G2 is the place you go for software, and it’s also the place where software buyers return to leave their reviews.
Our data ensures prospective software purchasers have meaningful user feedback on how products have helped reviewers in their pursuits. It can be difficult, however, to look more broadly at overarching features that reviewers mention across an entire category.
Even more difficult is the task of discerning whether or not certain features are living up to their hype or not meeting expectations. Once G2 aggregates that data, we can unlock these contextual insights.
When it comes to products represented in G2’s Biometric Authentication category, buyers were clear about what needs the market is meeting and where it is currently falling short.
Though the list of pros and cons was extensive, the following list represents the three most common sentiments among positive and negative reviews across all products in the Biometric Authentication categories.
G2 collected all the reviews used for these insights within the last 18 months, as reviews older than this have lost more than half their weight per our updated scoring methodologies.
G2 buyers are clear about what they like about their biometric authentication products. The top three favorites are ease of use, customer support, and integration compatibilities. Let's dive deeper into each of them below.
By a wide margin, ease of use was the single most mentioned feature reviewers spoke to in their biometric authentication product reviews—over 40%, in fact.
The reviewers commented on various concepts, including product implementation, intuitive interfaces, and easily customizable features.
At 15% of all positive remarks, customer support ranked as the second most prevalent point of praise that biometric authentication products shared.
Most often mentioned during initial product set-up, reviewers agreed that product support teams among biometric authentication product vendors made setting up these powerful tools as simple as possible. A fifth of these reviews made a point of mentioning that these teams were also helpful and responsive after set-up when it came to troubleshooting and general inquiries.
Implementing new products as quickly as possible helps organizations achieve a faster return on investment.
The fact that biometric authentication product producers have highly effective customer support teams in place across the market is a huge win for buyers.
Biometric authentication product reviews mentioning product integrations were a close third as far as total overall positive capabilities are concerned across the entire category.
A total of 14% of all positive remarks mentioned that biometric authentication products integrated well with other products.
The specific integrations buyers mentioned were know your customer (KYC) solutions, onboarding programs, mobile device solutions, web applications, and more.
G2 buyers are also clear about what they don't like about their biometric authentication products. The top three mentions are pricing-to-features ratio, security concerns, and integration difficulties. Let's dive deeper into each of them below.
At 12% of all criticisms, the pricing of biometric authentication products versus their capabilities was the top concern among buyers.
Buyers mentioned a variety of feature issues, including the inability of many of these products to be customized to the specific needs of the buyers’ interests.
Another concern was the lack of differentiation between biometric authentication products and the biometric authentication features natively integrated into other, more encompassing platforms.
The lack of customization and differentiation left many buyers feeling the pricing model currently did not support the value of the purchase. Compounding these problems were these products’ hardware needs, such as fingerprint and iris scanners, to extract as much value from these solutions as possible.
Again, other operating systems that are more encompassing—including those that computer manufacturers make—have the advantage of integrating these hardware necessities into their physical products.
All these concerns merge to make buyers, especially those at smaller organizations with smaller budgets, feel uncertain that products within the biometric authentication market may not have a quick enough ROI to make the enhanced security measures worth the capital investments in both software and hardware.
Buyers created a thread in 7% of negative reviews regarding security concerns biometric authentication products may actually pose.
Although these products are designed to create an extra layer of security using biometrics that is more difficult to steal or replicate than traditional passwords, these concerns were mostly related to how these products store biometric credentials to perform the authentication itself and how secure that storage is.
Reviewers mentioned products that they’d seen in the news for security breaches, which tainted their confidence in this market of products as a whole.
Other users commented on interface issues and lag times with these products, which gave reviewers pause when wondering how secure these products may actually be.
Despite integration capabilities being one of biometric authentication products’ biggest positives among reviewers, the difficulties buyers have experienced while attempting to integrate these products with other products present themselves as buyers’ third highest dissatisfaction.
About 6% of buyers left reviews speaking to the trouble they’ve encountered when trying to retrofit these products into their existing technology stacks. These difficulties range from lag times due to biometric authentication products being incapable of natively integrating with web browsers to difficulties integrating these products with mobile apps.
Overall, buyers expressed little dissatisfaction with integration inconveniences due to the better security the products enabled.
While clunky integration extensions, third-party applications, short lag times, and other hiccups created the third most prevalent uniform complaint, buyers largely felt these were only minor prices to pay.
Important to note is also the collective sentiment buyers felt that developers would be able to streamline these issues in the near future.
Despite the specificity of criticisms regarding biometric authentication products, general buyer sentiment for these powerful tools was quite positive.
Around 26% of all reviews declined to leave any negative feedback regarding this market of products, citing that customer support had been helpful with any issues they’d encountered or that they hadn’t hit any snags during the purchase, set-up, and implementation process.
The significantly heightened security barriers these tools create far outweigh their drawbacks—for businesses that are able to afford them.
Pricing, especially relative to features and hardware constraints, remains the single greatest pain point among buyers.
If developers truly want to extend these dynamic security solutions across organizations of all sizes with varying budgets, a solution appears to be needed to meet security teams and their financial advisors at the same time.
To get a better understanding of how biometric security products can better security practices and bolster data protection, take a look at the common features among products in G2’s Biometric Authentication category.
Edited by Jigmee Bhutia
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