13 Top Bot Management Software in the Market for 2024

How do you approach bot management? For certain businesses, the optimal approach could involve selecting a single bot management software to meet their existing bot detection and management needs.

For some companies, combining behavioural analytics for identifying malicious bot behaviour and a WAF (WAAP) to defend against vulnerability exploits, DDoS attacks, and API security breaches is essential.

This blog offers an extensive overview of the top bot management software available in the market for 2024, encompassing both standalone and bundled options.

Why Do You Need Bot Management Software?

Bot management software is designed to detect and mitigate the impact of automated bot traffic on websites and applications.

Why not just block all bots instead of managing them? It is a horrible idea. Bots can be good and bad, but bot mitigation solutions primarily focus on identifying and managing malicious bots that can harm online assets’ performance, security, and integrity.

Integrating security protocols, machine learning, and web development tools, the bot protection solution accurately identifies bots, prevents malicious actions, and maintains uninterrupted operations for legitimate bots.

13 Best Bot Management Software

1. AppTrana Bot Protection
2. Cloudflare Bot Manager
3. F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defence
4. Imperva Advanced Bot Management (Distil Networks)
5. Akamai Bot Manager
6. Barracuda Bot Protection
7. Fortinet
8. Human Bot Defender
9. Radware Bot Manager
10. DataDome
11. CHEQ Essential Bot Mitigation
12. Arkos Labs Bot Manager
13. Netacea

How Does Bot Management Software Work?

Bot protection software employs a range of methods to control and mitigate bad bot traffic:

Signature-based Detection: Identifies bots based on predefined patterns or signatures associated with known bots and botnets. Effective against well-known bot activities but may struggle with new or sophisticated bots.

Behavioural Analysis: Examines user behaviour to identify anomalies and deviations from normal patterns. Effective in detecting evolving bot behaviours.

Rate Limiting: Restricts the number of requests a user or bot can make within a specific time frame. Mitigates brute force and volumetric attacks.

IP Filtering: Examines the source IP addresses of incoming traffic and allows or blocks access based on predefined rules or reputation scores. Effectively blocks traffic from known malicious IP addresses but may be circumvented by bots using dynamic IP addresses or VPNs.

Device Fingerprinting: Creates unique fingerprints for devices accessing a website, helping distinguish between legitimate users and bots. It offers granular identification but may require additional resources.

CAPTCHA Challenges: Introduces challenges like CAPTCHA to differentiate between human users and automated bots. Effectively separates human and bot traffic but can create friction for users and may not be  effective against advanced bots that can resolve captcha’s

Heuristics: Utilizes rule-based approaches to identify patterns or behaviours indicative of bots, allowing the system to adapt to evolving threats. It provides flexibility to detect new and unknown bots but may generate false positives.

Machine Learning: Utilizes advanced algorithms to analyze and learn from patterns in data, improving the system’s ability to detect and mitigate new and sophisticated bot attacks. Adapts to evolving threats but requires sufficient training data and ongoing maintenance.

Blacklisting and Whitelisting: Maintains lists of known malicious bots to block and trusted sources to allow. It provides a quick and effective way to manage access based on historical data but may not be effective against new threats. Learn more about blacklisting and whitelisting IP in detail.

Challenge-based Mitigation: Introduces various challenges or puzzles that require human-like problem-solving skills. It raises the bar for bots but can impact the user experience and may not be effective against advanced bots using machine learning.

No single solution is foolproof, but these methods together create a comprehensive defense against malicious bot traffic. They enable businesses to adapt to the evolving landscape of bot threats while minimizing disruptions for legitimate users.

Features to Look for in a Bot Management Software

Today, defending against various attacks, securing web applications, mobile apps, and APIs, and binding the power of machine learning and behavioural-based detection have become essential prerequisites.

Regarding bot management tools, the primary distinctions revolve around their attack detection, response strategies, and ongoing threat research capabilities.

Bot mitigation solutions must stay abreast of continually evolving threats, provide a mix of pre-configured and customizable reports, and empower end-users to conduct transactions smoothly and with minimal frustration.

Given these developments, businesses seeking best bot management solutions should prioritize vendors that meet these fundamental criteria:

False Positive Monitoring

Excessive false positives pose a risk to a website’s health. If many users are frequently blocked or redirected to captcha pages, it leads to customer dissatisfaction.

Although technology provides robust bot detection, human expertise remains crucial for managing false positives.   Find a vendor that takes charge of false positive monitoring, relieving you of this burden.

In our AppTrana’s premium plan, security researchers act as your extended SOC team, ensuring a zero false positive guarantee. The SOC team identifies the root cause and adjusts the responsible detection modes if false positives occur.

Risk Score / Bot Score

Given the prevalent threat of botnets and the challenges in detection, businesses need advanced detection capabilities. They need to assess incoming traffic and signals through various ways to precisely identify different attack vectors.

Find a vendor employing a multi-layered detection approach, utilizing a diverse set of signals with varying degrees of accuracy.

Combining all the results into a risk score simplifies the detection process and enables the application of a response strategy aligned with the level of risk.

Accurate risk scores empower businesses to develop defense systems to reduce the impact on consumers’ account security in case of an adverse incident.

Workflow-based Bot Protection

Imagine a bot that buys event tickets from a vendor and resells them at a much higher price. A practice known as snatching limited availability inventory. It makes the Sales team happy but causes problems for Customer Service and Marketing as customers face inflated prices. This highlights the importance of tailoring your bot protection.

Opt for solutions allowing workflow-based customization. Creating custom rules within the workflow offers an effective strategy to combat evolving bot threats, especially in scenarios where the impact on various departments can vary.

Bot Insights Dashboard

Verify that the bot prevention solution offers a dashboard allowing report viewing, customizable report generation, and visualization for thorough insights.

The best bot mitigation solution’s dashboard features metrics like the percentage of bot traffic, identification of significant bot threats, trends in incidents, false positive rates, and a breakdown of attack types. Crucial insights include the geographic origin of bots, response times to threats, and impacts on user experience.

Monitoring the efficiency in distinguishing blocked and allowed requests, resource utilization, device/browser profiles, and the effectiveness of rate limiting adds depth.   These metrics collectively empower quick, informed decisions for a secure online environment.

