Automated bots have become a significant concern for businesses and users alike. In 2023, they accounted for nearly half of all internet traffic, with malicious “bad bots” comprising 32% of this traffic. These bad bots are responsible for activities such as data scraping, account takeovers (ATOs) and fraudulent transactions, posing substantial risks to online platforms.
As bot activities become more sophisticated, traditional security measures like CAPTCHAs and basic firewalls are no longer sufficient. Organizations are turning to advanced bot detection and mitigation tools that leverage machine learning, behavioral analysis and real-time threat intelligence to protect their digital assets.
What Is a Bot Detection and Mitigation Software?
Bot detection and mitigation software are specialized tools designed to identify, analyze and block malicious or unwanted bots from accessing digital platforms, websites and applications. Bots are essentially scripts or computer programs; they aren’t always nefarious, but require investigation, as they can be closely connected to cybercrime and online fraud. Software solutions help protect businesses from automated threats like credential stuffing, ATOs, scraping, fake accounts, and bot-driven fraud.
Effective bot detection software analyzes traffic in real time to spot and block harmful bots while allowing legitimate users through. It uses behavioral analysis, device fingerprinting, IP reputation checks, and machine learning to adapt to new threats. This helps prevent data breaches, protect brand reputation, and ensure smooth, secure site performance.
Top Features of Bot Detection and Mitigation Software
While bot detection tools vary in their specific approaches, several essential features consistently define effective bot mitigation solutions:
- IP Reputation Analysis: This feature identifies suspicious traffic by analyzing IP addresses against known blacklists, geolocation anomalies, or proxy detection. It helps filter out automated bots and fraudulent activity from legitimate human visitors.
- Device Fingerprinting: Device fingerprinting examines unique characteristics of each user’s device, including browser settings, hardware configurations, operating systems and plugins. This deep analysis helps detect automated scripts, botnets and spoofing tools that reuse or replicate device signatures.
- Behavioral and Velocity Rules: Velocity rules track how frequently and rapidly specific actions occur, providing insight into typical human versus automated bot activity. By establishing behavioral baselines, these rules detect anomalies like rapid logins, repetitive form submissions or unusual transaction patterns, flagging suspicious behaviors indicative of bots.
- Real-Time Monitoring and Alerts: Effective bot detection software continuously monitors traffic patterns, instantly identifying irregularities or spikes indicative of bot attacks. Real-time alerts promptly notify administrators or automated mitigation systems, enabling swift responses to emerging threats before significant damage occurs.
- Machine Learning Capabilities (ML): Modern bot detection solutions incorporate machine learning to adapt dynamically to evolving bot behaviors. ML-driven analytics provide proactive protection by detecting sophisticated bots and fraud techniques that traditional methods might miss.
List of Bot Detection Software Solutions
SEON
SEON empowers digital businesses across industries — including iGaming, fintech, eCommerce, online lending and more — to combat fraud without impacting user experience. Utilizing advanced technologies like device fingerprinting, IP analysis, real-time behavioral monitoring and customizable AI-driven rules, SEON provides risk teams with powerful insights to swiftly identify and block fraudulent activities, including.
- Prevent Abuse and Fraud: Leverage advanced profiling to detect and halt attempts at exploiting offers and financial products.
- Identify Fraud Rings: Reveal hidden networks of malicious actors through sophisticated device fingerprinting and multi-dimensional data analysis.
- Real-Time Risk Management: Instantly assess thousands of signals, including email, phone, social media presence, device information and IP addresses, streamlining your decision-making and reducing manual reviews.
- Streamlined Onboarding: Quickly validate user identities using rich digital footprint data, minimizing friction for legitimate customers.
- Customizable, Transparent Scoring: Adjust risk scoring based on specific business needs and enhance detection with transparent machine learning models.
- Automate Fraud Prevention: Automating critical fraud detection processes significantly reduces manual review overhead, allowing teams to focus on high-impact activities.
SEON combines cutting-edge fraud prevention capabilities with user-friendly tools, ensuring your operations remain secure, efficient and responsive to evolving threats.
