Akamai Bot Manager Review & Alternatives

Akamai Technologies is a content delivery network (CDN), cloud service, and cybersecurity company, providing web and Internet security services.

As part of the company’s Cloud Security product family, Akamai Bot Manager helps organizations manage the impact of bots across their entire digital environment, including websites, mobile applications, and web APIs. It helps organizations detect bots interacting with their web application or website and categorize them based on their role or value. It also gives you the flexibility to apply different management actions based on the category a bot belongs to.

Akamai Bot Manager employs a variety of detection techniques—including pre-defined signatures, bot reputation, and real-time detections capabilities to identify unknown bots as they attempt to access protected websites, including:

• Behavior anomaly analysis Collects telemetry from client input devices, such as mouse movements and keyboard strokes, to identify anomalous behavior that distinguishes between human and bot
• Browser fingerprinting Collects identifying client browser information and analyzes them to identify anomalies that show an automated bot
• HTTP anomaly detection Employs a risk scoring model to inspect HTTP requests for patterns and anomalies that show a computerized bot attempting to disguise itself as a legitimate bot-generated them
• Rate-based and session activity Looks for differences in the behavior of a web client to that of human users
• Workflow validation Allows an organization to define a workflow for its website that a human user would follow and take action on clients that deviate from the specified workflow

Bot Manager is deployed at the network edge (Akamai Intelligent Edge Platform), to enable you to detect and mitigate bot traffic before they hit valuable targets. It also integrates visualization and reporting of bot traffic into Akamai Security Center, which displays overall bot traffic statistics and other types of attack traffic. A live demo with simulated attacks is available on request.

But if you figured out that Akamai Bot Manager is not best suited for your online platform and you’re considering a suitable alternative, you’d find lots of them out there. However, you want to make sure that you get the same functionality, if not more, out of an alternative tool. To help you with the countless alternatives out there, we’ve put together a list of the ten best Akamai Bot Manager alternatives. Hopefully, this will guide you in selecting the right one for your environment.

The Best Akamai Bot Manager Alternatives

1. Barracuda Bot Protection

Barracuda Networks is a leading provider of networking, storage, and security products. The company’s security products cut across network security, data and email protection, and application security. Barracuda application security solution is known as Barracuda Cloud Application Protection.

Barracuda Cloud Application Protection protects your websites, mobile and web applications, and APIs against various application attacks, including OWASP Top 10, client-side attacks, DDoS, and bot attacks that use scraping, denial of inventory, and credential stuffing. It is an integrated platform that brings together a set of security tools to ensure the complete protection of your critical application. It supports applications deployed on-premises, in the cloud, or a hybrid. Some of the key tools in the Barracuda Cloud Application Protection platform include Web Application Firewall (WAF), WAF-as-a-Service, API Security, Cloud Security Guardian (security policy automation), and Advanced Bot Protection.

Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection scans incoming application traffic to identify and stop bots from scraping confidential data, skewing web analytics, and impairing website performance. It combines threat intelligence with machine learning to identify and detect bots and other advanced attackers. Barracuda provides a free web application vulnerability scanner to find and fix hidden security flaws. A free online demo and a free Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection trial are available on request.

2. fastly

fastly (formerly Signal Sciences) is a SaaS-based security technology company that provides a Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) Platform.

Some of the key application security tools included in the platform are: 

• Web Application Firewall (WAF) Signal Sciences next-generation WAF creates a protective shield between your web app and the Internet to help mitigate many common attacks.
• Bot Protection Signal Sciences monitors web application and API traffic to detect and block automated malicious bots, including bots that engage in message spamming, content scraping, credit card, and inventory abuse, among others.
• Runtime Application Self-Protection (RASP) Designed to provide personalized protection to your applications using runtime instrumentation to detect and block attacks by taking advantage of information from inside your application in real time.
• Account Takeover (ATO) Protection Detects and blocks credential stuffing and account takeovers attempt
• Rate Limiting Controls the number of requests from potential threats to prevent abusive behavior at the application layer that negatively affects website and API performance.
• DDoS protection Signal Sciences Cloud DDoS protection blocks network and application layer DDoS attacks to keep your web apps and APIs available for customers.

Fastly can be deployed in containers, on-premises, or the cloud and allow you to gain one unified view across your entire application. A free online demo is available on request.

3. DataDome

DataDome provides cloud-based online fraud and bot management services that protect mobile apps, websites, and APIs from web scraping, scalping, credential stuffing, and account takeover, Layer 7 DDoS attacks, and carding fraud. DataDome’s mission is to free the web from fraudulent traffic so that sensitive data remains safe and online platforms can perform at optimum speed.

DataDome uses AI and machine learning to determine whether a traffic or user account is a human or a bot by analyzing billions of events. Once a bot-driven fraud attempt is detected, DataDome blocks it right away without affecting business operations.

The rules used by DataDome to protect your applications from threats are ordered into the following four different categories: 

• Signature-Based Detection They leverage fingerprinting, such as browser fingerprint, HTTP header, and TLS fingerprint to identify malicious traffic
• Behavioral detection Detects threats based on behavior not linked to human activity, such as too many login attempts.
• Reputational detection Detecting threats based on requests originating from an IP with a lousy reputation or IP that recently acted maliciously.
• Vulnerability Scanner detection Detects threats by finding possible internal weaknesses and security vulnerabilities.

