflare is widely recognized for its comprehensive features that cater to web security and performance. Users frequently take advantage of its DDoS protection, flexible SSL options, and content optimization tools. The platform's strength in DNS management and caching ensures reduced server load and faster response times. While its user-friendly interface and resource optimization significantly enhance website performance and security, there is potential for improvement in analytics, CDN speed, and technical support.

What are Cloudflare's key features?

CDN: Efficiently delivers content globally, reducing latency and enhancing speed.
DDoS Protection: Shields websites from attacks, ensuring uninterrupted service.
DNS Management: Simplifies the process with reliable functionality.
Caching: Minimizes server load, accelerating content delivery.
WAF: Protects against a range of threats, bolstering site security.
Zero Trust: Offers advanced security measures to protect data and access.

What benefits should users look for in reviews?

Performance Improvement: Significant webpage speed enhancement through optimization.
Security Features: Robust mechanisms that guard against cyber threats.
User-Friendly Interface: Facilitates ease of use and management.
Global Resource Optimization: Efficient distribution of content and resources.

Industries ranging from e-commerce to the financial sector implement Cloudflare to safeguard online assets and streamline traffic management. These industries leverage its CDN and security capabilities to provide fast, secure user experiences, crucial for their demanding environments. Educational institutions utilize its robust DNS management to efficiently handle high volumes of traffic while maintaining security and performance across their networks.

Quad9 enhances internet security by dynamically blocking malicious domains using real-time threat intelligence. It’s designed to protect users from cyber threats without compromising performance or privacy.

Quad9 offers DNS security that prevents access to harmful domains while ensuring user privacy and high-speed service. It operates by filtering DNS queries, enhancing online safety without logging personal data. Established on trusted threat intelligence, it balances efficient protection against cyber threats with minimal impact on internet speed.

What are the key features of Quad9?

Real-time Threat Blocking: Uses advanced threat intelligence to block malicious domains instantly.
Privacy-focused: Does not log personal data, ensuring user anonymity.
Global Coverage: Provides fast and reliable DNS resolution worldwide.
Free Service: Offers complete protection at no cost to users.

What benefits does Quad9 offer?

Enhanced Security: Reduces risk of malware and phishing attacks by filtering harmful domains.
Improved Performance: Maintains fast internet speeds despite added security measures.
Anonymous Usage: Prioritizes privacy by refraining from logging or storing personal user data.

In industries like finance and healthcare, where data protection is crucial, Quad9 is implemented to enhance security protocols. Its no-cost approach and efficient threat blocking make it suitable for integration into existing security frameworks, particularly where privacy preservation and threat mitigation are priorities.

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.

CISCO, Netlab, proofpoint

Buyer's Guide

Cloudflare vs. Quad9

October 2024

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