Bot Monitoring and Protection Service

While bot mitigation techniques may be highly detailed, there’s always a chance that hackers can exploit a weak link. In such scenarios, a bot monitoring service is vital in taking rapid action.

By detecting patterns in bot attacks and devising advanced rules to counter specific threats, it becomes possible to thwart attacks based on the unique fingerprints attackers inevitably leave behind.

To achieve this, a solution is necessary to identify these patterns, and experts are crucial for reviewing and creating accurate policies. AppTrana offers a service tailored to meet these needs for its customers.

DDoS Protection

Botnet attacks are the primary cause behind the most massive DDoS attacks ever recorded. DDoS protection is essential for organizations to shoulder the infrastructure load and gain insights from global experts monitoring bot activity.

DDoS mitigation solutions play a pivotal role in distinguishing between legitimate traffic, such as human interactions, API calls, search engine bot activity, and malicious visitors, effectively filtering out the latter.

Managed Service

This feature allows you to delegate the monitoring and mitigation of bot threats to a dedicated team, ensuring constant expert oversight. This enhances your security posture against malicious bots and allows your internal resources to focus on core business functions.

The vendor’s experts actively manage and fine-tune the bot mitigation solution, ensuring it adapts to evolving threats and maintains optimal performance.

Download our guide to unlock insights on 10 essential considerations for evaluating bot management solutions

A Quick Snapshot Comparison of 13 Bot Management Software

Name of Bot Mitigation Solutions	Features	Suitable for
AppTrana Bot Protection	1.     Correlated Risk Scoring 2.     Real-time Analysis 3.     Customized Policies including workflow-based policies 4.     Anomaly detection 5.     False Positive Monitoring 6.     Unmetered Bot Protection	For teams lacking in-house security experts but requiring advanced policies against sophisticated bot threats. Its behavioural bot mitigation minimizes false positives, continually refining security rules. The 24/7 managed services include false positive monitoring, testing, incident reduction, DDoS and Bot monitoring, and streamlined onboarding for new applications, all in a $399 plan with a 24-hour SLA and zero false positives. Even the $99 plan provides 24/7 phone, chat, and email support, and all plans come with unmetered DDoS and bot protection.
Cloudflare Bot Manager	1.     Behavioural Analysis 2.     JS Fingerprinting 3.     Heuristics Engine 4.     Machine Learning 5.     Mobile App and API Protection 6.     Automatic Allowlists	Having already implemented Cloudflare as their CDN, the team leans towards emphasizing cost efficiency rather than prioritizing the precision of bot accuracy. Bot mitigation proves highly effective for e-commerce sites choosing the enterprise plan. Like AppTrana, Cloudflare has unmetered protection; however, the feature is available only in enterprise plan
F5 Distributed Cloud Bot Defence	1.     High Visibility 2.     Frictionless User Experience 3.     Strong Analytics 4.     F5 Bot Defense Mobile SDK 5.     Anti-fingerprinting Tools and On-permise Deployment	Additional reporting capabilities may require a separate BI tool when using F5. Configuration is a significant challenge, and ongoing maintenance demands dedicated security engineering with a thorough understanding of F5’s product intricacies. The cost of managed services for bot mitigation comes at the premium end.
Imperva Advanced Bot Management (Distil Networks)	1.     Bot Threat Research 2.     Flexible Deployment Model 3.     Multilayered Detection Approach 4.     Smart Controls and Custom Reporting 5.     Rate Limits with Hi-Def Device Fingerprint	If you’re already utilizing their other services like DDoS or WAF. Imperva proves to be an excellent choice for teams with advanced technical expertise in deploying bot mitigation solutions, particularly in industries like Media, IT services
Akamai Bot Manager	1.     AI models for Analyzing User Behaviour Patterns 2.     Akamai Bot Manager Scoring 3.     Response Tuning Simulator 4.     Invisible-to-human Challenges 5.     Known-bot Directories	It’s worth noting that bot management is offered as an add-on. Choosing the premium is essential if you desire an all-encompassing managed solution with advanced bot monitoring and false positive monitoring. It’s worth noting that the premium plan is relatively costly in the market.
Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection	1.     Risks Score 2.     ML-powered Bot Protection 3.     Advanced Threat-Intelligence Dashboard 4.     Multi-layer Bot Blocking Approach 5.     CAPTCHA Insertion & Challenges	If bot threats pose a minimal security risk for your organization or your team is equipped with numerous in-house security experts to handle the addition and testing of rules for potential false positives.
Fortinet	1.     Threshold-based Detection 2.     Automatic Profiling (whitelist) 3.     Web Scraping and Spam Detection 4.     Anti-botnet Service 5.     ML-based Detection Policy	Ideally tailored for DevSecOps teams, Fortinet boasts effective integration with CI/CD workflows. Incorporating machine learning for anomaly detection offers promise in minimizing false positives. It’s important to note that the bot protection module rates slightly lower than other bot management software.
Human Bot Defender	1.     ML-based bot Detection 2.     Threat Response Policies 3.     Broad Integration Options 4.     Support a wide range of Use Cases 5.  Advanced Reporting & Analytics	The user-friendly interface and intuitive dashboard make it easy for organizations to navigate and manage their security settings seamlessly.  It reduces the time spent on reviewing and cleaning up fraudulent activities. Unsurprisingly, HUMAN has achieved a high rating on the G2 Grid for Bot Detection and Mitigation. However, the unpredictability of HUMAN’s pricing model is worth noting, as high traffic volumes can result in sudden spikes in the cost of their bot solutions.
Radware Bot Manager	1.     Intent-based Behavioural Analysis 2.     Device & Browser Fingerprinting 3.     Business Impact Calculator 4.     CAPTCHA-free Mitigation 5.     Real-time Threat Monitoring	A strong choice for industries highly susceptible to bot attacks, such as e-commerce and FinTech. However, on the downside, configuring the Radware product is complex, requiring dedicated security engineers with in-depth product knowledge for ongoing maintenance.
DataDome	1.     Complete Protection for Websites, Mobile apps, & APIs 2.     Real-time Bot Management 3.     Powerful Dashboard 4.     Easy deployment 5.   Globally Privacy Compliant CAPTCHA	DataDome provides transparency regarding false positive rates, allowing users to make informed decisions. A lower false positive rate indicates a reduced risk of the bot management solution adversely affecting your business and customers. DataDome’s robust dashboard is particularly beneficial for analysts seeking to understand the rationale behind the metrics, offering clear insights into the process of risk classifications and decision-making.
CHEQ Essential Bot Mitigation	1.     Prevent Fraud Checkouts 2.     Invalid Traffic (IVT) Protection 3.     Improve Website Performance 4.     24/7 Support 5.    Real-time Visibility of Web Traffic to your Site	CHEQ bot protection is dedicated to companies seeking a comprehensive solution to secure their online presence, protect marketing investments, and enhance overall digital security.
Arkose Labs Bot Manager	1.     Multi-layered IP & Behavioural detection 2.     Transparent False Positive Rate 3.     24/7 SOC Support with Guaranteed Mitigation SLA 4.     Dynamic Bot Challenge Capabilities 5.     Flexible Deployment & Integration	Arkose’s breadth of offerings in bot protection is second to none and highly rated by experts and users. Evaluating Arkose makes sense for big companies wanting to streamline their security tools.
Netacea	1. Intent analytics for Bot Management 2. Single Point of Integration 3. Agentless Approach 4. Multiple Protection Modes 5. Bot Attack Intelligence	Netacea stands out among bot management providers by addressing key terms such as minimal false positives and incorporating managed services like AppTrana. For companies seeking a solution that integrates services, evaluating Netacea as a bot management platform could be a wise choice.

