Akamai Bot Manager Review & Alternatives

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been making rapid strides in the last few years and this has led to the evolution of robots or bots as they are called to perform many tasks for us. Typically, bots are used to perform repetitive tasks like indexing files, checking parameters, etc. The advantage of using bots is that they are much faster than humans and report fewer errors. This is why it's estimated that more than half of all internet traffic is bot-related, as they handle the first level of customer service, crawl and index websites, help with search engine optimization, and more.

However, bots can also be programmed to perform malicious activities like spamming, hacking, spying, spreading malware, and more. Many times, bots are used to carry out attacks like Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), where thousands of requests are sent to a server to exhaust its resources. Similarly, some bots send out spam and phishing emails, gain unauthorized access to accounts by trying out different password combinations, perform identity thefts, and more.

Organizations must constantly look out for such malicious bots and ensure that they don't infect the network or access critical resources. Given the growing sophistication of bots, it's not possible to manually protect an organization's resources, and the best way is to have a bot manager to detect and stop the malicious bots!

While there are many bot managers available, today, we will do a detailed review of the Akamai bot manager, and even explore its alternatives.

Here is our list of the best Akamai bot manager alternatives: 

1. DataDome A flexible bot detection and management tool that protects your organization from online attacks.
2. Radware A real-time bot protection tool that safeguards your web applications, mobile apps, and APIs.
3. Imperva An advanced bot detection and mitigation tool that provides comprehensive control and visibility over the activities of humans, good bots, and bad bots.
4. F5 A seamless solution that protects your apps and APIs from malicious bots and automated software without impacting user experience.

Akamai Bot Manager – A Detailed Review

Akamai Bot Manager is an advanced tool that identifies malicious bots and stops them even before they enter your network or application. Developed and offered by Akamai Technologies, a leading Content Delivery Network (CDN) and cybersecurity company, this bot manager comes with many advanced capabilities to protect your organization from cyber threats.

Key Features:

• Bot Classification: Akamai Bot Manager uses patented AI frameworks that examine traffic at the endpoint where a user interacts with an application or network. This framework looks at the message type, traffic pattern, volume, and other parameters to assign a bot score to each request. Based on the score, a request from a bot is either allowed or blocked. The advantage of such a scoring system is that you can still allow the good bots like search engine crawlers to access your content and index it, while blocking the bad bots.
• Reporting and Analysis: Along with detecting bots, classifying them, and blocking the malicious bots, Akamai also generates reports on the number of bots that were stopped, their origin if possible, the date, and time of the block, and other pertinent factors. Using this information, organizations can create a foolproof cybersecurity strategy that can protect their critical resources from bots.
• Increases User Experience and Trust: Akamai Bot Manager optimizes user experience and enhances user trust by automatically distinguishing legitimate bots from malicious ones. As a result, real users can seamlessly access your resources without getting blocked by the tool. At the same time, they can feel safe knowing that fraudulent activities are identified and stopped at the first point of contact. Needless to say, such measures build users' trust and confidence in your offerings.
• Save on Remediation Costs and Effort: Remediation after an attack is expensive and painful, as you'll have to spend resources to identify what was affected and the extent of the impact and take measures to fix them. It can be expensive, as you'll have to funnel your resources into this task. To avoid such hassles, it's best to detect issues and stop them before they even enter your network.
• Greater Control and Visibility: As an administrator, you must know all that's happening within your organization's network, especially about the lurking threats. Akamai Bot Manager provides high levels of visibility into your network's bot traffic patterns, based on which, you can decide if you must enhance the security of your network or take other measures to secure the perimeter. It also provides immense control over your cybersecurity practices and helps you easily assess the impact of certain security policies.
• Simplified Deployment: Though Akamai's features are extensive, deploying and using it is relatively simple, thanks to its inline architecture. More importantly, it scales well to meet your organization's growing traffic, as it relies on the Akamai network's massive processing capacity that can peak at about 100Tbps each day.

Overall, Akamai Bot Manager is a comprehensive tool that can detect, classify, and block malicious bots from entering your network. Along with detection, it also generates comprehensive reports that provide high levels of visibility and control over all that's happening in your network.

That said, Akamai comes with its share of limitations, with some prominent ones being:

• The admin interface is complex, and not suited for all users.
• It can be an expensive option for small and medium businesses.
• This tool has a steep learning curve.
• Limited SDK integrations.
• Configuration is key to prevent false positives.
• You are often restricted to the Akamai CDN.

Next, we explore some alternatives to the Akamai Bot Manager to overcome the above limitations.

The Best Alternatives to Akamai Bot Manager

With many bot detection and management tools available, choosing the right one requires in-depth research. If you like a lot of features that are present in Akamai, but find it too unwieldy or expensive, there are some close alternatives. Let's take a detailed look into the capabilities of each of these tools and how they compare with Akamai.

1. DataDome

DataDome is a cybersecurity platform that protects your websites, mobile apps, and APIs from malicious bots that can carry out online frauds and attacks. With this tool, you can safeguard your organization from attacks like denial of service, account takeover, credential stuffing, server overload, fake account creation, and more.

