Bot and agent trust management vendors compared
Every bot and agent trust management vendor in one place: Prosopo, DataDome, HUMAN, Kasada, Arkose Labs, CHEQ, Netacea, hCaptcha, reCAPTCHA Enterprise, Cloudflare, Akamai, Imperva and Castle. What each is good at, what it costs, and who it suits.

Updated 9 min read

There are around a dozen serious vendors in this market, and very few of them publish enough for a buyer to build a shortlist without first booking a round of sales calls. These pages close that gap: one vendor at a time, the same questions in the same order, drawn from the Forrester Wave, published vendor documentation and our own testing against each product.
Prosopo competes in this market, so these pages also set out how it compares on each dimension a buyer evaluates: deployment model, detection depth, how a block is explained, who authors the rules, where data is processed and what it costs. Where a vendor leads on a capability, we say so and explain which buyers that suits.
The vendors
Standalone platform with published pricing: Prosopo. Prosopo Protect covers your forms, API and whole site from $1,990 a month, priced by number of sites rather than by request, and every block comes with a reason your team can read. Procaptcha, its form widget, is free to start.
Standalone platforms with a managed service: DataDome, HUMAN Security, Kasada, Arkose Labs, CHEQ and Netacea.
Verification products deployed against a form, and via WAF integrations as a full-page challenge: hCaptcha Enterprise and Google reCAPTCHA Enterprise.
Bundled into a CDN or WAF contract you may already hold: Cloudflare Bot Management, Akamai Bot Manager and Imperva Advanced Bot Protection. These are worth measuring first, because you are already paying for them.
Scoring users and account events rather than requests: Castle.
For analyst rankings, who Forrester placed where and what each vendor was marked down for, read the Forrester Wave Q2 2026 breakdown. This section is the evaluation detail behind those rankings.
How to read the vendor pages
Every page in this section answers the same eight questions in the same order, so you can put two of them side by side and get a real comparison rather than two differently-shaped marketing pages.
- What the product is, in one sentence.
- Where it leads.
- Where Forrester or its own customers identified gaps.
- What it costs, and whether that number is published or quoted.
- Where data is processed.
- How a block gets explained to your team.
- Who authors the rules, you or the vendor.
- Which buyers it suits, and how Prosopo compares.
Four questions worth asking
Four questions worth putting to every vendor on this list, Prosopo included. They tend to decide how the deployment goes six months in, and they rarely appear on a feature matrix.
When this blocks a real customer, what does your team see? A numeric score tells you a block happened. A detector name tells you what matched. Forrester marked CHEQ down for numeric reason codes that are difficult to interpret and reCAPTCHA Enterprise for lack of detail and limited drill-down. That gap shows up as support tickets.
Who writes the rule when the default misses something? Kasada and Arkose run this inside a managed service, a real advantage if you do not want to staff it and a real constraint if you do. Ask whether your own team can write and deploy a rule without opening a ticket.
Where does the raw event data live, and can you get it out? Most vendors give you an integration endpoint that returns a verdict. Fewer give you the requests, fingerprints and timing signals in a form your own analysts can query. The export path to your own SIEM should be confirmed in writing.
What happens to the price at renewal? Only DataDome publishes an entry number. Everything else in this market is quoted, so the second-year number is a negotiation you have not had yet.
How Prosopo compares
We sell two products. Procaptcha is a widget that checks each form submission on its own. Our Enterprise plan, Prosopo Protect, sees every request to your forms, API and site, and learns what normal and abusive traffic look like there, so it catches abuse a single form never sees. You add it as a script tag on your forms, an edge worker on Cloudflare Workers or AWS Lambda@Edge, or both. Both products share the same Access Rules and the same portal.
Every block comes with a reason your team can act on: Solver service detected, Inconsistent hardware readings for device, Automation driver present, Datacentre DNS resolver behind a residential IP. Not a risk band and not a policy label. Every block and challenge carries an X-Prosopo-Request-Id header, and allowed requests forward it to your origin, so any decision can be retrieved and reviewed by ID. The widget stack is open source, so the client code can be reviewed before deployment.
Prosopo scales horizontally across points of presence in the US, LATAM, APAC and the EU. Verification stays fast wherever your users are, and the service keeps running if one node fails. Data processing can be restricted entirely to the EU on Protect.
Prices are published. Enterprise (Prosopo Protect), for forms, API and site-wide, starts at $1,990 a month priced by number of sites with traffic not metered, and Custom, with 24/7 support, a custom SLA and data residency, at $3,300. Procaptcha for forms is free, then from $39 a month. See the pricing page.
On certifications: ISO 27001 certification is in progress, and SOC 2 is on the roadmap behind it. If your procurement process requires a completed attestation before signature, tell us your date and we will tell you whether we can meet it. Data location, subprocessors, audit logs and support terms are on the security page.
Comparing vendors and want a second opinion?
A Bot Exposure Assessment is a 30-minute call with an engineer. We look at your traffic, show where your current setup leaves gaps, and agree how a trial would be judged. Nothing to install first.
Questions
Something else? Ask an engineer.
Which bot protection vendors should be on my shortlist?
Start with what you already own: if you have a Cloudflare Enterprise or Akamai CDN contract, bot management is already in it, and measuring what gets through that is the cheapest first step. If what survives is stealth-headless automation, solver services or real-device farms, the specialists are the next list: Prosopo Protect, DataDome, HUMAN, Kasada, Arkose Labs, CHEQ and Netacea. Prosopo Protect is the one with a published site-wide price, from £1,500 a month. If you need to protect a form rather than a whole site, hCaptcha Enterprise and reCAPTCHA Enterprise are the widget options. If the abuse is concentrated on login and registration, Castle scores users rather than requests. For analyst rankings across these vendors, see our Forrester Wave Q2 2026 breakdown.
What is the difference between bot management and bot and agent trust management?
They are the same market. Forrester renamed it in late 2025 because AI agents now fall between real humans and unwanted bots, and a binary block-or-allow decision loses real customers who delegate tasks to an agent. The discipline is now about identifying the intent of every automated request rather than filtering automation as a class.
Which bot protection vendor publishes its pricing?
Almost none of them. DataDome publishes an Essentials tier at around $3,830/month. Cloudflare Bot Management is priced inside an Enterprise contract that is quoted, not listed. Kasada, Arkose Labs, HUMAN, Netacea, Akamai and Imperva quote on request. Prosopo publishes every price: site-wide Protect from £1,500 a month ($1,990), or £2,500 ($3,300) with 24/7 support, and Procaptcha for forms free, then from $39 a month.
Which vendors process data in the EU?
Netacea is UK-based. Prosopo is UK-incorporated and can restrict processing entirely to the EU on the Enterprise and Custom plans. DataDome operates from New York and Paris with EU points of presence. HUMAN, Kasada, Arkose Labs, CHEQ and Castle are primarily US-hosted, and reCAPTCHA Enterprise runs on Google Cloud. Each vendor's specific processing region should be confirmed in the data protection agreement.