 

Bot Protection Solution in WAAP Bundles

Extending protection against web application exploits, DDoS attacks, malicious bot activity, and API-targeted threats, WAAP vendors demonstrate a shift from isolated to unified and comprehensive solutions.

Seamlessly bundled with WAAP solutions, bot mitigation offers organizations a cohesive strategy to enhance their protection against the complex threats of automated bots in the modern digital landscape. Let’s analyze the top WAAP providers bundling bot protection into their offerings.

1. AppTrana WAAP from Indusface

AppTrana’s managed bot protection solution, fully integrated with AppTrana WAAP, ensures easy implementation and management—all included in the WAAP pricing.

Leveraging behavioural models that monitor metrics such as max values of requests per session/host, IP, URI, and geography, AppTrana adeptly filters out most of the bot traffic with minimal processing workload before deep packet inspection begins.

Its unique commitment to a ZERO false positive guarantee sets it apart—an unparalleled assurance in the WAAP market.

The bundled managed services team also serves as an extended SOC team, collaborating closely with application teams to tailor rules for seamless integration into each business requirement.

What are the standout features?

Custom Workflow

While there are well-known good bots, numerous operate in a gray area. Therefore, thoroughly examining a bot’s effects is crucial for understanding its impact on your business.

With AppTrana, tailor your defense by creating custom application workflows for bot traffic. For instance, the Checkout flow might involve a sequence of steps; bots might not know it, so a workflow-based rule checking for the same would help identify sophisticated bots.

With real-time risk analysis, configure risk-based policies within AppTrana to automatically respond to detected issues upon reaching a specified risk level.

Behavioural-Based Anomaly Detection

Imagine a security system that doesn’t rely on predefined labels to differentiate between normal and malicious behaviour.

The real-time behavioural model analyzes extensive contextual data, observing every user’s request to characterize behaviour and observe intently.

By examining a greater number of transactions, the bot prevention solution can instantly identify broader patterns and generate a behavioural signature to thwart the attack immediately.

Blocking actions are triggered exclusively when the behaviour crosses a defined risk threshold, maintaining a high level of accuracy and keeping false positives at a minimum.

Correlated Risk Scoring

A multi-layered strategy is essential when the distinction between legitimate and malicious activity is unclear.

With AppTrana, bot protection goes beyond isolated measures; it’s about interconnected defense against bots.

The strategy involves a blend of allowing genuine bots and blocking deceptive ones, detecting Tor IPs, using User Agent-based detection, screening for suspicious countries, and checking IP reputations, including identifying Data Center IPs.

Each aspect contributes to defining unique behaviours tailored to specific attack vectors. Every request to an AppTrana-protected website receives a risk score, indicating the likelihood of the request coming from a bot vs. a human.

Granular Mitigation Approaches

Simply blocking might not always be the best solution when managing bots. It’s essential to figure out what each bot tries to do in real-time and respond (Allow, Deny, Block) accordingly.

AppTrana’s bot mitigation follows a case-by-case approach, employing various techniques for more granular mitigation:

• Feed Fake Data – Let the bot do its thing, but give it fake information to waste time and confuse those controlling it. This mitigation option empowers application owners to protect their primary site and understand the bot’s behaviour.
• Crypto Challenge for Bots – Deals with high-scoring bots differently than low-scoring ones. For those in between, AppTrana challenges them with solving tricky crypto puzzles, slowing them down and making it more expensive for those behind the attack.
• Throttling– It slows down the speed at which bots can make requests. This helps manage and lessen the impact of bot activities without completely blocking them.

Using these detailed bot mitigation techniques, AppTrana ensures a flexible and intelligent approach to handling various bots with unmatched accuracy.

Managed Service

Bot mitigation methods, even those not requiring direct user interaction, can lead to inaccuracies, especially with false positives, where a real human is mistakenly identified as a bot.

Effectively managing false positives is a critical distinguishing factor for bot management vendors. Each application or website protected by AppTrana is monitored by a solution engineering team, ensuring complete oversight of suspicious activities and thorough analysis of successfully mitigated bot attacks to guarantee zero false positives.

The SOC team diligently works to ensure that the bot prevention solution stays adaptive to changing patterns of automated threats, incorporating insights from the latest observations.

What is best?

• Behavioural Analysis of Bot Traffic
• Custom Risk Tolerance
• A single dashboard that shows complete visibility into bot mitigation
• Good Bot Pretender Detection
• Fingerprinting & JS Detections
• ZERO false positive guarantee

What could have been better?

Self-service capability for creating bot rules is limited. For example, if you want to create a custom rule based on a certain bot confidence score, you’ll have to rely on the managed services team to do that for you.

Who is it for?

