Top 5 Reasons Companies Choose Arkose Labs Over reCAPTCHA Enterprise

by Ed Gower on February 11, 2022

Stopping automated attacks is key to protecting businesses and users in today’s threat landscape. Bots are vital to attackers being able to launch attacks at scale and profitably. To stop bot-driven attacks, many large companies rely on reCAPTCHA Enterprise, a version of google’s reCAPTCHA that claims to work invisibly on the back end to stop bots and allow good users to authenticate without friction. However, there are a number of flaws with reCAPTCHA Enterprise. In this blog, we will examine the differences between it and Arkose Labs’ market-leading bot prevention platform.

1. Resilience to Advanced Bots

When detecting bad bot traffic, reCAPTCHA Enterprise relies on using the same challenges they have always used. So any business deploying reCAPTCHA Enterprise is still going to have only the same old reCAPTCHA v2 grid with picking crosswalks available to them if they want to serve a challenge to suspected suspicious traffic. These have already been proven to be easily bypassed by even the most basic off-the-shelf bots.

Arkose Labs, however, creates context-based, 3D enforcement challenges utilizing the latest machine vision innovations that even the most advanced bots are not able to solve. This undermines the profitability of attacks, ensuring that your websites and apps become less viable attack surfaces, providing long-term protection against sophisticated attacks.

2. User Experience

reCAPTCHA Enterprise has attempted to create a more user-friendly experience, but it still has issues in this regard. For example, when a user with a high risk score is identified reCAPTCHA Enterprise clients can either decide to block that user completely, cause them to use multi-factor authentication or utilize the older and irritating reCAPTCHA v2 challenges. All of these options cause undue friction to good users that potentially get caught in its snare.

Arkose Labs’s AI-powered platform performs smart but invisible risk assessments resulting in a frictionless experience for good users, whilst being impossible for fraudsters to profitably break the security defenses. Implementing Arkose Labs has provided businesses with a 70% uptick in good user experience, 83.3% reduced friction for site visitors and 96% reduced friction on account registration.

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3. Privacy

No reCAPTCHA version is GDPR compliant, as it uses cookies and personal data to calculate their risk score. A quick search on how to stop frequent reCAPTCHAs advises the best way is to log in to Google or have your cookies enabled in browser settings. Anyone who does not provide access to their personal data to Google thus experiences more friction.

Arkose Labs is fully GDPR compliant and the only personally identifiable information used in our assessment is the IP address rather than tracking any browsing history.

4. Data Intelligence / Trust & Transparency

The reCAPTCHA Enterprise dashboard is able to show some data on the distribution of user scores for each action and will return a maximum of 7 data points for businesses to understand their user’s risk score. This, however, is not enough for customers that need a feedback loop in order to have trust in the accuracy of their risk classifications or scores.

Arkose Labs, on-the-other-hand, provides real-time logging (RTL) with detailed logs of user activity and full transparency to the 59 data attributes that are used in the risk analysis. This provides actionable insights facilitating immediate adaptation to changing attack patterns.

5. Customer Service

Google does not offer a specific reCAPTCHA support service other than online static resources. It also delivers no actionable insights but rather acts as “black box.” The only alternative is to pay for Google Cloud Support which is designed for customers using their cloud hosting.

Arkose Labs are true partners to our clients. We support them with a dedicated technical account manager and hands-on 24/7 Security Operations Center staffed by a team of experts. We provide a commercial SLA against automated attacks at scale, and the industry’s only warranty protecting businesses up to $1 million against credential stuffing attacks.

Arkose Labs ensures that you are providing a good experience to your users whilst still protecting your business from fraudsters, not just today but in the long-term. To learn more about how we can help or to book a demo, click here.

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