While the dead internet theory may be considered a conspiracy theory, there are, in fact, a lot of bots on the internet, some good, some bad. Bot management solutions are necessary to ensure access and interactions with only the good ones. This comparison and analysis of the Bot Management SPARK MatrixTM for 2024 and 2025 includes major vendors and their rankings as per customer impact and technology excellence. These rankings can be a vital asset while choosing a product that is the best fit for your establishment. (If you are interested in analyses going further back, here is the analysis of the 2023 and 2024 SPARK Matrix TM.)
Comparing the Q3 2024 and Q3 2025 SPARK Matrices for Bot Management reveals a market that is consolidating around a smaller group of clear leaders, with some striking upgrades, exits, and quiet underperformers, compared to the 2024 matrix. The following table shows the changes.
| Vendor | 2024 Position | 2025 Position | Movement | Why They Moved (or Didn’t) |
| Radware | Leader (High Tech, High Impact) | Leader (Slightly higher Customer Impact) | Stable / Strengthened | Radware likely benefited from operational consistency rather than headline innovation. As bot attacks became stealthier and business-logic driven, customers rewarded defenses that scale cleanly without tuning fatigue or user friction. Stability became a competitive advantage in 2025. |
| Cloudflare | Leader | Leader (Improved Tech + Impact) | Upward within Leaders | Cloudflare’s gains reflect platform gravity more than pure bot innovation. Tight integration with CDN, Zero Trust, API protection, and WAF made bot management a default capability rather than a separate purchase, which increasingly matches buyer expectations. |
| Akamai | Leader | Leader (Marginal change) | Flat | Akamai continues to likely benefit from telemetry depth, but the lack of dramatic upward movement suggests the market now expects behavioral deception resistance, not just visibility. |
| DataDome | Leader (Lower right) | Leader (Stronger placement) | Clear Upward Move | DataDome’s rise likely reflects market validation of its revenue-protection narrative. As bot abuse shifted toward scalping, scraping, and credential abuse, vendors aligned to fraud and commerce outcomes gained influence over generic security-first messaging. |
| F5 | Borderline Leader / Strong Contender | Leader (Improved Tech Excellence) | Incremental Upward | F5 has improved technically, but likely suffers from perception baggage. Buyers increasingly expect bot protection to be natively edge- and API-aligned; F5’s challenge likely remains strategic framing rather than capability depth. |
| HUMAN | Leader / Strong Contender boundary | Strong Contender (More central) | Slight Downward / Repositioning | HUMAN remains strong in intelligence, but the market is less tolerant of defenses that introduce friction or require explicit verification. Intelligence without invisible enforcement is becoming harder to justify at scale. |
| Arkose Labs | Leader (Lower right) | Leader (Lower right, reduced impact) | Soft Decline | Arkose’s likely reliance on interactive challenges increasingly clashes with human-assisted automation and CAPTCHA-solving services. The market now treats challenge-response as a part of primary defense. |
| Kasada | Strong Contender | Strong Contender (Higher Impact) | Upward Momentum | Kasada likely benefited from the shift toward behavioral, non-intrusive bot mitigation. Silent detection aligns well with 2025 buyer priorities, though scale and platform competition remain structural challenges. |
| Netacea | Strong Contender | Strong Contender (Improved) | Upward | Netacea’s rise likelyreflects clearer articulation of enterprise outcomes and improved positioning against fraud-driven bot abuse. However, mid-tier vendors face increasing pressure from bundled platform offerings. |
| Cequence Security | Strong Contender | Strong Contender (Stable) | Flat | Cequence’s likely API-centric strength keeps it relevant, but the market is converging API abuse, bot management, and application security into unified stacks — compressing standalone differentiation. |
| Imperva | Strong Contender | Strong Contender (Slightly lower relative impact) | Relative Decline | Imperva’s legacy credibility buys time, but buyers are prioritizing behavioral precision and native edge enforcement. |
| Link11 | Not present | Strong Contender (Lower Tech Excellence) | New Entrant | Link11’s entry reflects convergence between DDoS mitigation and bot management. While credible, it still lags behavioral depth compared to established leaders, positioning it as an emerging rather than defining player. |
| hCaptcha | Leader | Leader (Lower Impact) | Flat / Slight Decline | hCaptcha remains visible but is likely to be increasingly challenged by human-assisted automation. The market is shifting away from single-step human verification toward continuous behavioral assessment. |
| AppsFlyer | Strong Contender | Not Present | Missing | AppsFlyer’s bot-related capabilities appear increasingly adjacent rather than core as the market consolidates around security-first and platform-embedded vendors. |
| Reblaze | Aspirant / Lower quadrant | Not Present | Missing | Reblaze’s absence in 2025 suggests limited traction against more behaviorally advanced or platform-native competitors. |
Now, let us analyze each quadrant:
SPARK Leader
Both 2024 and 2025 leaders’ quadrants remain populated by familiar names, such as Radware, Cloudflare, Akamai, DataDome, F5, Arkose Labs, and hCaptcha. But treating this as continuity misses the deeper shift. In 2024, leadership was still largely defined by detection accuracy, challenge success rates, and threat intelligence depth. By 2025, those factors are already assumed to be essential. The key differentiator is how invisibly bot management operates within a broader platform.