Organizations that lack an internal team with technical expertise to fine-tune the rules for accurate bot detection. This becomes particularly critical in regulated industries where safeguarding customer data is paramount. Attacks like ATO and content scraping, which expose sensitive information to bots, can lead to costly data breaches resulting in non-compliance fines.

With behavioural-based bot protection, the accuracy of bot detection is exceptionally high, leading to zero false positives. This is paramount for companies focused on maximizing revenue and ensuring customer satisfaction.

AppTrana stands out in banking, financial services, insurance, retail, manufacturing, healthcare, and media. Its ISO:27001, GDPR, and PCI certifications ensure its effectiveness in even the most regulated industries.

2. Cloudflare Bot Manager

Cloudflare, a company specializing in web performance and security, provides customers with a WAF for robust security. This WAF is a defense mechanism against various threats, including cross-site scripting (XSS), credential stuffing, and DDoS attacks.

A key component of Cloudflare’s WAF is the Bot Management solution, designed to counter malicious bot attacks effectively while ensuring minimal impact on genuine users.

What are the standout features?

Global Threat Intelligence

Cloudflare utilizes behavioural analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting techniques on a vast, globally distributed dataset to accurately discern and identify bot activity.

Cloudflare has an extensive global threat intelligence repository, drawing from trillions of requests flowing through its network each week.

This data enables Cloudflare to spot potential bot activity effectively. Additionally, patterns are compared with signals from other detection methods to help identify events linked to recognized compromise indicators.

DDoS Mitigation

A tactic attackers employ for successful DDoS attacks involves controlling compromised machines and forming a botnet.

To thwart such attacks, it’s crucial to convince attackers that their efforts to disrupt the website will prove ineffective in accomplishing their objectives. The same strategy is also applicable in combating botnets.

Cloudflare excels in mitigating some of the largest-scale DDoS attacks linked to botnets, showcasing its robust infrastructure’s ability to handle massive global assaults across various applications.

Make our DDoS mitigation playbook a part of your threat mitigation plan to maximize success in fighting against such attacks.

Behaviour Analysis

Like AppTrana, Cloudflare integrates an adaptive bot mitigation system, offering a personalized defense mechanism by assessing and analyzing normal visitor behaviour over an extended timeframe.

Unlike traditional methods that rely on known bot labels, behavioural analysis identifies bots and anomalies by examining deviations from established normal behaviour on a specific customer’s website.

This adaptive approach strengthens Cloudflare’s capacity to defend against bot attacks while ensuring optimal performance and user experience.

Captcha Alternatives

CAPTCHAs served as the primary means of detecting bots, but they often came at the cost of user experience.

Cloudflare has pioneered innovative methods to challenge bots effectively while eliminating the frustrations associated with solving CAPTCHAs. The decision to present a CAPTCHA to a user depends on various factors, such as site configurations and the assessed risk level.

For instance, a CAPTCHA might be triggered for suspicious traffic, like when a user accesses a site via the Tor client, but not for those using conventional browsers like Google Chrome.

In addition, Cloudflare Turnstile offers a seamless, CAPTCHA-free web experience for website visitors through a direct code snippet.

What is best?

• Captcha-free Mitigation
• Soc-as-a-service
• Simple Deployment
• Low Latency
• Actionable Analytics and Logs
• Threat Intelligence at-scale

What could have been better?

• The basic plans of WAF bot protection come with limited features, and the advanced bot protection, including Geo-blocking, is exclusively available as a premium feature in the Enterprise plan. Various mitigation techniques are available but majority are as part of rules that customers have to write, requiring security expertise. Enabling rate limiting rules for DDoS results in additional cost per request.
• The ability to write workflow-based rules is limited, requiring customers to create them again.
• Effective support capabilities are only available in the Enterprise plan. In the face of sophisticated bot attacks, having access to security experts for guidance becomes crucial.

Who is it for?

Cloudflare is an immensely popular WAAP platform, serving millions of websites and applications.

With robust DDoS protection, WAF, Bot Mitigation, and API security offerings, Cloudflare provides an excellent combination, particularly well-suited for the SaaS industry at various scales.

3. F5 CloudBot Defence

F5’s Distributed Cloud Bot Defense, an advanced add-on security feature, is integral to the F5 WAAP service. With seamless integration, this feature ensures real-time protection for web applications and APIs, defending against a broad spectrum of attacks within the distributed cloud global network.

F5 Bot Defence is particularly popular in retailers, hotel chains, banks, airlines, and federal agencies.

What are the standout features?

Hybrid Deployment

Align your bot management strategy with your operational preferences, technical maturity, and business models just as you deploy technology.

F5’s Distributed Cloud Bot Defense provides deployment options tailored to your organization’s infrastructure and architecture. Whether fully managed, self-service, or hybrid SaaS, and whether applied across the mobile or web, it maintains efficacy and mitigates risk without compromise.

Native Protection for Salesforce Commerce Cloud Apps

Malicious bots may constitute up to 90% of eCommerce website traffic, and global eCommerce fraud losses were projected to surpass $48 billion in 2023.

F5 comes with built-in support for Distributed Cloud Bot Defense tailored for Salesforce Commerce Cloud (SFCC). This solution uses AI and machine learning to identify, block, and redirect fraudulent traffic in real-time, protecting against an account takeover, credential stuffing, web scraping, checkout abuse, denial of inventory, and other attacks.

Integration with SIEM Systems

F5 is well-known for its smooth integrations with SIEM tools. Security teams can enhance their threat analysis by integrating Distributed Cloud Bot Defense’s rich signal data and inferences into leading SIEM systems like Splunk, Devo, Datadog, SolarWinds, and more in real-time or through cloud buckets.

What is best?

• Integration with F5 Web Application Firewall
• ML and behavioural analytics
• Deliver mobile bot detection
• Multi-service implementations
• Choose your integration tier, tailor your experience, and decide on your deployment model

What could have been better?

• Implementing many changes often necessitates coordination with support or scheduling change windows for manual applications, posing potential challenges in scaling.
• The creation and configuration of custom policies are supported but rely on the availability of support.
• Less precise blocking leads to frequent false positives, impacting business operations

Who is it for?

While F5’s bot protection solution serves customers across various industries, it exhibits strength in ecommerce, finance and airlines, with notable implementations in Salesforce and other prominent platforms.