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DataDome
DataDome is a bot detection and mitigation solution that protects websites, mobile apps, and APIs from automated threats in real time. It uses machine learning, behavioral signals, and IP reputation analysis to block malicious bots while allowing legitimate users.
DataDome helps defend against credential stuffing, scraping, fake account creation, and payment fraud. Designed for scalability, the solution integrates easily with major platforms and ensures smooth site performance. It focuses on minimizing false positives and adapting to evolving threats through continuous learning.
Arkose Labs
Arkose Labs delivers a bot mitigation platform that combines risk scoring with interactive challenges to stop automated attacks. The solution helps prevent credential stuffing, fake account creation, promo abuse, and other types of fraud. By blending real-time analysis with dynamic friction, Arkose makes attacks costly for fraudsters while preserving the user experience for genuine customers. It protects web and mobile platforms at scale and is designed for organizations seeking to balance strong security with a low-friction experience for trusted users.
Cloudflare
Cloudflare’s bot management is part of its integrated web security platform, offering protection against automated threats at the edge. It uses machine learning, behavioral analysis, and global threat intelligence to detect and block malicious bots with minimal latency.
Cloudflare helps stop credential stuffing, scraping, fake account creation, and other attacks, while ensuring good traffic flows without interruption. The solution is designed for speed, scalability, and ease of integration, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes across industries and regions.
ClickGUARD
ClickGUARD focuses on protecting paid search campaigns from click fraud and invalid traffic. While it’s not a full bot detection suite, it includes bot mitigation features that filter automated clicks and protect ad budgets. The platform offers real-time monitoring, customizable rules, IP blocking, and detailed reporting to help advertisers reduce wasted spend. ClickGUARD is designed to improve PPC campaign efficiency by ensuring ads are served to real users. It’s aimed at businesses wanting to maximize return on ad spend.
Radware Bot Manager
Radware Bot Manager offers comprehensive bot detection and mitigation for websites, apps, and APIs. It uses device fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and machine learning to identify and block sophisticated bots that mimic human behavior or use residential proxies.
Radware’s solution protects against credential stuffing, scraping, account takeovers, and other automated fraud. It provides flexible deployment options, integrates with existing security stacks, and focuses on reducing false positives. The system ensures legitimate users have seamless access while keeping harmful bots at bay.
Reblaze
Reblaze provides cloud-based bot detection and mitigation as part of its web security suite. The platform protects against automated threats like scraping, credential stuffing, and fake account creation using advanced fingerprinting, behavioral analysis, and traffic shaping. Reblaze offers full traffic visibility, real-time attack detection, and easy deployment behind existing infrastructure. It helps businesses control and secure their digital assets without affecting performance for legitimate users. The solution continuously adapts to evolving threats, offering flexible policies and automated threat response.
BioCatch
BioCatch specializes in behavioral biometrics, offering bot detection by analyzing user interactions like keystrokes, mouse movements, and swipe patterns. It helps identify bots, remote access attacks, and social engineering fraud in real time. BioCatch’s solution is used mainly in banking and fintech to protect against account takeovers and identity fraud. The technology works invisibly in the background, delivering frictionless protection without disrupting legitimate users. Its risk models are continuously updated to adapt to new threats, improving fraud detection and response.
Imperva
Imperva provides bot detection and mitigation as part of its Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) platform. The solution uses machine learning, device fingerprinting, and global threat intelligence to detect and block automated threats in real time. It helps protect websites, apps, and APIs from scraping, credential stuffing, account takeovers, and other bot attacks. Imperva integrates easily into security architectures and offers flexible deployment. The system minimizes false positives, ensuring seamless experiences for legitimate users while keeping malicious bots out.
What Kind of Attacks Can Bot Detection Software Prevent?
While there is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to bot detection software, the key use cases are to prevent the following attacks:
- Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) Attacks: A DDoS attack happens when bots flood servers with traffic, causing disruption or downtime. These large-scale attacks can lead to financial loss, operational issues, and reduced user trust. Bot detection software helps quickly identify and stop them to keep services stable and available.
- Phishing Attacks: Bots automate phishing campaigns, including mass email and SMS spam, to deceive individuals into revealing sensitive information such as login credentials and financial details. These attacks primarily target sectors like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), webmail services, financial institutions and payment platforms.