Radware, Cloudflare, and Akamai sit most comfortably in this new definition of leadership. Their bot defenses are not experienced as products; they are experienced as the absence of problems. That matters in a world where bot traffic is deliberately engineered to look legitimate and where false positives directly impact revenue.
DataDome’s stronger placement in 2025 reflects a second path to leadership: business alignment. Instead of proximity to traffic, DataDome ties bot mitigation directly to financial abuse scenarios that commerce teams care about. Its rise shows that leadership can come from specialization, but only when that specialization maps cleanly to revenue protection.
By contrast, vendors like Arkose Labs and hCaptcha remain in the Leaders quadrant, but less comfortably. Their presence increasingly feels conditional. As human-assisted automation erodes the effectiveness of challenge-response models, CAPTCHA adoption is insufficient to ensure leadership here. The quadrant suggests relevance AND scrutiny.
In short, the Leaders quadrant in 2025 is not about stopping bots better. It is about being structurally embedded enough that customers cannot imagine removing you without redesigning their stack.
QKS Group Security Analyst Lokesh Biswal points out a critical change from 2024 to 2025: “Bot management has shifted from a visible, point security control to an embedded, behavior-driven capability that operates silently across digital platforms. Market leadership is now defined less by raw detection accuracy and more by frictionless enforcement, platform integration, and clear business alignment. Vendors delivering invisible protection at scale strengthened their positions, while challenge-centric and loosely integrated approaches faced increasing scrutiny.“
Strong Contenders:
The Strong Contenders quadrant is where the market’s tension is most visible.
Vendors like HUMAN, Kasada, Netacea, Cequence Security, Imperva, and Link11 occupy this space. This is the most strategically uncomfortable quadrant to sit in in 2025. Many of these vendors are technically excellent, but the market is now drifting away from standalone decisions.
HUMAN’s position reflects this dilemma well. Its intelligence-driven approach remains respected, but the quadrant placement suggests that intelligence alone is insufficient unless enforcement is frictionless and deeply integrated. Buyers are less willing to tolerate verification flows, even when they work.
Kasada and Netacea benefit from the behavioral-first shift, but the quadrant highlights a different risk: platform compression. As Cloudflare, Akamai, and others bundle bot protection into broader offerings, Strong Contenders must justify why they deserve a separate budget line.
Cequence Security’s stable placement underscores its API abuse strength, yet also raises a strategic question the quadrant cannot answer: will API-centric bot protection remain distinct, or be absorbed into unified application security platforms? The longer that question remains unresolved, the harder the upward movement becomes.
Imperva’s continued presence here signals relevance, but not momentum. The quadrant reflects a market that increasingly differentiates between having bot management and being known for it.
The Strong Contenders quadrant in 2025 is less a stepping stone to leadership and more a pressure chamber. Vendors here must either align with platforms, redefine value, or accept long-term marginalization.
Aspirants:
One of the most striking changes between the two matrices is how quiet the Aspirants quadrant has become.
In 2024, vendors like Reblaze still appeared here, signalling room for growth and experimentation. By 2025, the absence of many smaller or less differentiated players suggests that the market has raised its minimum credibility threshold.
Bot management is no longer forgiving of partial solutions. Vendors without demonstrable behavioral depth, enterprise references, or integration pathways simply do not register. This is not consolidation through acquisition, it is consolidation through irrelevance.
The emptiness of the Aspirants quadrant sends a blunt message: vendors will likely struggle to “grow into” relevance. It is either operating at platform scale or an uphill battle against embedded incumbents.