PerimeterX 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.

Overview of PerimeterX Platform

PerimeterX platform includes the following 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, formjacking, 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.

If you’re considering a suitable alternative, like PerimeterX, you will find lots of them. However, you want to ensure you get the same functionality from an alternative tool. So, we’ve compiled a list of the eight best PerimeterX options. Hopefully, this will guide you in the process of selecting the right one for your environment.

The Best PerimeterX Alternatives

1. Qualys Cloud Platform

Qualys is one of the first cloud-based information security and compliance solutions providers. Qualys security services include vulnerability management, detection & response, threat protection, patch management, endpoint detection & response, cloud security assessment, web app scanning, and a firewall.

The Qualys Cloud Platform, combined with its lightweight Cloud Agents, Virtual Scanners, and Network Analysis capabilities, brings together all four critical elements of effective vulnerability management into a single app. As a result, Qualys vulnerability management helps organizations discover every asset in their environment, assesses these assets for the latest vulnerabilities, and automatically deploys remediation.

Qualys Web Application Scanning (WAS) provides automated crawling and testing of web applications and APIs to find and fix security vulnerabilities, including cross-site scripting (XSS) and SQL injection.  A free 30-day trial of the Qualys  Platform is available on request.

Pros:

  • Supports continuous monitoring and scanning for vulnerabilities
  • Lightweight, operates as an online service
  • Supports automated remediation of threats
  • Great user interface

Cons:

  • Not the best option for smaller networks

2. Barracuda Cloud Application 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 essential tools include Web Application Firewall (WAF), WAF-as-a-Service, API Security, Cloud Security Guardian (security policy automation), and Bot Protection.

Barracuda 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 trial of the Barracuda application security solution is also available on request.

  • The interface is easy to use and scales well when monitoring multiple networks and wide-scale access rules

  • Features a built-in IDS to help alert to port scans and other pre-attack events

  • Ideal for more complex networks – great for enterprises

  • The NexGen Admin dashboard is highly customizable and offers many different ways to report and visualize firewall insights

  • Suited more for enterprises, many features can be too much for smaller networks

  • No free trial must manually request an evaluation version from their sales team

3. Invicti

Invicti, formerly known as Netsparker, is an easy-to-use application security solution that enables you to scan web applications, websites, and services for security flaws. It uses a heuristic-based approach to detect vulnerabilities, making it easier to identify zero-day vulnerabilities in web applications.

Invicti also uses a proprietary technology called Proof-Based Scanning to safely exploit identified vulnerabilities and automatically create a proof-of-exploit to show that it’s not a false positive. With Proof-Based Scanning technology, you can build DAST into your software development lifecycle (SDLC) to eliminate vulnerabilities before they can reach production.

The vulnerabilities Invicti scans for are listed in the Top 10 list of most critical security risks. It’s targeted at small and medium businesses and doesn’t require deep IT security knowledge to use. The product is available in three editions: Standard, Team, and Enterprise. In addition, a free online demo is available.

  • Features a highly intuitive and insightful admin dashboard

  • Supports any web applications, web service, or API, regardless of framework

  • Provides streamlined reports with prioritized vulnerabilities and remediation steps

  • Eliminates false positives by safely exploiting vulnerabilities via read-only methods

  • Integrates into dev ops easily providing quick feedback to prevent future bugs

  • Would like to see a trial rather than a demo

4. Acunetix

Acunetix is an automated web application security testing tool designed to help small and mid-size organizations find and fix exploitable vulnerabilities that put their web applications at risk of attack. Acunetix automatically discovers and creates a list of your websites, web applications, and APIs and scans them for security holes. Acunetix comprises the following key components and features:

  • AcuSensor technology An optional component of Acunetix, which you can use for free with all product licenses.

  • AcuMonitor A service that allows the scanner to detect out-of-band vulnerabilities. This service is automatically used by out-of-band checks and requires no installation or configuration, only simple registration for on-premises versions.

  • DeepScan Technology Acunetix DeepScan technology enables it to crawl and scan even the most complex website or web application to find all possible entry points.

The product is available in three editions: Standard, Premium, and Acunetix 360, designed to meet the needs of a specific segment of end-users. All three editions can scan for the OWASP Top 10 and are particularly strong at detecting web application security issues such as cross-site scripting, SQL injection, reflected XSS, CSRF attacks, and directory traversal, among others. A free demo is available on request.

  • Designed specifically for application security

  • Integrates with a large number of other tools such as OpenVAS

  • Can detect and alert when misconfigurations are discovered

  • Leverages automation to immediately stop threats and escalate issues based on the severity

  • Would like to see a trial version for testing

5. Akamai Bot Manager

Akamai Bot Manager is designed to help 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 such as 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 abnormal behavior that distinguishes between human and bot
  • Browser fingerprinting Collects identifying client browser information and analyzes them to identify anomalies that indicate an automated bot
  • HTTP anomaly detection Employs a risk scoring model to inspect HTTP requests for patterns and anomalies that indicate they were generated by an automated bot attempting to disguise itself as a legitimate bot
  • 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 it hits 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.

  • Block multiple types of DDoS attacks such as SYN, UDP, and POST floods

  • Offers advanced insights after an attempted attack to help improve security posture

  • Can automatically reduce attack surfaces before an attack

  • Would like to see a free downloadable trial

  • Smaller networks may not use features such as hybrid cloud protection

6. Imperva Bot Protection

Imperva is a cyber security software and services company protecting enterprise data and applications in the cloud or on-premise. 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 impacting application performance or user experience. In addition, 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.

  • Combines in-depth audits and compliance tests with breach detection features

  • Offers highly technical compliance auditing features, great for enterprise environments

  • Available both as a cloud product or on-premise solution

  • Many features are not applicable to smaller organizations that don’t have to monitor compliance

Table 1.0 | Imperva’s Advanced Bot Protection deployment options

Table 1.0 above describes the available deployment options. In addition, a personalized online demo and a free trial are available on request.

7. Signal Sciences

Signal Sciences is a SaaS-based security technology company that provides a Web Application and API Protection (WAAP) Platform. Signal Sciences was named a 2021 Gartner Peer Insights Customers’ Choice for WAF.

Some of the critical 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 impacts 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.

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

  • Sleek interface – easy to use

  • Does a good job of simplifying complex RASP environments

  • Lightweight – carefully avoids impacting app performance

  • Can detect API abuse, account takeover, and other threats

  • Can take time to fully explore all options available

8. DataDome

DataDome provides cloud-based online fraud and bot management services that protect mobile apps, websites, and APIs from web scraping, scalping, credential stuffing, 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 impacting 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 impacting the customer experience. A personalized online demo and a free 30-day trial are available on request.

  • Simple yet intuitive interface – highly customizable
  • Compleltely cloud-based – very flexible
  • Uses both signature and behavioral detection methods
  • Supports both automated and manual scans