Disclaimer: Everything you’ll read in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test every tool. This article was last updated in Q4 2022. Please feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.
Best Castle.io Alternatives
| Company | Core Features | Notable Clients | Summary |
| SEON |
| Revolut, Air France, Kindred | Unique in-depth customer profiling, AML screening, and flexible rules |
| ClearSale |
| Motorola, ASUS, Under Armour | End-to-end fraud solution with in-house manual review team & fraud consultation services |
| BioCatch |
| Nuance, Experian, Microsoft | Biometrics-focused fraud solution with unique analysis of physical input data |
| Sift |
| Doordash, Hello Fresh, Zoosk | Single fraud solution from authentication to payment protection to dispute management |
| Auth0 |
| Mazda, Sharp, Pfizer | Comprehensive authentication platform with tools for easy stack integration |
| SHIELD |
| MPL, TrueMoney, HappyFresh | Persistent fraud monitoring with compliance and ad security tools |
What Does Castle.io Offer?
Building on years of experience in authentication and building startups, co-founders Johan Brissmyr and Sebastian Wallin started developing Castle.io in 2014, focusing on providing businesses of all sizes with transparent fraud prevention services.
Castle.io has been built to prevent the fraud pain points that small and medium businesses are commonly wracked with. This includes specific risk scores for:
- account abuse
- account takeovers (ATOs)
- bot abuse
These scores are generated through risk-based API analysis, as well as device fingerprinting, and the software produces a detailed audit trail for both investigating and reporting fraud. Castle.io allows its customers to introduce these risk-assessing touchpoints nearly anywhere along the user journey, such as at registration, login, or payment, and it has documentation support for adding a custom touchpoint integration on the front end of your website or app.
Watch SEON in a live demo to compare its fraud-fighting to Castle.io and its competitors and learn what it can do for you.
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Why Look for a Castle.io Alternative?
The Castle.io product offers a fairly comprehensive suite of fraud-fighting capabilities, and is roughly at parity with many other products on the market today in terms of security. With that in mind, some of the other solutions available may better suit your business’s capabilities, scale, and fraud prevention needs.
Part of Castle.io’s mission statement is developing a fraud solution by developers, for developers. This means that the company provides great in-depth documentation for integrating and executing its solution in the most optimal way, and the relatively small (but passionate) Castle.io team does not come with as much hands-on integration help as some other products offer.
Many of the API call touchpoints must be manually integrated into your own front-end code, as opposed to some other software offerings that work out of the box.
Six Castle.io Alternatives
Depending on your company’s fraud needs – something easily deployed or holistically end-to-end – there may be solutions better suited than the offering from Castle.io.
Here are six alternatives that may be better at filling any holes that fraudsters have punched in your bottom line.
SEON
Tamas Kadar and Bence Jendruszak originally set out to establish one of Central Europe’s first crypto exchanges but found themselves hounded by fraudsters as soon as they enabled card-not-present payments. SEON was born as they pivoted into the fraud prevention industry.
The SaaS package offered by SEON leverages API calls on OSINT data, the enrichment of that data to discover additional risk signals, AML screening, and device fingerprinting to develop accurate risk scores on incoming traffic.
Rather uniquely, SEON’s risk scores tie into alternative data sources like social media profiles to develop confidence that a given user is a real human and not a fraudster or bot.
The platform’s device fingerprinting in combination with both whitebox and blackbox ML also looks for patterns and risk signals that stretch across your transaction history. This better equips your online clearsystems to prevent fraudsters who engage in things like bonus abuse, account takeovers, and fraudulent payments.
The AML screening module offers similar ease of use and flexibility, designed to help you boost your compliance. Combining KYC and AML data has plenty of advantages, particularly for startups who have yet to implement proper risk management solutions and need to unify their tech stack.
SEON is available for free, and it offers integrations like Slack for your team and Shopify for your customers.
ClearSale
All the way back in 2001, ClearSale was founded by Pedro Chiamulera, a former Olympic athlete. The company grew its influence from its headquarters in São Paulo – at one point in 2010 it was Brazil’s second fastest growing company – before launching its US-based fraud solution in 2016.
Given how long ClearSale has been operational, it is unsurprising that today, it counts some of the biggest ecommerce retailers in the world among its clients. Alongside them, companies like OfficeMax, Victoria’s Secret, and Under Armour look to the vendor both for chargeback protection as well as for its ability to leave the manual review process entirely to ClearSale’s fraud consultancy team.
Companies that will get the most out of ClearSale are those that wish to hand over as much of their fraud prevention and dispute management responsibilities as they can. The software’s system boasts a low rate of false declines, as the fraud prevention vendor also makes use of a human team of analysts to boost accuracy.
With its ecommerce focus, ClearSale also offers integrations for various other marketplaces like Magento, which may suit many SMEs better than some other options – as will the flexible pricing options.
