aigw vs NS1 (IBM)
Honest comparison. Where NS1 is the right call, where aigw is, and how to choose.
- Pick NS1 if you have enterprise procurement, very specific routing needs, and a budget to match.
- Pick aigw if you want the 80% of NS1 that everyone actually uses, self-serve and at a fraction of the cost.
- NS1's Filter Chain is genuinely powerful. Most teams don't need it. Honest test: have you ever shipped a 6-filter chain?
Where NS1 wins
- Filter Chain. NS1's flagship feature. Compose arbitrary routing logic from primitives: geofence, weighted shuffle, sticky region, health gates, custom-attribute filters. If your routing requirements look like a flow chart, NS1 has the most expressive engine in the market.
- Dedicated managed DNS. NS1 is a DNS-first company (now under IBM). Their support team knows DNS deeply, not as a side-quest to a CDN or cloud platform.
- Enterprise contracts. SOC 2, ISO 27001, BAA, single-tenant deployments, white-glove migration support. If you have a procurement team that requires those, NS1 has the artifacts.
- Data Feeds / Pulsar. NS1 can ingest external data (real-time telemetry, third-party feeds) and feed that into routing decisions. Useful if your routing depends on real-time signals from outside the DNS world.
Where aigw wins
- Transparent self-serve pricing. NS1 pricing starts at "talk to sales". aigw pricing is on the pricing page. You can sign up and run a real workload in 10 minutes without an email exchange.
- Simpler primitives. aigw gives you health-checked POOL records (weighted or active-passive), GEO records, and timed CANARY rollouts as first-class building blocks. NS1 makes you compose filter chains yourself. Most teams want the built-in primitives, not a programmable engine.
- Observability that you can read. Per-zone p50/p95/p99, top names, country breakdowns, query counts. NS1 has good analytics too, but their data export model is opinionated about where the data should live. Ours lives in the console, ready to look at.
- Modern UX. aigw console is built for the way developers actually work today: keyboard friendly, dark mode, a /test query button on every record, in-line dig results. NS1's UI shows its age.
- Per-zone query firewall + hijack monitor. Refuse DNS queries by source IP / country / qtype. Probe your zone every 5 min from public resolvers to catch hijacks. Both included on every plan.
Side by side
| Feature | NS1 | aigw |
|---|---|---|
| Authoritative DNS | Yes | Yes |
| Anycast network | Multi-region, mature | Multi-region (growing) |
| Failover / weighted / geo | Composable via Filter Chain | POOL + GEO records |
| Latency / RTT routing | Yes (Pulsar add-on) | No, geo + pools instead |
| External signals (Data Feeds) | Yes (Pulsar / Data Feeds) | No |
| DNSSEC | Yes | Roadmap |
| Per-zone insights | Yes, with data-export config | Built in |
| Hijack monitoring | Limited (DNS Monitor add-on) | Yes, included |
| DNS-layer query firewall | No | Yes |
| API key IP allow-list | Yes | Yes |
| Terraform provider | Yes | Yes |
| Self-serve sign-up | Limited (Developer plan, gates above) | Yes |
| Pricing | Contact sales for production | Published, flat per plan |
Filter Chain vs first-class record types
NS1's argument is "build any routing logic you can imagine by composing filters". That's true and powerful. The honest counter is that 95% of customers want one of five things: send all traffic to A, send most to A and some to B, fail over from A to B when A is down, send US traffic to A and EU to B, send each request to the closest healthy origin.
aigw ships those five as record types. You don't need to compose anything. The tradeoff is real: if you need a six-filter pipeline with sticky-session steering based on a custom Pulsar feed, aigw won't get you there. You should talk to NS1.
Honest disclosures
- NS1's anycast network is mature and global. We're not at parity on POP count.
- NS1 has more enterprise certifications. If you need a BAA or single-tenant deployment today, NS1 has those; we don't.
- NS1's Filter Chain is genuinely the most flexible routing engine in the DNS market. We optimize for the common case, not the long tail.
- NS1 has been around since 2013. aigw is in beta. We dogfood our own DNS but we're not the same maturity level.
Try it
Free plan: 5 zones, 100k queries/month. No card. No sales call. Sign up at console.aigw.app.