4. Imperva Advanced Bot Management (Distil Networks)

Advanced Bot Protection is at the core of Imperva Application Security, a pivotal component that minimizes risk while optimizing user satisfaction.

Imperva’s solutions offer on-premises and cloud protection, including WAF, DDoS protection, Bot attack mitigation, RASP, actionable security insights, and security-enhanced application delivery.

What are the standout features?

Securing Web, Mobile Apps, and APIs

Bad bots don’t just stick to websites; they also sneak into mobile apps and APIs. Like AppTrana, Imperva doesn’t just protect your website from bad bots but keeps them away from all access points – Web, mobile apps, and APIs.

Rate limits with Hi-Def Device Fingerprint

Imperva’s Advanced Bot Protection uses a super detailed “Hi-Def Fingerprint” that looks at more than just IP addresses and headers.

It is like giving each bot a unique fingerprint, so even if they try to be sneaky and change their location, they can recognize and control their behaviour based on this fingerprint.

With this, you can set rate limits based on device fingerprints instead of IPs, controlling pages per minute, pages per session, and how long a session lasts.

Easy Deployment

Whether you’re managing an online store with peak traffic times or overseeing a diverse tech environment, bot protection offers tailored solutions.

Opt for a single-stack deployment connected with Cloud WAF for seamless e-commerce protection. Alternatively, choose Connectors compatible with AWS, Cloudflare, F5 Networks, NGINX, and Fastly for a versatile, cloud-savvy approach.

And for those who prefer an on-premises setup, effortlessly integrate advanced bot protection with Imperva’s On-Premises WAF. Compare Cloud WAF vs On-Premise WAF here.

What is best?

• Full stack application security solution
• Account takeover protection
• Actionable threat insights
• Client-side fingerprinting
• Provides geo-IP blocking to reduce foreign bot traffic

What could have been better?

• Several users have mentioned challenges when it comes to the setup and configuration of the solution.
• If you opt for integration with Imperva WAF, remember that advanced features may be considered add-ons, potentially leading to a higher overall cost than other available basic bot protection solutions.

Who is it for?

Large organizations seeking a hybrid deployment that can accommodate cloud and on-premise data centers with appliances will find it a suitable option.

If you are self-assured in managing ongoing maintenance independently and do not require managed services, choosing the Imperva bot protection solution is a reliable and cost-effective decision.

Ideal for companies seeking a single-stack security solution offering CDN, WAF, DDoS and Advanced Bot Protection.

For SMBs, check AppTrana WAAP, which includes all essential advanced bot mitigation features in its $399 plan.

Check out our detailed blog, which examines key features, reviews, and ratings of Imperva WAAP as well as the other 17 top WAAP providers in the market.

5. Akamai Bot Manager

Akamai delivers top-tier bot mitigation by integrating Prolexic, Edge DNS, and App & API Protector, ensuring robust protection for applications, data centers, and internet-facing infrastructure.

Bot Manager assists customers in handling specific bot-related scenarios like web scraping, price scraping, data aggregation, inventory grabbing, and more.

What are the standout features?

Enhanced Scraper Detection

A recent study found that scalper bots make 40% of all online ticket purchases. These bots are advanced tools that scan various websites to snatch up large quantities of popular items like sneakers and gaming consoles before regular consumers can even log in to buy them. Akamai is improving its protection by using advanced detection methods to tackle this issue.

They employ machine learning models for each customer to analyze complex attacks on major websites. The insights gained from these models help create quick and effective measures against new types of attacks, unlike other methods that take days or weeks.

Strong Response Strategy

Cyber attackers are smart and can trick anti-bot tools by tweaking their attacks. Bot management software works to reduce this trickery by adjusting its rules. To handle different threats, companies need a solid response strategy.

By integrating Akamai’s Bot Manager with advanced challenges, the Bot Score feature empowers you to automatically respond based on predefined thresholds and actions, providing a sense of assurance.

The Bot Score tool checks each request, letting companies customize responses for each case. It also lets them test changes beforehand to see how they might affect things, using historical data for insights.

Global Threat Intelligence

Catering to over 50% of Global 500 companies, Akamai boasts a presence in more than 131 countries with 4,167 points of presence and an annual revenue surpassing US$3.6 billion. They use this strength in Bot Manager, continuously updating it to stay ahead of new tricks that bots use.

Akamai’s team of over 400 threat researchers remains vigilant, tracking attack patterns to enhance detection capabilities.

Innovative Bot Challenges

Instead of making real people prove they’re not bots, Akamai made challenges only bots can see. The crypto challenge makes bots solve tricky puzzles, making their attacks slow and costly. The interstitial challenge checks if clients can handle cookies and JavaScript. If not, Bot Manager adds a time penalty and the action you chose to stop them.

What is best?

• Detects low-and-slow attacks
• More accurate assessment of bot traffic
• Bot visibility for effective decision-making
• Enhance bot mitigation with nuanced responses, like serving alternate content, challenges, slowing, and more

What could have been better?

• Detection capabilities are limited, allowing sophisticated bots to bypass the solution potentially.
• Akamai Bot Manager has no built-in challenge solution (e.g., CAPTCHA).
• Costs may escalate as Akamai’s managed team involvement is required for rule implementation and optimizations.
• BOT Manager is an add-on

Who is it for?

For organizations with low bot security risks and those already leveraging Akamai as their WAF/CDN, the Akamai Bot Manager seamlessly protects traffic within the Akamai infrastructure.

However, it’s essential to note that the managed services are more expensive. The potential expense is attributed to the requirement of engaging the Akamai Team for rule implementation and optimizations, making it a consideration for organizations with budget considerations.

6. Barracuda WAF ABP

Barracuda WAF employs sophisticated bot detection technologies that differentiate between malicious and benign bots. The Advanced Bot Protection (ABP) feature utilizes cloud-based machine learning to detect bot-driven spam, prevent credential stuffing, assign risk scores to requests, and employ client fingerprinting.

What are the standout features?

Web Scraping and Spam Detection

Apps often face problems like web scraping and bot spam. Barracuda Application Protection tackles these issues using tricks, studying behaviour, and recognizing patterns to stop bad bots. It sets traps called honeypots to catch harmful bots, tracks their moves, and shares that info with Barracuda’s threat intelligence for analysis.

