Most threats in any digital environment come from bots or botnets. While some bots are useful, some mimic human behavior with evil intentions. These malicious bots hoard resources, perform account takeovers, launch DDoS attacks, or steal intellectual property, raising the importance of bot detection and mitigation.

Bots now make up nearly half of all internet traffic. Many rely on their ability to deliver web services at scale and low cost. However, threat actors exploit them to launch digital attacks, typically for monetary gain.

Bot detection prevents these attacks by identifying and distinguishing automated bots from human users through various techniques like behavioral analysis, CAPTCHAs, threat intelligence, and so on to mitigate the threats bots carry. Bot mitigation blocks these threats in the internet traffic before they cause problems like false metrics, stolen credentials, or outages.

This article outlines five of the best solutions for bot detection and mitigation. Read further to find out how each platform can defend businesses and organizations against attacks or other unauthorized activity involving bots.

#1 HUMAN Bot Defender

Overview

HUMAN Bot Defender safeguards websites, mobile applications, and APIs from bot attacks. It is a behavior-based bot management solution that leverages advanced machine learning techniques, predictive models, and security research to block a wide range of automated attacks, preserve page load performance, and optimize security resources, including infrastructure costs.

It works by collecting and sending hundreds of client-side indicators to determine human against bot activity. It continuously learns the normal range of human interactions and correlates it with policies defined by organizations. The bot detector tags and mitigates bot traffic according to the established policies for threat response to block bots from attacking.

HUMAN Bot Defender runs on the HUMAN Defense Platform, which contains modules to combat specific risks businesses face like client-side attacks, unwanted data extraction, fraudulent financial transactions, etc. It grants full visibility and control of various environments.

This bot detection and mitigation software also integrates with other solutions like load balancers, e-commerce platforms, CDN, and more to provide friction-free digital experiences for businesses and their customers. Leveraging its insights ensures only real humans interact with online applications and services.

HUMAN offers a modern defense strategy so organizations have protection against bot attacks and frauds. The company also offers a human verification service called BotGuard that prevents invalid traffic from entering ad targeting systems, CRM, and downstream marketing systems.

This bot protection service is made for marketers who want to visualize fraudulent traffic, analyze bot audiences, and detarget them from active marketing campaigns. It maintains clean, efficient data and downstream marketing and improves lead quality as well as conversion rates.

Features

Detect Bots at Scale

HUMAN combines several methods to detect bots at scale, across web, mobile applications, and API endpoints. It minimizes user friction and ensures a safe customer journey, without collecting or storing PII data. If required, the Bot Defender provides a verification feature to protect businesses against CAPTCHA-solving bots to avoid costs associated with bot-related security issues.

Enforcement Actions for Bot Mitigation

Bot Defender performs a range of enforcement actions for bot mitigation. It can block bots completely, rate-limit them, or redirect them to decoy sites, thus preventing them from compromising the metrics of a site and reducing its analytics' accuracy. It supports over 40+ integrations and integrates within an existing infrastructure, thus preserving application performance and extending bot protection across environments.

Rich Analytics

The bot management solution also offers rich analytics through a portal where pre-built and customizable dashboards are accessible. These dashboards provide actionable insights to help benchmark site traffic against competitors. Integrating Bot Defender with leading analytics platforms like Google Analytics and Adobe Analytics can improve the accuracy of the data and result in better business decisions.

Reasons to consider:

• Integrations

• Custom dashboards and reports

• High accuracy for bot detection

Reasons to avoid:

• Dashboard sometimes slow to respond

• Native portal UI is a bit clunky

• Not easy to implement/set up

#2 Cloudflare Bot Management

Overview

Cloudflare improves visibility across cloud environments and Internet domains, including on-premises so businesses can regain control of their technology and security environment. It leverages several bot detection methods: behavioral analysis, machine learning, and fingerprinting.

Cloudflare Bot Management analyzes behavior and detects anomalies in the Internet property's specific traffic. It scores every request by how different it is from the baseline. Since its machine learning is trained on a curated subset of billions of requests per day, it can create a reliable bot score for every request.

It pairs well with Cloudflare Firewall, so users can block IPs with the lowest scores and even adjust the score threshold in firewall rules, depending on their sensitivity to false positives/negatives. This intuitive score allows bot management software to extend its detection capabilities under the hood without manual configuration from the user.

Moreover, this bot management solution also uses fingerprinting to accurately classify bots. It does not generate nor store device fingerprints, ensuring no violation of user privacy. It complies with local regulations for data locality and storage, ensuring data protection for businesses with the most potential for monetary gain like financial services, travel, and hospitality.

Cloudflare Bot Management is fast to deploy. It automatically recommends rules to manage bots out of the box. It requires no instrumentation with third-party JavaScript, removing complex configuration and maintenance.

Cloudflare Bot Management also detects bots fast with a median latency of 0.3 milliseconds or less. It also integrates with other solutions from the provider, enhancing security, user experience, and performance.

Features

Visual Rule Builder

Cloudflare lets users tune bot management rules to fit their specific needs. It provides a visual rule builder where they can adjust rules based on path or URI pattern, request method, score sensitivities, and mitigation methods, such as log, challenge, or block.

Automatic Allowists

Cloudflare Bot Management allows good bots like those that belong to search engines to keep reaching the site. It can protect SEO ranking while preventing malicious traffic.

Threat Intelligence At-Scale

This bot detection software accurately identifies bots by applying several detection methods to a diverse and vast volume of globally distributed data. Each login, request, and response that goes through its network strengthens its machine learning so it can detect and block bot-driven threats before they can disrupt business operations.