- Brute Force Attacks & Credential Stuffing: Bots perform automated attacks to guess login credentials by systematically testing numerous password combinations or exploiting leaked databases. As data breaches continue, credential stuffing attacks pose risks by allowing unauthorized access to user accounts.
- Bonus Abuse: Often, fraudsters utilize bots to exploit promotional offers and referral bonuses, which can impact marketing budgets and skew analytics’ accuracy. This form of abuse is common in online gaming but also affects fintech, travel and other sectors in which offering promotional incentives is a common practice.
- iGaming Fraud: In online gambling, bots can automate betting and gameplay to facilitate crimes like money laundering. In addition, botnet rings that operate at scale can exploit gaming platforms to generate substantial revenues while illegally undermining game fairness and compliance.
- Ticket Scalping: Bots quickly purchase event tickets in bulk, subsequently reselling them at inflated prices. Ticket scalping damages consumer trust and disrupts the intended distribution channels, as evidenced by major legal actions taken by prominent ticketing companies against scalping operations.
- Fake Reviews, Posts & Comments: Bots are known to be responsible for producing fake reviews, comments and social media posts that contribute to the erosion of trust and authenticity on digital platforms. Effective bot detection mitigates these issues, maintaining platform integrity and user confidence.
- Scraper Bots: Scraper bots automatically harvest valuable data such as pricing information and product details from websites, providing unfair advantages to competitors. Bot detection software protects intellectual property and competitive edge by identifying and blocking these types of automated activities.
- Marketing Fraud: Automated bots generate fraudulent traffic for pay-per-click, pay-per-lead and pay-per-impression advertising campaigns. Such artificial traffic wastes marketing budgets and skews performance analytics, adversely affecting genuine user engagement and business outcomes.
Choosing Your Bot Detection Software
Bot detection software comes in many forms. To choose effectively, start by clearly identifying the specific types of bot attacks your company faces today and threats that may emerge in the future.
Consider the following factors when evaluating bot detection solutions:
- Specific Needs: Does your business primarily face issues like DDoS attacks, phishing, credential stuffing or marketing fraud? Identifying your primary risks helps narrow down your software choices.
- Comprehensive Protection vs. Specialized Solutions: Decide if your business requires an all-in-one fraud prevention platform or specialized tools to tackle specific problems such as advertising fraud or account takeovers.
- Integration and Scalability: Evaluate how easily a solution integrates with your current infrastructure, and consider its capacity to scale with your business growth.
- Accuracy and Customizability: Look for software that offers real-time monitoring, robust analytics and customizable rule sets to adapt quickly to evolving threats.
- User Experience: Ensure the solution you select balances robust security measures with minimal impact on legitimate user experiences.
By carefully assessing and aligning your needs with these criteria, you can select a bot detection software solution that effectively protects your business and supports your broader operational goals.
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Disclaimer: All information in this article is based on publicly available sources gathered through online research. We haven’t tested each tool directly. The content was last updated in Q2 2025. If you spot anything outdated or would like to suggest an update, feel free to get in touch.
FAQ
The quality of your bot detection software depends on your risk factor and appetite. Some companies need bot detection software for their Google Ads campaigns, others to protect accounts from takeovers or from DDoS attacks. There is no one-size-fits-all solution.
Yes. Because they are programmed to perform the same actions repeatedly, it’s easy to analyze their activity and flag them as scripts or software.
Bot protection includes tools designed to let you monitor online traffic in order to identify and filter out malicious bots. For instance, you may want to block bots that perform DDoS attacks, account takeover (ATO) attacks, and malicious PPC clicks.
Not at all. Search engines, for instance, use good bots called web crawlers or spiders. Similarly, you should ensure you allow copyright bots and site monitoring bots while filtering out those that may cause DDoS attacks or account takeovers.
Sources
- VIP Grinders: Massive poker bot farm detected across multiple online poker sites
- Corero: Impact of DDoS on Enterprise Organizations
- Comparitech: Phishing statistics and facts for 2019–2021
- Ticketnews: Ticketmaster, Prestige Entertainment Settle “Bot” Case in California