Active Threat Intelligence

This cloud-delivered service combines Barracuda’s extensive real-time Global Threat Intelligence Infrastructure with advanced machine-learning capabilities.

When attacks happen, we need quick responses. Barracuda Active Threat Intelligence gathers threat information from an extensive network and customer data worldwide. This info is instantly processed using machine learning and immediately shared with connected devices. This fast process helps spot new threats and attackers quickly.

Captcha Challenges

Barracuda Application Protection uses tactics to block bots and attackers, such as presenting JavaScript challenges and CAPTCHAs.

What is best?

• Full stack application security solution
• Credential attack and brute force attack protection
• Multiple deployment options
• Complete DDoS mitigation

What could have been better?

• False positives could be a challenge
• Most of the advanced features are not accessible without an additional license

Who is it for?

Barracuda is suitable for SMBs already utilizing its WAF and seeking to activate advanced bot mitigation with minimal expenses.

If the priority is an on-premise solution that decisively hard-blocks malicious bots, understanding the trade-off of a slight risk of blocking real users, Barracuda Bot Mitigation offers a compelling solution.

7. FortiWeb

FortiWeb protects web applications and APIs from OWASP Top-10 threats, DDoS attacks, and malicious bots. FortiGate WAF Bot Mitigation ensures visibility and control without causing delays for users with unnecessary captchas or challenges.

What are the standout features?

Anti-botnet Service

FortiGuard IP Reputation Service gathers data about harmful IP addresses from various sources like Fortinet’s threat sensors, CERTs, MITRE, cooperating competitors, and global partners. This collaboration ensures the latest information about dangerous sources. With real-time updates from network gateways and top-notch research from FortiGuard Labs, businesses can stay safer and stop attacks before they happen.

Threshold Based Detection

You can set rules in FortiWeb based on certain limits for detecting suspicious activities. These rules determine how often, for how long, and how severe certain behaviours occur. FortiWeb then uses this information to decide whether a request is from a human or a bot.

ML-Based Detection Policy

How do you determine if the number of HTTP requests from a user is abnormal?

Traditional methods require experimenting with different threshold values and constantly checking attack logs until there are no reported logs for regular traffic. However, with ML-based bot Detection, FortiWeb simplifies this process.

It uses the SVM (Support Vector Machine) algorithm to create a model that learns the traffic patterns of regular clients. When a new client’s traffic is received, it’s compared to regular clients’ patterns. The new client is classified as an anomaly if there’s a mismatch. If the regular clients’ traffic patterns change significantly, FortiWeb automatically updates the bot detection model to adapt to these changes.

What is best?

• Distinguishes between malicious and legitimate bots
• Optimizes user experience by avoiding unnecessary captchas and challenges
• Employs advanced techniques like bot deception and biometric detection for accurate identification
• Ensures uninterrupted business operations by safeguarding essential services

What could have been better?

• Specialized in a specific area, not emphasizing much on bot protection
• Supports limited customization
• Increased number of False Positives

Who is it for?

While not designed for high-intensity bot attacks, Fortinet provides a balanced solution that effectively addresses the specific needs of companies with lower bot traffic expectations. This approach helps maintain a reasonable level of security without unnecessary complexity.

If you’re a company in a sector where bot attacks are less frequent but still want reliable protection, Fortinet WAF bot mitigation offers a sensible option with a focus on efficiency and simplicity.

Dedicated Bot Protection Software

Unlike bundled solutions, the software focuses solely on comprehensive bot mitigation, providing a targeted approach to protect against bot attacks.

While dedicated bot protection software excels in specialized defense against bot threats, organizations should weigh the pros and cons based on their security requirements.

Bot Protection Solution: Standalone vs. Bundled

Standalone bot protection ensures specialized expertise in understanding and countering bot threats, allowing for tailored configurations to meet unique security needs.

Bundled solutions from certain providers come equipped with a basic bot mitigation tool, offering limited capabilities and proving less effective than dedicated standalone bot mitigation solutions.

While specialized bot management software excels in its focused expertise, it brings certain limitations to the table:

• It lacks the all-encompassing features of bundled solutions, prompting the need for additional tools to complete the security picture.
• Implementing multiple standalone solutions might result in integration challenges, leading to the potential complexities in managing and monitoring various security components.
• While standalone solutions might be more focused, they could potentially lead to higher costs when compared to bundled solutions that offer a comprehensive suite of security features.
• Managing separate tools for different security aspects may introduce operational complexities, requiring additional monitoring, configuration, and maintenance efforts.
• It may face challenges in scaling to meet the expanding needs of larger enterprises or growing online platforms.
• Standalone BOT solutions at most times will need to integrate with some other WAAP solution to be effective

Let’s proceed with the examination of key attributes found in the top bot management software available in the market:

8. HUMAN Bot Defender

Formerly recognized as Perimeter X Defender, the HUMAN Bot Defender operates on the HUMAN Defense Platform, a cybersecurity framework by HUMAN.

This company safeguards organizations by disrupting bot attacks, digital fraud, and abuse. The HUMAN Bot Defender, a behaviour-driven and machine-learning-powered solution, shields websites, mobile applications, and APIs from automated attacks.

HUMAN employs a dual bot detection approach: passive checks on servers (triggered by visitor requests) and active scripts (running on the visitor’s agent) gather information to identify bots.

What are the standout features?

Excellent User Experience

Bot protection’s success hinges on balancing accuracy, speed, and UX.

The detection system ensures website protection from bots while minimizing disruption to user experience. It refrains from bothering users with captcha-solving or authentication waiting screens unless there is suspicion of a bot-generated request.

If necessary, Bot Defender introduces the Human Challenge, a friendly verification feature that effectively counters CAPTCHA-solving bots while maintaining a positive user experience.

Deployment Flexibility

The HUMAN Defense Platform smoothly integrates with current web or mobile applications and infrastructure without requiring an in-line appliance or adding a reverse proxy to traffic flow. Bot Defender seamlessly fits into the modern tech stack and effortlessly scales with businesses’ technology, accommodating their growth.

Adaptive Threat Intelligence

Leveraging the capacity to verify more than 20 trillion digital interactions each week and monitor 80% of the programmatic advertising ecosystem, HUMAN’s Satori Threat Intelligence & Research team actively prevents fraud schemes.