BioCatch
Avi Turgeman founded BioCatch in 2011, springboarding the company’s fraud-fighting tech from his own experiences in the Israeli military as a whitehat hacker. Then, he specialized in leveraging biometric data into security, which is also a large reason why BioCatch provides confidence to its customers.
BioCatch’s primary and most unique capabilities are the insights derived from the close monitoring of how your customers interact with your app or website, regardless of how they are connecting to it. By unpacking characteristics like keystroke behavior or touchscreen activity, the software constantly monitors for signs of suspicious activity.
This gives BioCatch the ability to effectively protect accounts, detect remote access tools and mobile emulators, and even help safeguard from social engineering scams. The company boasts fintech clients like Citigroup and Barclays, and it also offers strong PSD2 customer authentication capabilities.
Sift
After its foundation in 2011, Sift did a tour at Y Combinator’s startup accelerator program. The company managed to raise $106 million in development capital, the investment of which has turned into Sift’s current platform.
This reputation has earned the trust of big-ticket clients like DoorDash and HelloFresh, with modules designed to address business-to-consumer ecommerce woes, like chargeback disputes and spammy, potentially fraudulent content.
Sift’s fraud fighting brainpower comes from its global data network, which handles some 70 billion transactions per month. Both specific and generalized ML systems work together to automate fraud prevention, assigning scores and making access decisions autonomously. Where manual oversight is required, Sift’s software can be set to prioritize high-value transactions, offering a realistic boost to revenue when resources are scarce.
To address some pain points that are common across ecommerce, Sift also offers ML-driven dispute management, which helps streamline and prioritize the dispute queue, as well as a module to address content integrity. That module uses further ML to scan listings for signs of fraud and spam in your marketplace, helping keep your ecosystem free of both chargebacks and fraud.
Auth0
Like Castle.io, Auth0 has made space for itself in the authentication and ID management industry with a “by developers, for developers” attitude. In pursuit of making a single product to meet many organizations’ ID management needs, co-founders Eugenio Pace and Matias Woloski worked to make the Auth0 stack an easily-integrated and versatile hub where companies can customize their authentication protocols.
Though it does not offer a full fraud prevention suite like Castle.io and other offerings on this list, Auth0’s authentication programming is also effective at stopping common fraud threats. The suite also has modules to address breached passwords, a marketplace for additional third-party integratable systems, and step-up multi-factor authentication challenges.
As part of Auth0’s branding is minimal friction, it also offers SSO (single sign-on), universal login, and passwordless authentication to cut down on potential churn across multiple user journeys. These tools also provide clients with a clear overview of their user base in terms of access and user management, modules for which are also part of the platform.
Auth0 is available for free for small businesses with less than 7,000 active users.
SHIELD
Though the company’s humble beginnings were on the personal website of the founder, Justin Lie, SHIELD has now grown into one of the APAC region’s go-to solutions for payment fraud, account protection, synthetic ID fraud, ad fraud, bonus abuse, and bot attacks. By also focusing on ridesharing, social media and deliveries as sectors as well as the usual gaming and ecommerce companies, SHIELD’s clientele now includes companies like TrueMoney and Razer.
Under the hood, SHIELD develops its scores through risk indicators, leaning heavily on in-depth device fingerprinting and insights from its Global Intelligence Network of some 7 billion profiled devices.
All of the API calls that power this engine are inside of the company’s Compliance API, running incoming traffic through a comprehensive gauntlet of security checks. This itself is powered by a hybrid AI system that draws upon neural networks and symbolic AI to handle the scoring. SHIELD uses these capabilities to be adept at user activity monitoring in real-time, ready to flag when a user turns from good to bad.
SEON’s free plan allows up to 2000 API calls, so every company can fight fraud, regardless of scale.
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How to Choose the Right Castle.io Alternative
The relatively small team at Castle.io has developed a well-regarded product. The software is lightweight, and probably best approached by a fraud team member with some development experience, both to navigate the user experience but also for the integration itself.
Considering that Castle.io’s fairly comprehensive fraud service is offered at an affordable price point, it is a worthwhile choice for some small businesses that are not expecting super-high transaction volumes.
As well as this, Castle.io’s support and documentation seem geared towards a small, hands-on support team that is willing to dive deep into the product and learn its ins and outs. Such a team will probably get the most out of what the company has to offer in terms of keeping a small business safe.
Castle.io Alternatives FAQ
The company offers its service as part of a subscription plan, with tiers for SMEs and enterprise clients. Both tiers have respective maximum “good” events – analysis touchpoints – per month, with the “Professional” package coming in at $33 per month or 10,000 events, and the enterprise-grade contract costing $2,800 per month or 1,000,000 events.
Though Castle.io offers its SaaS at a price point that is scaled down for SMEs, products like Auth0 and, of course, SEON, are available for free. However, in most cases, your usage and needs will define exactly how much each product would cost you.
To get a better idea of what Castle.io has to offer, what technology it employs to do it, and how it can be a part of your infrastructure, head over to reputable B2B review sites such as Capterra or G2, or even the documentation section of its official website.
