The facts, row by row

Our column is SpatiumDDI as it ships today. Theirs come from their own public pages, listed at the end of this article.

SpatiumDDI, EfficientIP SOLIDserver and Infoblox, compared on what each is, licence, price, deployment, engines, high availability, Windows DNS and DHCP, support, track record and analyst coverage.
Topic	SpatiumDDI	EfficientIP SOLIDserver	Infoblox
What it is	An open-source DDI platform: DNS, DHCP and IP address management under one control plane.	A commercial DDI suite, SOLIDserver DDI, sold as hardware and virtual appliances.	A commercial DDI suite: NIOS, an on-premises grid of appliances, and Universal DDI, a cloud-managed service for NIOS grids and NIOS-X servers.
Licence and source	Apache 2.0. The whole source is public, and every feature ships on every install.	Proprietary. A subscription bundles the licence with support, and the licence grants no rights to the source code.	Proprietary. Infoblox grants a limited licence to use the products.
Price	The software is free everywhere it runs. Support plans are flat yearly rates, published on this site and banded by locations and server nodes, never by IP count.	By quote; no public price list.	By quote. Universal DDI is licensed in tokens, priced through an Infoblox representative.
How it runs	An appliance ISO for a virtual machine or bare metal, a Docker Compose file or a Helm chart, on infrastructure you own.	Hardware appliances; virtual appliances on VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix and OpenStack; images for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud.	Physical and virtual NIOS appliances, and NIOS-X servers, including NIOS-X as a service, managed from Universal DDI.
Engines underneath	BIND9, PowerDNS or Technitium for DNS, and Kea for DHCP: the standard open-source engines, deployed and upgraded by the control plane.	For DNS, a Hybrid DNS Engine that packages BIND, NSD and Unbound and switches between them in one click.	For DNS, a BIND-based engine inside its appliances.
High availability	A 3, 5 or 7-node control plane, Kea HA pairs, and DNS and DHCP agents that keep serving from cached configuration if the control plane is down.	SmartArchitecture: automated active-active failover, DHCP “star” failover, and the servers of an architecture managed as one.	A grid run from a Grid Master; any member, the Grid Master included, can be an active/passive HA pair.
Windows DNS and DHCP	Managed in place over WinRM, with nothing installed on the domain controllers, plus importers and a guided cutover for when you choose to move off them.	Managed through SmartArchitecture, alongside its own appliances.	Managed over RPC, with no agents installed on the Windows servers.
Support	From the people who build it, in Montréal, in English or French. Today: business hours, next-business-day response. Same-day response and a 24×7 path for severity 1 open with the Standard plan, which we estimate for Q3 2027.	Worldwide, from EfficientIP and select partners.	24/7/365 on its Premium and Elite support tiers, from several global support centres.
Track record	First release in April 2026; a 1.0.0 release candidate in November 2026. No production deployments yet: reference deployments are our next milestone.	In business since 2004, with offices in France, the United States and Singapore.	Founded in 1999; based in Santa Clara, California.
Analyst coverage	None yet.	A Value Leader in the 2025 EMA Radar for DDI and a Leader in GigaOm’s 2025 Radar for DDI; reviewed on Gartner Peer Insights.	A Value Leader in the 2025 EMA Radar for DDI; reviewed on Gartner Peer Insights.

Their columns were checked against their own public pages in November 2026. If something has changed, tell us and we will correct it.Sources ↓

Where they are ahead

If you are weighing a move, weigh these too. They are the reasons a cautious team stays put, and we would rather you heard them from us.

Years in production

EfficientIP has been in business since 2004 and Infoblox since 1999, and both can point you to customers who have run them for years. SpatiumDDI’s first release was in April 2026, and 1.0.0 isn’t out yet. That is why every evaluation we propose runs beside your current system, never instead of it.

Support at full strength, today

Infoblox sells 24/7/365 support from several global support centres, and EfficientIP supports customers worldwide with its partners. Ours is business hours today. Same-day response and a 24×7 path for severity 1 open with the Standard plan, and we won’t sell either before the people behind it are in place.

Analysts and reviews

Both were named Value Leaders in the 2025 EMA Radar for DDI, and both are reviewed by their customers on Gartner Peer Insights. SpatiumDDI isn’t in any of them yet; our evidence today is our lab’s, and the code itself.

What an open-source platform changes

The same job, DNS, DHCP and IP address management for a network with many sites, done on different terms.

Open source, all of it

Apache 2.0, with no paid edition and no feature held back. If Spatium North disappeared tomorrow, your DNS would keep answering, and the code would still be there for anyone to pick up.

A price you can read before you call

The software costs nothing in production, lab, test or disaster recovery. Support is a flat yearly rate from a published grid, banded by locations and server nodes, never by IP count, with a discount for education and the public sector.

Standard engines, your data

Underneath are the standard open-source engines, BIND9, PowerDNS or Technitium for DNS and Kea for DHCP, and your records live in PostgreSQL on your own hardware. Every action in the console is an API call, with the OpenAPI schema published for each release.

An evaluation that touches nothing

Your configuration is imported read-only, and SpatiumDDI runs beside your current system with nothing sent to your servers until you decide to move a zone. The trial is free, with every feature, for as long as you need it.

Coming from SOLIDserver or Infoblox

There is no dedicated importer for SOLIDserver or NIOS yet, and the guided cutover — readiness checks, lease handover, per-zone rollback — ships for Windows DNS and DHCP today. A move from either incumbent is planned in Discovery: two weeks, at a fixed price credited toward the deployment.

Discovery maps your estate onto the importers that exist today: BIND9 configurations and zone files, Kea and ISC DHCP configurations, and NetBox. Infoblox, for one, can hand over its configuration as named.conf and dhcpd.conf files and its zones by zone transfer; Discovery checks how cleanly yours comes across before anything is planned around it.

Then comes a parallel run in which nothing changes on your current system until the evidence says it should. And if your network also runs Windows DNS and DHCP beside its commercial DDI, SpatiumDDI can manage those from day one.

The pilot, run beside your incumbent →Discovery and support pricing →

Where their columns come from

Each fact about EfficientIP and Infoblox above is from their own public pages and the analyst reports they cite, checked in November 2026. If one has changed, tell us through the contact form and we will correct this article.

EfficientIP, SOLIDserver, Infoblox, NIOS and Universal DDI are trademarks of their respective owners. Spatium North is not affiliated with EfficientIP or Infoblox, and neither has reviewed this article.

Weighing a move?

Tell us what you run today and roughly how big it is. A founder replies within one business day, and the first conversation is about whether SpatiumDDI fits your network, not about a contract.