DataDome provides a tool to check your site for bad bots slowing down your website performance and affecting the customer experience. A personalized online demo and a free 30-day trial are available on request.

4. Imperva Bot Protection

Imperva is a cyber security software and services company that protects enterprise data and applications in the cloud or on-premises. The Imperva application security platform gives organizations visibility and control over human and malicious bot traffic, including the ability to detect and mitigate OWASP Top 10 vulnerabilities without imposing friction on legitimate users.

Imperva’s Advanced Bot Protection protects websites, mobile apps, and APIs from automated threats, including web scraping, account takeover, transaction fraud, denial of service, competitive data mining, unauthorized vulnerability scans, spam, click fraud, and web and mobile API abuse, without affecting application performance or user experience. It checks that each browser has the correct JavaScript engine, is formatted correctly, and all components perform as they should. This helps to distinguish between browser automation tools and legitimate users.

Table 1.0 | Imperva’s Advanced Bot Protection deployment options

A personalized online demo and a free trial are available on request.

5. PerimeterX  Platform

PerimeterX (now HUMAN Security) provides cloud-based platform-agnostic application security solutions that leverage machine learning and behavior-based analytics to protect online businesses while preserving user experience. PerimeterX products detect and block automated bot attacks and client-side threats before they affect your web and mobile applications or APIs. This helps to reduce your risk, protect users and partners, and safeguards proprietary content.

PerimeterX platform includes essential products: 

• PerimeterX Bot Defender A behavior-based bot management solution protecting your websites, mobile applications, and APIs from automated attacks. It combines intelligent fingerprinting, behavioral signals, and predictive analysis to detect bots on web and mobile applications and API endpoints.
• PerimeterX Code Defender A client-side application security solution that protects websites from digital skimming, foam jacking, and Magecart attacks. Code Defender detects suspicious script behavior by automatically inventorying and baselining the conduct of all client-side JavaScript on your website.
• PerimeterX Page Defender Preserves the intended online shopper experience by blocking unwanted coupon extensions and ad injections that steal your users and redirect them to competitors.  Eliminating these pop-ups means you can prevent your site visitors from getting redirected to competitors, hide unauthorized content from being shown on your site, take back control of the shoppers’ experience and keep them on the path to purchase.

The PerimeterX platform provides other services and tools, such as behavior-based predictive analytics, machine learning models, sensors, detectors, and enforcers. It also features a user-friendly portal with advanced analysis and reporting capabilities that give you actionable insights. Although PerimeterX does not offer a free trial, a free online product demo is available on request.

6. Radware Bot Manager

Radware is a leading provider of cybersecurity and application delivery products for the physical, cloud, and software-defined data centers. Radware’s products and services include network and application security services, cloud services such as Cloud WAF, Cloud DDoS Protection, Cloud Workload Protection, Cloud Web Acceleration, Cloud Malware Protection, and Bot Manager, among others.

The Radware Bot Manager provides bot management and protection of web applications, mobile apps, and APIs from malicious bots without affecting legitimate users and performance. It combines behavioral modeling, collective bot intelligence, machine learning, domain-specific detection techniques, and fingerprinting of browsers, devices, and machines to identify and eliminate all forms of malicious bot traffic and threats such as account takeover, credential stuffing, brute force, denial of inventory, DDoS, payment fraud and web scraping

It can integrate with Radware Bot Manager via the Radware cloud connectors, web server & CDN plugins, or virtual appliances. A 30-day free trial is available on request.

7. Reblaze Bot Management

Reblaze is a cloud-based security solution company that offers services such as CDN, web application firewall (WAF), API security, traffic management, DDoS protection, bot mitigation, and more all in a single, unified platform. The Reblaze Bot Management tool protects websites, mobile apps, and APIs from unwanted bots and accounts for takeover attacks, including credential theft, credential discovery, session attacks, and the abuse of valid credentials.

Reblaze employs various honeypots, client authentication, behavioral analysis, challenges, and more to detect and mitigate malicious bots that bypass traditional bot detection methods. Under the challenges method, for example, incoming web traffic is subjected to a series of increasingly tough challenges. Failure to meet the demand of any challenge results in the denial of network access to that incoming web traffic. A personalized online demo and a free trial are available on request.

8. Netacea Bot Management 

Netacea is a relatively young but fast-rising company that provides cloud-based server-side bot management solutions that protect websites, mobile apps, and APIs from automated threats such as credential stuffing, account takeovers, web scraping, card cracking, among others. Netacea uses a machine learning-based intelligent detection engine known as Intent Analytics.

Netacea Bot Management detects and blocks malicious bot activity by leveraging the power of machine learning, behavioral analytics, and anomaly detection to distinguish between authentic and automated traffic that threatens web applications. This enables Netacea to build a detailed profile of authentic versus fake without affecting user experience. Other features that come Netacea platform include dashboarding capabilities and real-time actionable threat intelligence with data-rich visualizations to enable you to make informed decisions. A free online demo is available on request.

You can integrate Netacea into your existing infrastructure in three ways:

• Reverse Proxy This requires that Netacea is implemented in front of the original site but behind any CDN/WAF/DDoS layers.
• Adaptive Threat Architecture This is a technical integration at the CDN layer to address customer concerns about automated traffic.
• API-Based Integration The API implementation does not mitigate threats; instead, it provides customers with threat intelligence on their web application traffic