What is a CAPTCHA?

We first understand what is captcha then Let’s deep dive into the top 11 Recaptcha alternatives.

A CAPTCHA stands for ‘Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart.’ It is a test that only humans can pass. So, with this, you can keep the bots astray from your website.

One can use CAPTCHAs to avoid spam and check that the people who access a website are human. So, in general, it is used to prevent bots from spamming a website or a comment section.

CAPTCHAs are based on computer science ideas: How can a computer tell whether a human is typing a message or a computer program?

The answer is that computers cannot distinguish between a human and a bot. The only way computers can mark the difference is by verifying the text typed by the human against the text generated by a computer. That is, the text has to be encrypted. However, computers aren’t allowed to look inside the encrypted text to see what it is. So in this way, humans can pass the CAPTCHA, but bots cannot.

What is Recaptcha?

ReCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system owned by Google. Luis Von Ahn developed it in 2009. Most of the websites use ReCAPTCHA to prevent any malicious activity by using bots. As per the latest survey by SimilarTech, more than 3.7 million websites use reCAPTCHA. And that is huge! But there are a few other Google ReCAPTCHA alternatives to protect against spammers and frauds.

The top 11 Recaptcha alternatives are as follows

Hcaptcha:

In the race of providing new alternatives to reCAPTCHA, Hcaptcha came up with a unique method to protect against bots. It gives the most logical challenges to incoming traffic, which are easily solvable by humans but not by the bots. They provide options to the publishers to choose whether to keep a text question or a photo question or something else of their choice. This free-to-use firewall is a decentralized tool that runs on the Ethereum blockchain, and HUMAN Protocol powers it. So hCAPTCHA is a tool that minimizes human frustration during entry in the websites and maximizes protection against bot attacks. 

KeyCAPTCHA

KeyCAPTCHA is one of the CAPTCHA generators. It is free to use the tool. It is used in WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, vBulletin, and other PHP websites. This tool differs from reCAPTCHA because it uses simple puzzles including images, unlike reCAPTCHA, which is easily solvable and less frustrating for the users. Its installation is also quite simple. You only have to their website and install the keyCAPTCHA for your website. They also provide a demo for the same on their website.

Nucaptcha:

There are a lot of open-source reCAPTCHA alternatives out there, and each one serves a different approach. One of its examples is Nucaptcha. ReCAPTCHA is used to test humans and call the odd ones bots who fail to answer it correctly. But Nucaptcha uses reverse theory, which means it examines suspicious bots only, letting humans go through. Even if a bot solves a threat, Nucaptcha detects it by looking at their behavior. They also provide the companies to choose the type of test according to their needs.

Datadome:

When talking about the Google captcha alternative, we should not forget Datadome. Datadome brings a new type of protection against bot attacks, scraping, card cracking, fake account creation, data leak, etc. It goes through a vulnerability scan on the site and detects and detains the bot’s activity before it attacks. It analyzes both technical and behavioral data to maintain a smooth surfing experience for real human users.

Radware Bot manager:

When discussing the Google reCAPTCHA alternative, the Radware bot manager gives a tough competition to a regular reCAPTCHA test. ReCAPTCHA fails to detect bots that act like humans, attack the websites, steal their data, and interfere in their performance. But the Radware Bot manager differentiates between good bot, bad bot, and human users. It suspects malicious behavior and neutralizes it.

Akamai bot manager:

Akamai is one of the free reCAPTCHA alternatives. 

It detects unknown bots using AI models for user behavior analysis and browser fingerprinting. It gives you a complete real-time analysis of the bot traffic on the website. They detect and manage all kinds of bot attacks. Akamai has 1500+ bots listed in their directory, which analyzes 130 TB of bot attacks daily. One can try Akamai bot manager by checking out their website.

PerimeterX Bot defender:

PerimeterX bot defender is a behavior-based bot defender that protects websites, mobile applications, and API against malware attacks and reduces the risk of data breaches. Also, it increases operational efficiency. It detects the highest sophisticated bots across the internet to provide the uttermost security. PerimeterX bot defender detects and redirects bots to decoy sites. It has a business Insights Dashboard that provides detailed insights into traffic on your website.

Reblaze bot management:

Reblaze is also one of the crucial bot management systems. It blocks the malicious traffic in the cloud before it reaches the protected network. It has a processing latency of about 0.5 ms. In its security, web applications and API receives legitimate requests only. Incoming web traffic has a series of different challenges. Failure in any challenge results in restrictions to the requestor. It covers all types of challenges ranging from Primary filtering to biometric behavioral analysis. At last, it only allows legitimate traffic to pass through.

Imperva bot management:

Imperva is also one of the emerging security systems against automated bot attacks without affecting critical traffic flow. It detects the bots and adds them to the violators’ database. Imperva also catches the botnets that are hiding behind shared IP space. It identifies the bot activity before eliminating them. It also takes care of incoming traffic for the website, unlike the reCAPTCHA system, which cannot distinguish between human traffic and bots and can result in the loss of real-time users.

HUMAN:

HUMAN investigates more than 10 trillion interactions every week to make sure the host’s website remains threat-free. New sophisticated bots impersonate human behavior to evade the target. HUMAN has successfully detained such bots also. It uses a multilayered detection methodology to detect suspicious activity with unmatched speed and accuracy. After examining, it passes the ‘bot or not’ decision. One failure and the bot is declared inHUMAN.

F5 solutions:

F5 comes with protection against data scraping, card frauding, inventory hoarding, etc. It collects all the requests from incoming traffic and sends them to the cloud. Whenever a threat is detected, only the legitimate traffic is allowed to pass. It uses multi-level technology to defeat online fraud and bot evasion. F5 protects over 4 billion transactions per week. It gives a unique ID to each device visiting the site. It identifies and stops attempts that use compromised credentials. Hence in this way, it blocks bots who emulate human behavior and try to jump into the website.

Kasada

Kasada’s bot mitigation solution never relies on CAPTCHAs or any form of authentication on behalf of legitimate human users. This eliminates friction-causing tactics that are easily evaded by sophisticated bots. With Kasada, malicious bot behavior is identified from the first request, stopping bots from accessing the web, mobile, and API channels, before they can do their damage. Instead of placing the burden on users to prove they’re human, it instead applies zero trust principles to identify automation and strikes back with invisible challenges to make bot attacks too expensive to conduct at scale.

Do you know any other captcha that is not included in the above list? Please comment below :

Read more on how captcha solutions are used.