The team has played a vital role in collaborative efforts with Google, the FBI, and other entities, leading to the takedown of cybercriminal organizations such as PARETO, 3ve, and Methbot.

What is best?

• Implement decisions with efficiency
• Delivers actionable insights
• Quick deployment options are available through a JavaScript snippet or SDK
• Integrate with any IT stack
• 24/7/365 Enterprise Customer Support

What could have been better?

• The pricing model of HUMAN is unpredictable, with significant surges in the cost of their bot solutions occurring when there are high volumes of traffic.
• While the dashboard is compelling, its user-friendliness is inconsistent, and development is progressing faster than the accompanying documentation.
• You’ll need a skilled DevOps team to configure customizations within each of its multiple modules manually.

Who is it for?

This solution caters to a diverse range of industries, from e-commerce and travel to government and retail, making it a versatile and comprehensive choice for those who rely on online platforms, deal with sensitive data, or aim to provide a secure and reliable online.

9. Radware Bot Manager

Radware provides standalone SaaS bot management services and an integrated suite of on-premises and cloud-based security solutions. This ensures comprehensive protection with offerings like Bot Manager, DDoS, and WAF, covering all domains.

Radware’s dedicated bot management software, Radware Bot Manager, utilizes a sophisticated detection engine that analyzes more than 250 parameters in real-time to identify and thwart bot activities.

What are the standout features?

IDBA (Intent-based Deep Behavior Analysis)

Radware’s bot protection employs IDBA to protect against various threats, including account takeover, DDoS, ad and payment fraud, and web scraping. This patented technology accurately detects and mitigates malicious bot activity by understanding their behavioural intent, stopping automated attacks proactively through semi-supervised machine learning models.

Captcha Free Mitigation

Bot Manager provides comprehensive mitigation options, including Allow, Challenge CAPTCHA (with customizable challenges and block pages), Block, Feed Fake Data, Throttle, Drop, Session Termination, Redirect Loop, Log Only, and Custom Response.

This versatility empowers organizations to craft a tailored defense strategy against evolving bot threats, ensuring optimal security and user experience.

In addition, its unique Crypto Challenge mitigation, inspired by cryptographic proof-of-work concepts, guarantees a smooth experience for real users without the need for CAPTCHAs. At the same time, it effectively tackles advanced CAPTCHA-solving bots.

Flexible Deployment Options

Whether it’s an online forum, news website, or job board platform, Radware Bot Manager’s versatile integration options empower you to address specific challenges and tailor the antibot defense for dynamic business needs.

Radware Bot Manager provides diverse integration options suitable for any infrastructure. These include plug-ins for web servers, CDNs, CMS, JavaScript tags, Android & iOS SDKs, API cloud connectors, and a virtual appliance.

What is best?

• Real-time reporting of legitimate traffic, malicious bot traffic, Crawlers, etc
• CAPTCHA-free user experience
• Configure your custom alerts
• Custom weekly report
• Blockchain-based mitigation

What could have been better?

• Limited flexibility in configuring custom rules. Users need to raise support tickets to request specific rules, causing time delays.
• The dashboard also offers limited customization options; specific customers have reported difficulties during the setup and configuration.
• While Radware Bot Manager is moderately priced, some users find it in the middle range.

Who is it for?

The offerings match or exceed the competition in specific features, with notable value in the custom rule creation and intent-based detection.

However, SMBs may perceive the pricing as steep. Large enterprises in finance, e-commerce, and healthcare, where protecting against bot threats is critical due to the sensitive nature of data and transactions, can prioritize these advanced features to ensure a robust defense against potential malicious activities.

10. Data Dome

DataDome provides comprehensive protection against bots and online fraud, offering a quick and hassle-free installation on any infrastructure.

Using real-time detection with behavioural analysis and machine learning, their solution stands out for its accurate bot detection and swift mitigation.

Their technology evaluates page access in less than two milliseconds by comparing each request to an in-memory pattern database for quick decision-making.

What are the standout features?

Transparency in false positive rate

When choosing the bot protection software, a false positive rate is the critical decision-making factor.

DataDome employs an AI-powered detection engine, utilizing client-side and server-side signals to determine if a request originates from a malicious actor.

They claim a false positive rate of <0.01%. Other than AppTrana WAAP, which claims zero false positives, Datadome is the only vendor that mentions this number on the website.

Further, DataDome is fully transparent on its false positive rate. Their dashboard provides real-time measurement of false positive rates for each endpoint—a mobile app, website, or API.

Actionable Dashboard

With DataDome’s intuitive dashboard, your user experience is streamlined through visually impactful displays. Gain insights into your overall threat landscape, explore specific threats in detail, and generate automated reports.

Whether you’re looking for a comprehensive understanding of bot vs. human traffic or need to investigate specific threat incidents, the dashboard provides seamless control.

Threat Intelligence Team

While DataDome’s AI engine identifies and blocks all automated threats in real-time, their threat intelligence team is on the job 24/7, monitoring the billions of requests processed by their AI.

This guarantees an impressively low false positive rate (<0.01%), immediate actions during large-scale attacks and ongoing enhancements to their machine-learning models for top-notch performance.

What is best?

• Audio CAPTCHA is available in 13 languages
• Dedicated 24/7 SOC team support
• Ensures zero latency to the platform’s performance
• Exceptional user experience

What could have been better?

• While DataDome provides real-time threat notifications and daily email reports, specific inquiries may require human assistance, and their basic plan lacks access to 24/7 support services.
• Positioned as a dedicated solution for protection against bots rather than a comprehensive one-size-fits-all approach encompassing CDN, WAF, DDoS protection, and more.

Who is it for?

If cost is not a consideration, choosing Datadome as your antibot solution, particularly with a managed service offering, is a sound decision that can assist in mitigating false positives.

That said, keep in mind, that Datadome must be used in conjunction with your WAF or WAAP for non-bot threat mitigation.

11. CHEQ Essential Bot Mitigation

With CHEQ Essentials Bot Mitigation, website owners can detect, and block bots created for content scraping, collecting user data, or launching malicious attacks.

CHEQ Essentials provides businesses with an efficient method to identify and instantly block harmful traffic, ensuring their advertising budgets are used wisely.

