reCAPTCHA icon
reCAPTCHA icon

reCAPTCHA

 127 likes

reCAPTCHA is a free service that protects your site from spam and abuse, using risk analysis techniques to tell humans and bots apart.

reCAPTCHA screenshot 1

License model

  • FreemiumProprietary

Application type

Country of Origin

  • US flagUnited States

Platforms

  • Online
1.5 / 5 Avg rating (10)
127likes
11comments
0news articles

Features

Suggest and vote on features
  1.  Spam Filter
  2.  Captcha Recognition

 Tags

reCAPTCHA News & Activities

Highlights All activities

Recent News

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Recent activities

  • App icon
    Kezxo added reCAPTCHA as alternative to Anubis (anti-bot)
    about 1 month ago
  • App icon
    braky added reCAPTCHA as alternative to Captcha
    2 months ago
  • App icon
    POX added reCAPTCHA as alternative to Cap Captcha
    2 months ago
  • alternativeto-dingo898 reviewed reCAPTCHA  
    3 months ago

    Useless against bots. Disguised User Tracking.

  • App icon
    sanson added reCAPTCHA as alternative to CaptchaText
    4 months ago
  • kusarebaita reviewed reCAPTCHA  
    7 months ago

    Making humans 'prove' they aren't robots by forcing them to act like robots, so that the real robots could use the data to become more human-like. For your own protection, I might add!

  • App icon
    K0RR added reCAPTCHA as alternative to mCaptcha
    9 months ago
  • petujepef-gujasude reviewed reCAPTCHA  
    10 months ago

    Might have worked circa 2005 but is complete garbage today. Don't waste your time.

Show all activities

reCAPTCHA information

  • Developed by

    US flagGoogle
  • Licensing

    Proprietary and Freemium product.
  • Pricing

    Subscription that costs up to $9000 per month + free version with limited functionality.
  • Rating

    Average rating of 1.5
  • Alternatives

    26 alternatives listed
  • Supported Languages

    • English

AlternativeTo Category

Security & Privacy

Our users have written 11 comments and reviews about reCAPTCHA, and it has gotten 127 likes

reCAPTCHA was added to AlternativeTo by Sedoe on Apr 28, 2011 and this page was last updated Feb 13, 2023.

Comments and Reviews

   
 Post comment/review
Comment summary: Critiques of reCAPTCHA highlight privacy concerns, as it is seen as a method to train Google's algorithms using crowdsourced data. Users express frustration with the difficulty and intrusiveness of the CAPTCHAs, which often block legitimate users and require excessive interactions. Although some view it as safer for small businesses compared to hosting their own solutions, many note its inefficiency and call for alternatives due to user inconvenience and privacy issues.
Top Positive Comment
ab1
Jul 30, 2022
-3

reCAPTCHA icon reCAPTCHA is safer than hosting your own CAPTCHA for most individuals and small businesses.

Top Negative Comment
PoorPocketsMcNewHold
Apr 13, 2019
12

Maybe the most popular, but far from being the better tho.

  • Block user blacklisting Google.
  • Block user using alternative internet protocols (I2P, TOR, for talking only the most popular.
  • Blocking people who block trackers, or people using some browser settings.
  • Can waste minutes to the user complete the whole CAPTCHA, by pretending multiples times that the user failed on multiple test. And the worse for a CAPTCHA :
  • It can be bypassed, Here´s for example Buster, and entirely free browser extension, that ironically use a couple of (API), including own Google ones to bypass their entire services.
breakup_google
Jun 28, 2019

there are also some darkweb services to bypass it which I now pay for on some sites I use more often.

Casper Rivers
Mar 29, 2025
0

Useless against bots. Disguised User Tracking.

kusarebaita
Nov 30, 2024
0

Making humans 'prove' they aren't robots by forcing them to act like robots, so that the real robots could use the data to become more human-like. For your own protection, I might add!

Peter Jepef
Sep 6, 2024
1

Might have worked circa 2005 but is complete garbage today. Don't waste your time.

alquimista
Apr 1, 2020
6

A horrible and privacy intrusive solution blocking common users and making users work for Google.

An example of technical monopoly where there are very few other viable and privacy friendly solutions.

breakup_google
Jun 28, 2019
3

since trump administration cancelled protection of users from ISP which allows all ISP to harvest surfing behavior of clients [to sell] it is foolish to use internets without VPN. I use VPN services from companies well rated by Torrent Freak. I am not a pirate or a spammer. I am also not politically correct because I will not comply with intellectual tyranny either.

I would no more disable VPN than I would adblock whitelist a site using third party ads

#deleteGoogle #privacyraping

for everything else there's F'google http://uncaptcha.cs.umd.edu/

[Edited by breakup_google, June 28]

[Edited by breakup_google, June 30]

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7 of 11 comments

What is reCAPTCHA?

reCAPTCHA is a CAPTCHA system that enables web hosts to distinguish between human and automated access to websites. The latest version aims to have as little user interaction as possible, using machine learning to analyse a user's actions and determine if they are a bot, and if they fail that test they are asked to identify typically road-related items, which can help both to identify humans and train Google's self driving car project.

The original version asked users to decipher hard to read text or match images. Version 2 also asked users to decipher text or match images if the analysis of cookies and canvas rendering suggested the page was being downloaded automatically. Since version 3, reCAPTCHA will never interrupt users and is intended to run automatically when users load pages or click buttons. reCAPTCHA is owned by Google.

The original iteration of the service was a mass collaboration platform designed for the digitization of books, particularly those that were too illegible to be scanned by computers. The verification prompts utilized pairs of words from scanned pages, with one known word used as a control for verification, and the second used to crowdsource the reading of an uncertain word. reCAPTCHA was originally developed by Luis von Ahn, David Abraham, Manuel Blum, Michael Crawford, Ben Maurer, Colin McMillen, and Edison Tan at Carnegie Mellon University's main Pittsburgh campus. It was acquired by Google in September 2009. The system helped to digitize the archives of The New York Times, and was subsequently used by Google Books for similar purposes.

The system is free for 1 million calls monthly, and $1 per 1,000 after that (up to 10,000,000).