With the rise of bot-related cybersecurity attacks in the past few years, detecting and mitigating bad bot activities is now very important in application security.
This is why investing in a bot management solution is very important for any business serious about their cybersecurity. Bot management solutions are designed to detect bot activity, identify malicious bots, and mitigate their activities from engaging with websites, applications, or networks.
With so many different options available in the market, however, choosing the best bot management solution for your business can be a daunting task. This is why we’ve tested all the different solutions available in the market and compared their performances. Based on our tests, we have provided a review of our top 5 picks below.
Top 5 Advanced and Useful Bot Management Solutions for Application Security
1. DataDome
DataDome is the number one SaaS bot protection solution for e-commerce and classified ads businesses and one of the most prominent bot prevention and management solutions available today.
DataDome offers real-time bot protection with A.I. and machine learning technologies. The technology works by comparing every request to your site with DataDome’s in-memory pattern database. DataDome is very effective in protecting your web server from various bot-based cybersecurity attacks, including layer 7 DDoS attacks, credential stuffing, and SQL injection, among others.
DataDome can run anywhere and is compatible with all web technologies, including multi-cloud and multi-CDN setups. DataDome’s ease of use combined with its advanced bot protection make it an extremely effective bot mitigation solution.
Key Features
- Seamless integration: DataDome is compatible with all web technologies. So, even if you change your platform, you can still rely on DataDome as your bot management solution without having to take care of the time-consuming migration process.
- Full protection: real-time A.I.-based protection to protect your website, mobile app and API from any malicious bot activities from every angle, and everything runs on autopilot.
- Deploy in minutes: since DataDome runs anywhere in any cloud, you can install DataDome in just a matter of minutes with just a simple piece of code that is already optimized for your architecture.
- Best-in-class protection: detect and identify 100% of OWASP automated bot attacks and threats. When a new malicious bot is detected, all of DataDome’s customers are automatically protected from this new attack in less than 50 milliseconds.
- Real-time notification: you’ll get a real-time notification via email or Slack whenever the site is under bot attack, but everything runs on autopilot so you don’t have to do anything.
- At the Edge protection: Thanks to 25 points of presence, every request to your site is analyzed and either blocked or authorized in real time. The solution doesn’t impact your latency, which means a faster website and happier users.
- Best rated solution on G2
Ideal for: E-commerce and classified ads businesses looking for a SaaS solution with no impact on existing architecture.
2. Akamai
Akamai is a global CDN service (dubbed Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform) with more than 240,000 servers located all over the world. Akamai’s bot management solution is built on top of this infrastructure, where the 240,000+ servers collect and analyze data to train the A.I. machine learning technology.
Akamai bot manager works in a clean-pipe manner, filtering bot activities at the edge of the server, so only the safest traffic ends up at the client’s actual server.
Key Features
- Self-updating bot directory: continuously updates its directory of more than 1,400 known bots by utilizing Akamai’s CDN servers.
- Real-time detections: uses a wide variety of techniques including user behavior analysis, fingerprinting, HTTP anomaly detection, and others to analyze traffic.
- Reporting and analysis: analyzes sample events to learn how different bots interact with your website and applies filters to better analyze different aspects of your bot traffic.
- Advanced management actions: applies a wide range of actions to your bot traffic from delivering fake content, slowing the bot’s activities, and serve cached content, among others.
Ideal for: Companies that are already using Akamai for performance or other security protection.
3. Cloudflare
Cloudflare is a web infrastructure and web security company which also offers comprehensive bot management and protection solutions.
Cloudflare can detect and manage bots in real-time with quick and easy deployment, preventing various threats such as credential stuffing, content scraping, application DDoS, inventory hoarding, and more.
Key Features
- Comprehensive bot detection methods: can detect bots via machine learning, fingerprinting, and behavioral analysis to allow speedy but accurate bot detection. Fingerprinting is based on Cloudflare’s 25 million plus internet properties to accurately classify bots.
- Integrated security and performance: Cloudflare’s bot management solution seamlessly integrates with Cloudflare’s other cybersecurity solutions – CDN products, WAF, and others.
- Automatic allowlist: automatically updates its database of good bots to prevent false positives.
- Mobile protection: protects mobile applications from various attacks without using mobile SDK.
- Configuration flexibility: easily configure unique actions and mitigations as required by your business.
Ideal for: Security teams that are already familiar with Cloudflare Workers, and who want granular control over how the tool detects and responds to attacks.
4. Radware
Radware bot manager is also one of the most complete protection solutions that can protect web applications, mobile applications, and APIs from malicious bot activities that target applications and networks.
Radware is a comprehensive bot management solution across all channels providing protection from various forms of account takeover, DDoS, denial of inventory, card fraud, and more. Very accurate detection with low false positives.
Key Features
- Accurate detection: IDBA (Intent-based Deep Behavioral Analysis) technology to filter highly sophisticated bots that mimic human behaviors, resulting in minimum false positives. Website functionality and user experience remain intact during detection and mitigation.
- API Protection: can protect APIs that are targeted by malicious bots by controlling navigation flow and fingerprint communications between machines.
- Application security: integrated bot management, API security, WAF, and DDoS mitigation in a comprehensive solution
- Easy deployment: flexible deployment in just a matter of minutes, supports various platforms.
- Reporting and analytics: granular classification of different types of bots, can analyze how different bots interact with your system independently.
Ideal for: Companies that are looking for a combined WAF, malware protection, and bot protection solution.
5. Imperva
Imperva offers a comprehensive bot management solution to protect mobile applications, websites, and APIs from various malicious bot activities and threats. Will protect your system in the background of your operations and won’t affect performance and natural traffic.
Imperva’s bot management tool effectively protects all access points and can provide different response options for incoming bot traffic. You can also analyze bot activities for insights into patterns and trends.
Key Features
- Comprehensive protection: advanced bot protection that can mitigate each OWASP automated threat. Complete protection against online scams, account takeover attacks, web scraping, DDoS, credential stuffing, and many others.
- Detection method: Imperva offers one of the most accurate detection and mitigation capabilities to protect against the latest advanced persistent bots (APBs)
- Reporting and analytics: provides visibility and analytics for a more comprehensive view of all attacks.
- Integration: integration to Imperva’s Cloud Application Security for more comprehensive protection, including CDN, WAF, DDoS mitigation solutions.
Ideal for: Companies that are already using other Imperva products and that don’t mind routing their traffic via Imperva’s CDN servers.
Conclusion
The right bot management solution is very important for any company serious about protecting their business from the endless possibilities of automated threats. It’s important to remember that there are two key challenges in bot management: differentiating between good bots such as an investment bot and bad bots and identifying bad bots masquerading themselves as legitimate users.
A proper bot management solution can help tackle these issues, separating good bots from the bad bots without affecting the website’s performance.
Above, we have shared our top 5 picks for the most advanced and useful bot management solutions for application security, and in our opinion, DataDome offers the best bot mitigation solution due to its advanced bot protection technology, integration with any web technology, and the fact that it is very easy to deploy.
