Bots are automated computer programs that roam the web. They can be both a boon and a bane for organizations. On one hand, they can automate tasks and provide valuable assistance. But on the flip side, malicious bots can wreak havoc by carrying out harmful activities like data scraping, spamming, or launching cyberattacks.
This is where the importance of bot protection software comes into play. As a decision-maker of your organization, you must safeguard your digital resources from these malicious bots. As it is almost impossible to manually monitor, detect, and prevent these bots from entering your network, you need bot protection tools that will handle these bots for you. These tools serve as a digital shield to defend your assets from harmful bots, ensuring that your business can operate smoothly and securely in the ever-evolving digital landscape.
Here is our list of the best bot protection software:
- IndusFace AppTrana An enhanced bot protection platform that detects and blocks bad bots while allowing the good bots.
- DataDome An online fraud protection software that offers complete protection for your mobile apps, websites, APIs, and more.
- Reblaze Bot Management Offers comprehensive web security protection with WAF, DDoS, bot mitigation, and more.
- Akamai Bot Manager An effective tool for detecting and mitigating bad bots right at the edges, before they enter the network.
- Cloudflare Bot Manager A popular tool that goes beyond CAPTCHAs to detect malicious bots while allowing good bots.
- Radware Bot Manager A comprehensive bot protection software that protects websites, mobile applications, and APIs from automated threats.
The Best Bot Protection Software
Let's take a detailed look into the capabilities of each of the above tools to help you zero in on the best fit for your needs.
1. IndusFace AppTrana
AppTrana from IndusFace is a fully managed SaaS platform that offers web application firewall, DDoS protection, and bot mitigation capabilities to protect your organization against malicious bots. In [particular, it protects your network from many advanced attacks like account takeover, credential stuffing, and scrapping right from the first day.
Key Features:
- Real-time Analysis of Bot Traffic: This platform detects and blocks bad bot traffic in real-time. It detects these bad bots based on behavioral patterns of past traffic. Along with this behavioral analysis, it also combines static analysis of requests. Together, it can spot all kinds of malicious bot requests.
- Anomaly Detection: Another key capability is to detect anomalies using a risk score to reduce false positives. Essentially, AppTrana has many bot modules, with each looking for specific behaviors that can indicate the presence of a bad bot. At the broader level, this tool generates a correlated test score that reflects the behavior of each request. Using this information, you can better understand patterns related to the source of the bots, their payload, etc., and accordingly, you can implement security controls.
- Granular Controls: AppTrana offers custom and granular controls that you can use to control bot behavior on your site. This way, you have complete control over the protection level of your organization. At the same time, you can identify and classify traffic as bot vs. human traffic.
These features collectively provide comprehensive protection against bad bots. More importantly, you have excellent control and visibility into the detection process and can create security controls and policies to mitigate their impact.
AppTrana offers three pricing plans: Advanced at $99 per month, Premium at $399 per month, and Enterprise, which requires a custom quote. You can also try AppTrana free for a limited time.
2. DataDome
DataDome is a bot protection software designed to protect your websites, mobile apps, and APIs from malicious bots and other online frauds. It offers a consistent level of protection for all your endpoints while identifying and removing the weak links in your infrastructure.
Key Features:
- Enhanced User Experience: An often overlooked aspect of bot protection is user experience. As an organization, the last thing you want is for users to uninstall your mobile app or move away from your website because it's slow. At the same time, the amount of processing that goes into identifying bots can cause latency in applications, leading to poor user experience. But DataDome strikes a balance between the two, as it checks for malicious bots without causing noticeable delays in the performance of your apps.
- Threat Analytics and Notifications: Gaining insights into every threat that can impact your digital resources will help you plan and mitigate them better. DataDome's powerful threat analytics provides detailed information into threats like account takeover, scraping, vulnerability scanning, DDoS, and more. It also provides information about dedicated KPIs, 30 days of live traffic data, and real-time attack reports. Plus, you get notifications for all the events that you have subscribed for.
- Support and Compliance: Any subscription to DataDome comes with full support, including 24/7 technical support. It even has a SOC experts center that proactively identifies threats and intimates the same to you. This process of identifying and mitigating threats also helps with compliance.
Overall, DataDome is an advanced platform that protects your digital assets from the onslaught of attacks through malicious bots.
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 sign up for a demo and get a free trial.
3. Reblaze Bot Management
Reblaze Bot Management is a tool that allows the good bots while blocking the bad bots and other hostile traffic from entering your network. The processing latency is claimed to be less than 0.5 milliseconds per request and also ensures that web servers and APIs get only genuine requests.
Key Features:
- Multivariate Bot Detection: Reblaze takes a unique approach to identifying and blocking bad bots. It subjects every incoming traffic to a series of checks and stringent challenges, and any request that doesn't meet even one challenge is filtered and blocked. This is an automated process that saves time and reduces false positives because the good bots and requests from human users will not fail all the challenges.