Mobile App and API Protection

Cloudflare Bot Management extends its protection for mobile applications and APIs, ensuring businesses have governance and visibility over any IT environment. It protects mobile apps from impersonation and emulation attacks without using mobile SDK and APIs that are accessed via web browsers.

Reasons to consider:

• Integrated security and performance

• Lowest latency

• Simple deployment

• Free service for simple bots

Reasons to avoid:

• A bit pricey for extra features

• Long learning curve

#3 DataDome

Overview

DataDome leverages artificial intelligence (AI) for bot detection. It processes in real-time as every single request gets analyzed and subjected to a blend of AI and machine learning models to determine in 2 milliseconds whether or not to provide access.

It boasts a false positive rate of 0.01%. It has designed its response strategy and blocking/challenging mechanisms tailored for each endpoint: mobile apps, websites, and APIs, keeping businesses secured and the user experience seamless.

This bot management software gives unprecedented insights into threats, including dedicated KPIs, for effective bot mitigation. Businesses can analyze 30 days of live traffic and access real-time attack reports, along with notifications, through a comprehensive dashboard.

Features

Bot Mitigation on Autopilot

This bot mitigation software does not require frequent human intervention. Once the allow list is set up, DataDome takes care of all unwanted traffic on its own.

Services, SOC, and Support

Two of its subscription plans include a full set of professional services that cover deep-dive, crises, and ad hoc events. It also offers 24/7 technical support for most subscription plans. When needed, its Bot SOC (Security Operations Center) experts can step in to monitor and mitigate traffic to ensure optimal security and performance at all times.

Customization Options

Businesses can customize DataDome's response decisions to endpoints. They can either whitelist, add a CAPTCHA, or block and the data mitigation software follows the custom rules once added manually.

Powerful Analytics Tools

DataDome contains powerful analytics tools so businesses can get detailed insights to mitigate bots with malicious intent like account takeover, intensive scraping, or vulnerability scanning. It displays attack reports and sends out notifications in real-time.

Reasons to consider:

• Low false positive rate

• Unlimited users

• Detailed insights

Reasons to avoid:

• Expensive

• Premium features exclusive to higher subscription plan

#4 CHEQ Essentials

Overview

CHEQ Essentials is designed to help website owners detect and block bots accessing their sites. It uses a combination of techniques to identify malicious bots accurately. It leverages advanced algorithms and over 2000 behavioral tests in real-time for each visit. Anything suspicious or malicious gets blocked automatically.

Features

Detailed Reports

Businesses can get detailed reports on bot activity, including bot type and behavior patterns. CHEQ Essentials helps them understand website traffic and make informed decisions to improve website performance and security.

Paid Marketing Protection

CHEQ Essentials also offers paid marketing protection by blocking invalid traffic that compromises the metrics of an ad. Implementing click fraud and ad fraud protection safeguards budgets and improves the overall effectiveness of the ad campaigns, especially on Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, and Meta Ads. This feature saves businesses ad spending and marketing efforts for genuine human traffic only as it prevents click fraud and ad fraud in real-time, ensuring an accurate representation of data for analytics.

Invalid Traffic Protection

CHEQ Essentials also protects ad campaigns and websites against various types of invalid traffic, ensuring the integrity and effectiveness of marketing performance. It incorporates bot mitigation techniques to identify and block malicious bots from accessing the site or interacting with ads, ensuring that traffic and leads come from genuine users. Blocking bad bots and eliminating fake leads minimizes the strain on server resources, bandwidth, and processing power, resulting in better website performance.

Reasons to consider:

• Straightforward functions

• Multilayered protection

• Customizable

Reasons to avoid:

• No assisted onboarding for fixed subscription plans

• Bot mitigation limited web applications

#5 GeeTest

Overview

GeeTest provides a defense against bot attacks while maintaining a good user experience. It leverages machine learning models to combat constantly evolving internet threats. It has 12+ years of anti-bot experience and has served 360,000+ companies all over the world. This bot management software works by collecting and analyzing 100+ parameters, including environmental and biometric data, to evaluate the risk level of a user who clicks a CAPTCHA button to interact with a site or an app.

GeeTest accurately detects and blocks fraudulent bot traffic in real time as its machine learning models are fed with a rich risk database, which enables its Risk Analysis Engine to pinpoint all angles of attack. It also develops custom solutions to serve unique business needs and security requirements. It can also interoperate with a prior security bot detection, further strengthening an organization's security posture.

Features

OneTap

GeeTest offers a zero-friction customer verification approach called OneTap. It removes the hassle for users when interacting with an app or website, as they can simply click to verify each visit instead of dealing with time-consuming old CAPTCHAs.

The bot management provider also offers a mixture of multiple types of CAPTCHA, depending on the use case. This feature supports the majority of existing devices and operating systems.

Device Fingerprinting

Companies can gain critical insights into traffic patterns through device fingerprinting. GeeTest monitors traffic credibility from behavioral and device dimensions to identify and prevent malicious bot activity originating from them. It weeds dubious devices, ensuring bot attacks remain at bay, keeping websites and applications secure and losses minimal.

Reasons to consider:

• Ease of use

• Quick deployment

• Cross-platform compatibility

• Proven track record

• Data security

Reasons to avoid:

• A bit expensive

Conclusion

Bot attacks can disrupt services, steal data, and damage reputations. Businesses of all sizes must seek solutions to identify and manage bot traffic while mitigating threats. As bot technology continues to evolve, companies have become more vulnerable to bot attacks. Some bots can easily bypass CAPTCHAs, evading cyber defenses and increasing security risks. Choose from the top 5 best bot detection and mitigation software to secure access points to a business website, application, and APIs.