What are the standout features?

Bundle UP – Paid Marketing Protection + Bot Mitigation 

To generate many PPC ad clicks, fraudulent advertisers use bots and malware for click fraud bidding.

CHEQ Essentials offers a multi-layer protection package that addresses paid marketing and website bot mitigation. This protects your PPC campaigns, allowing you to make the most of your marketing budget, and ensures effective prevention of access to your website by malicious bots.

Ad Fraud Prevention

Around 20% of websites that display ads get visits only from fake click bots. CHEQ is mainly used in advertising to stop ad fraud. This means it ensures that real people, not bots, see your ads. It prevents fake clicks on Google and offers a solution to prevent click fraud on other platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Microsoft, and Snapchat.

Analyse REAL Data

When bots engage with a website, their activities are mixed in with the data. It’s a challenge for companies wanting to know how well their content connects with an audience or get reliable information about website traffic and user actions.

Gain unparalleled insights into your clicks, including analytics on invalid traffic (IVT), reasons for blocking, most-clicked keywords, and session recordings. This helps businesses better understand their clicks and interactions, keep their pipeline free from bad leads, and ensure accurate data for their marketing funnels.

What is best?

• Prevent Fraud checkouts
• Invalid Traffic (IVT) Protection
• Improve Website Performance
• 24/7 Support
• Real-time visibility of web traffic to your site

What could have been better?

• Designed primarily for tackling Ad Fraud, it may not be as effective against other threats like Account Takeover, Scraping, DDoS, etc.
• The dashboard, while functional, lacks user-friendliness.
• Free trial offers only a monitoring mode, allowing you to assess the impact of fraudulent traffic on your PPC campaigns or website, and blocking requires you to subscribe to advanced plans.

Who is it for?

CHEQ bot protection is primarily for a wide range of companies across various industries that rely heavily on digital marketing and online presence.

CHEQ Essentials is tailored for website owners, advertisers, and marketers, offering comprehensive protection against bot-related threats, and ensuring efficient ad spend, making it a tool for online advertising security.

12. Arkose Labs Bot Manager

Arkose Labs’ bot management software is exceptionally effective, reinforced by a ZeroBot Guarantee, assuring the defeat of bot attacks within a specified timeframe. This protects legitimate users from phishing scams, malicious messages, and other threats.

What are the standout features?

Adaptive Bot Mitigation

Combining behavioural biometrics and analytics to study user behaviour, Arkose adds a crucial layer for accurately distinguishing between harmful bots, good bot traffic, genuine users, and malicious individuals. This advanced detection empowers fraud and security teams with insights to move from merely mitigating fraud to preventing it.

Dynamic Challenge Capabilities

Defenses that specifically aim to separate automated and human activities fall short when dealing with traffic from inexpensive human “sweatshop” sources. These sources are strategically utilized to bypass detection by anti-bot technologies.

Bot manager’s multi-layered approach analyzes real-time signals from devices, networks, and behaviours to identify hidden signs of the bot and human-driven attacks.

It ensures that attacks are promptly identified using rate limiting, IP and device intelligence, traffic shaping, and behavioural biometrics. Through invisible assessments for risk-based decisions and targeted responses, this approach also enhances the overall customer experience.

24/7 SOC Team Support

While machines handle routine tasks, the expertise of trained security professionals is crucial for their insights and experience. Their skills are valuable in adapting to evolving attack patterns and investigating risk signatures identified by machine learning.

With 24/7 analysis from the SOC, the bot management software instantly identifies and addresses risks in real-time, helping security teams combat large-scale, persistent attacks.

What is best?

• Flexible deployment and integration
• Threat intelligence sourced from the dark web
• Continuous 24/7 monitoring by the SOCC with a guaranteed SLA for mitigation
• Better user throughput than CAPTCHAs and MFA

What could have been better?

• Latency in synchronous events needs improvement
• Higher cost, challenging for smaller companies to establish ROI without the right expertise. The pricing model is challenging to scale according to specific needs
• Difficulty in interpreting detailed monitor results, often requiring support from Arkose experts

Who is it for?

With a substantial security research team and a customer base numbering in the tens of thousands, Arkose Labs leverages machine learning on this extensive dataset to develop a robust threat landscape and provide effective protection.

If your search extends beyond bot mitigation to encompass best-of-breed solutions, you’ll find strengths in some of the other WAAPs mentioned here.

13. Netacea

Netacea offers bot detection and mitigation, utilizing its Intent Analytics engine powered by machine learning. This intelligent bot management solution assists businesses in comprehending their web traffic, with a focus on bot activity.

What are the standout features?

Agentless Bot Mitigation

Using client-side JavaScript and mobile SDKs to block bots is outdated and insufficient against advanced bots.

Netacea Bot protection takes a different approach with zero client-side code, enhancing security by preventing attackers from reverse engineering your defenses and understanding how you handle bot threats.

Low Maintenance

Tired of the ongoing updates and manual steps needed for bot protection?

With Netacea’s auto-detect technology supported by proactive bot experts, threats to your platform are identified and mitigated automatically, all without the hassle of complex configurations or ongoing ruleset management.

Multiple Protection Modes

When a website faces a sudden surge in bot activity attempting to perform fraudulent transactions, with Netacea Detector, the site can instantly trigger inline mitigation measures, blocking the malicious bots in real time to prevent fraudulent activities.

Alternatively, if you’re looking for a continuous flow of data to strengthen your defense strategies, Netacea Detector adapts to your needs. It can seamlessly provide mitigations or recommendations to your systems, allowing you to handle the security challenges in a way that suits your specific situation and preferences.

What is best?

• Behaviour-centric protection that identifies 6X threats
• Automatic server-side maintenance
• Real-time detection and instant mitigation of bot attacks
• Exceptionally low false positive rate (0.001%)

What could have been better?

• The reporting aspect requires improvement. While the product performs well, obtaining visibility into ongoing activities may be challenging.
• The abundance of data in the reports sometimes feels overwhelming, leading to a potential issue of data overload.

Who is it for?

If you’re in finance, retail, or e-commerce and expect a lot of bot attacks, Netacea is a great choice. It not only deals with these threats well but also makes sure it doesn’t disrupt user experience with false alarms.

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