- Uses Multiple Identifiers: A highlight of Reblaze is that it goes beyond IP addresses to detect bad requests. Rather, it uses multiple identifiers like IP headers, cookies, POST body arguments, and more to detect bad requests. It uses techniques like dynamic rate filtering, network anomaly tracking, layer 7 anomaly detection, and more to reduce the chances of false positives.
- Builds a Behavioral Profile: For every application or website it protects, Reblaze builds a comprehensive behavioral profile of requests and users. It continuously learns and understands how users interact with the application, and flags any request that deviates from this behavior.
In all, Reblaze takes a methodical approach to detecting bad requests and blocks them from entering your network and accessing your applications.
Reblaze offers custom pricing, so you'll need to reach out to the sales team for a quote. You can also try the product free for a limited time.
4. Akamai Bot Manager
Akamai Bot Manager is a popular tool that analyzes every packet at the edges and using a complex set of rules, identifies and blocks the bad requests from entering your network. It uses patented technologies based on AI and ML algorithms to ensure that only good data reaches your applications.
Key Features:
- Handles Highly Sophisticated Bots: Cybercriminals today have greater access to knowledge and resources and can quickly create highly sophisticated bots that are hard to detect. To counter such bots, Akamai not only uses ML algorithms to continuously learn the behavior of these bots but also analyzes tons of attack data daily to protect your network from zero-day threats and evolving bots.
- Extensive Reporting: Another advantage is the extensive reporting that contains insights about the industry trends, your bot traffic analysis, and other information that can help with your decision-making. Armed with such comprehensive information, you can create a foolproof cybersecurity strategy.
- Uses a Scoring System: Akamai uses a scoring system, where it analyzes more than 30 billion bots a day. It assigns a score for each bot, where 0 is a bot and 100 is a human. Using this bot score, you can design an appropriate response and the corresponding action.
Thus, Akamai's bot manager effectively mitigates bad bot traffic and protects your digital resources.
To purchase Akamai, you need to find a local partner. You can also try Akamai free for a limited time.
5. Cloudflare Bot Manager
Cloudflare Bot Manager is a popular platform that uses many detection methods to accurately identify and block bots. They analyze patterns for anomalies and ensure that good requests are not stopped. Such a measured approach helps build brand image and confidence among customers.
Key Features:
- Complete Control Through Configuration: You can control the way Cloudflare interacts with the bots and handles them by tweaking the configuration parameters. Such control also provides visibility into what's happening with your network, the nature of requests that come in, and other factors. Using such information, you can continuously adapt your cybersecurity practices to gain maximum protection.
- Rich Analytics and Logs: The intuitive dashboard of Cloudflare provides all the analytics and logs you need to better understand the nature of requests coming to your websites and mobile applications. You can even create custom dashboards that show just the information you need for further processing and decision-making. Plus, this platform is simple to deploy and can be up and running in no time.
- Improves Performance: Often, performance is the price paid for high security. But, with Cloudflare, it takes less than 0.3 milliseconds to analyze each request. Hence, there is no impact at all on the performance of your application and the resulting user experience.
All these features together make Cloudflare a good option to avoid bad requests without the extensive use of CAPTCHAs.
Cloudflare Bot Manager offers four pricing plans: Free, Pro at $20 per month, Business at $200 per month, and Enterprise, which requires a custom quote. Get started with Cloudflare today.
6. Radware Bot Manager
Radware Bot Manager is a comprehensive platform that provides real-time protection for your mobile applications and APIs. Through its effective features, Radware also safeguards your online revenue and helps build trust and reputation among your customers.
Key Features:
- Detection and Mitigation Engine: Radware's detection and mitigation engine is the heart of its operations as it provides multiple layers of protection for your applications. In particular, its embedded machine-learning modules evolve continuously while its anomaly detection capabilities ensure a genuine user flow.
- Integration with Existing Infrastructure: With Radware, you don't have to spend resources on integrating it with your existing infrastructure. You can choose from its web server plugins, cloud connectors, JavaScript tags, DNS redirection, and virtual appliances to integrate with your existing IT stack.
- Granular Data Reporting and Analytics: Radware offers granular data reporting and analytics through its well-designed dashboard. You can analyze traffic patterns, configure automated actions for malicious bots, view legitimate traffic and crawlers, and do so much more. You can even configure custom alerts through this dashboard.
Overall, Radware Bot Manager can protect your digital assets from all kinds of automated threats, including those that use botnets to enter your network.
Radware Bot Manager offers pricing through a custom quote from the sales team. You can also sign up for a 30-day free trial.
Thus, these are the best bot protection software available today.
Final Thoughts
To conclude, your organization must have a streamlined plan to protect against malicious bots that can create havoc if they enter your network. Besides causing financial and reputational damage, they can also result in data loss and possibly, legal and compliance fines as well. To avoid such scenarios, it's important to invest in good bot protection software that can spot malicious bots right at the edges and stop them from entering your network. In this article, we discussed six top tools that come with wide-arching capabilities in bot management.
