Arkose Labs: Funcaptcha, telltales, and the self-service gap

Arkose is the vendor whose challenge you have probably seen even if you have never bought it. The Funcaptcha puzzles are widely deployed on consumer signup flows. Underneath the challenge is a serious identity-fraud platform.

What Arkose is

Arkose Titan, shipped March 2026, is a unified platform covering Bot Manager, Email Intelligence, Device Identity, Server-Side Edge, Agent Trust Manager and Scraping Protection. California-based, with an identity-fraud centre of gravity rather than a pure bot-mitigation one.

Where it leads

Two things Forrester calls out. Telltales, the AI-generated explanations of which detection signals fired, and bundled pricing with the SOC included. The second is a genuine advantage over CHEQ, which Forrester marked down for requiring customers to buy each product separately, and over Netacea's multi-part pricing structure.

The Funcaptcha challenge itself is a real asset in one specific case: when you want a visible, adversarial challenge that is expensive for a solver farm to get through at scale, and you can absorb the friction on the user. Consumer consumer signup is where that trade-off works.

Where Forrester identified gaps

Marketing-analytics and transaction-assurance dashboards lag the Leaders. More interestingly, Arkose customers told Forrester they want more self-service configuration options for expert users.

That is worth weighing in an evaluation. It is not a criticism of detection quality; it comes from experienced users who know what they want to change and cannot change it directly.

What it costs

Quoted, with the SOC in the bundle.

Where data is processed

US-based. European buyers with an EU-only processing requirement should establish the available regions early. On the Prosopo Enterprise plan, processing can be held to the EU.

How a block gets explained

Telltales, a clear improvement on a bare score. The distinction worth drawing is between a generated summary of what a model saw and the literal string that matched. Prosopo returns the second. Whether that difference matters to you depends on whether the person reading it is writing an incident review or a status update.

Who authors the rules

Arkose, inside the managed service, with configuration on top. The customer feedback in the Wave is that expert users want more control than the product currently gives them.

Which buyers Arkose suits

Arkose is the stronger fit if account-takeover and identity fraud are the primary problem rather than scraping or inventory abuse, if you want email intelligence and device identity from the same vendor, if a visible adversarial challenge on signup is acceptable to your product team. It also suits procurement requiring completed SOC 2 and ISO 27001 attestations today; Prosopo's ISO 27001 certification is in progress.

How Prosopo compares

If you are one of the expert users in that Forrester comment. Prosopo Access Rules are authored by your team and apply on save, matching on IP CIDR, ASN, country, User-Agent, headers, JA4 TLS fingerprint and OS.

If you want proof of work with a puzzle fallback rather than an image challenge as the default escalation. Prosopo reserves image challenges for traffic the detector already believes is automated.

If you want the underlying events, not just the explanation. Every request, fingerprint and rule firing is filterable and exportable to Datadog, Splunk, Elastic or Sentinel.

Side by side

Longer write-up in top Arkose Labs alternatives and the Forrester Wave breakdown.