Key Features:

• Highly Secure: DataDome uses an adaptive bot on autopilot mode to detect malicious traffic and prevent them from accessing your websites and other resources. According to the company's website, DataDome analyzes every request within just two milliseconds with 99.99% accuracy. Its ML engine continuously learns and adapts, as it processes more than three trillion signals each day.
• No Impact on Performance: A common concern with bot managers is their impact on performance, as they have to analyze every request. While this is not much, still this analysis can impact latency parameters. However, DataDome has no impact at all on your application's performance, and thus, does not reduce user experience.
• Comprehensive Features: DataDome also comes with many comprehensive features like an intuitive dashboard where you can quickly find all the information you want. Plus, its autopilot protection combined with its 24/7 support makes it a reliable ally in cybersecurity.

In all, DataDome empowers your teams to focus on the core aspects of business while it takes care of protecting your resources.

DataDome offers four pricing plans: Business at $3,490 per month, Corporate at $6,190 per month, Enterprise at $8,190 per month, and Enterprise Plus, which requires a custom quote. You can watch a demo and try the service for free.

2. Radware Bot Manager

Radware Bot Manager continuously scans your network traffic in real-time to protect your web applications, mobile apps, and APIs from malicious bots. In the process, it reduces the risk of data breaches and improves the overall operational efficiency of your organization.

Key Features:

• Detection and Mitigation Engine: A highlight of Radware and the power behind its operations is its advanced detection and mitigation engine. It comes with many capabilities like an intent-based deep behavioral analysis that reduces false positives and alerts, embedded machine learning modules that continuously learn and adapt to the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape. Device, and browser fingerprinting to identify known vulnerabilities, and more.
• Seamless Integration: Radware integrates seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, which means, you don't have to make any major changes. It also comes with multiple ways to integrate like web server plugins, cloud connectors, DNS redirection, JavaScript tags, and more. Such options ensure that Radware can integrate, regardless of the design of your infrastructure.
• Granular Reporting and Analysis: Granular data analysis provides insights into your network traffic patterns. Its intuitive dashboard allows you to configure custom alerts and automated bot management actions based on your needs. It also analyzes and reports in real-time, legitimate crawlers, malicious bot traffic, legitimate traffic, and more. Using this information, you can frame cybersecurity policies and take measures to remediate them.

In all, Radware Bot Manager is an advanced platform that analyzes traffic to identify malicious bots and blocks them.

Contact Radware's sales team for a custom quote and start a 30-day free trial.

3. Imperva Bot Management

Imperva's bot detection and mitigation tool is highly sophisticated, provides comprehensive visibility into the nature of your traffic, and makes it easy to identify the bad bots that could harm your mobile applications, APIs, and websites.

Key Features:

• Advanced Browser Validation: Web scraping bots often escape the attention of many bot detection tools as they claim to be a browser type and pass through. But with Imperva, each request is validated to determine if it's what it claims to be. At the same time, legitimate users are not impacted because the advanced browser automation frameworks used by Imperva can distinguish humans and browser bots.
• Leverages Machine Learning: Imperva uses the power of machine learning to collect and analyze data about bots and their behavior. It continuously learns from patterns to pinpoint anomalies in traffic. Plus, it feeds all information about bad bots and their source IP address where available to a real-time database. Moreover, it uses biometric data validation to catch botnets that use malware to hijack devices.
• Extensive Device Attributes: Besides IPs and headers, Imperva analyzes more than 200 device attributes to effectively identify bad bots. More importantly, these fingerprints stick to each bot, so they can be identified even when they connect from random IP addresses, use peer-to-peer networks, or anonymous proxies.

Overall, Imperva can provide an extensive layer of protection for your websites, mobile apps, and APIs, and protect them from bad bots.

Contact the sales team for a custom quote on Imperva Bot Management and get started with a free trial.

4. F5

F5 is a bot management platform that protects your web apps and APIs from malicious bots and other automated programs. At the same time, it ensures that the user experience of real users is not impacted, and the security team has complete visibility and control over what's going on.

Key Features:

• High Levels of Visibility: F5 works well across multiple environments and applications. It can process billions of transactions every day while ensuring the safety of more than 200 million legitimate transactions. Along with balancing user experience with performance, F5 also offers high levels of control and visibility into the blocked bots and their attributes, so your organization can tailor policies accordingly.
• Adaptable and Accurate: This bot management platform can scale well with the growing needs of your business. It's also adaptable to multiple environments. More importantly, F5 uses real-time protection retrospective analysis that combines both telemetry and dynamic rule updates to reduce false positives. Its reporting dashboard is also intuitive and makes it easy to find the information you want.
• Integrations: F5 integrates well with many leading companies like Okta and Salesforce to provide comprehensive bot protection solutions. Moreover, F5 fits well with existing infrastructure and doesn't require complex integrations.

In all, F5 is a convenient bot management tool that's effective, secure, and adaptable to your changing business needs.

Contact the sales team for a quote and try F5 for free.

Thus, these are some good alternatives to Akamai.

Final Thoughts

To conclude, malicious bots are on the rise, and it's more important now than ever to have a comprehensive bot detection and management tool that will protect your APIs, websites, and mobile apps from these bots. Akamai is a popular bot mitigation tool but has many limitations like complexity and high costs. In this article, we explored some alternatives to Akamai, and we hope this information is helpful for you in choosing the best bot detection tool that best meets your organization's needs.