What is the best value CAPTCHA in 2024?
Millions of websites worldwide use CAPTCHA services to protect their websites from spam and abuse. The most popular CAPTCHA service is Google reCAPTCHA, but it's not the only one.
We've mentioned before that Google reCAPTCHA's price hike has caused quite a stir in the digital community. However, in this article, we'll compare the actual costs of using Google reCAPTCHA, Prosopo Procaptcha, hCaptcha, and Cloudflare Turnstile. If you're looking for a feature comparison between Google reCAPTCHA and Prosopo Procaptcha, view our previous article.
Google reCAPTCHA cost
While previously enjoying the high free tier limits of 1mln free assessments per month – which translated to almost universal installation on millions of websites, this appears to be about to change starting April 1st 2024.
According to the email I got this morning: Google reduces the free assessments from 1mln to just 10,000 a month for both recaptcha enterprise service and previously “free recaptcha service”, which constitutes a 100x allowance reduction, renames recapcha no-cost plan to reCAPTCHA-lite (with up to 10,000 assessments a month) and introduces new “reCAPTCHA standard” plan – that comes with up to 100,000 assessments for $8 a month.
reCAPTCHA Enterprise users are still going to be paying $1 per every 1000 assessments after the first free 10,000 assessments (also reduced from previously 1mln free per month). But, and email is a little confusing here, it would appear that the “transaction protection” feature becomes less expensive if you use it: (from $40 per 1000 to $1 per 1000 reduction).
Being a core service for many websites – the upcoming reCAPTCHA Pricing Change is going to send many developers and companies scrambling for alternatives and assessing the current usage, although the 8$ per 100k assessments per month plan might be enough for many.
Prosopo Procaptcha cost
- $0 for frictionless use up to 100,000 assessments per month
- $9 per month for 100,000 - 1,000,000 assessments
- Custom pricing for enterprises or users with over 1,000,000 assessments
hCaptcha cost
- $0 for image captcha only
- $99 per month frictionless captcha
Cloudflare Turnstile cost
- Free for any size of traffic, however, there is no respite if they decide your browser fingerprint is suspicious. You will be stuck in a loop of solving captchas until you give up or they decide you are not a bot.
- No image / puzzle captcha, only frictionless mode based on browser signals.
Comparison Table
We've broken our comparison down as follows:
| Feature | Prosopo Procaptcha | Google reCAPTCHA | hCaptcha | Cloudflare Turnstile |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free Tier | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Frictionless Free Tier | ✓ 100k assessments | ✓ 10k assessments | ✗ | ✓ |
| Price for 100k assessments | $0 | $8 | $99 | $0 |
| Price for 100,000 - 1 million assessments | $9 | $80 | $990 | $0 |
| Image / Puzzle CAPTCHA for bots | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| Privacy | High | Low | Medium | High |
| Custom Challenge Types | ✓ | ✗ | Enterprise-only | ✗ |
| Self-hosted Option | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Open Source | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Community Support | ✓ | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Live Chat Support | ✓ | ✗ | ✗ | ✗ |
| Invisible Mode | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✗ |
| reCAPTCHA drop-in replacement | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Solvable by 2Captcha etc. | ✗ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
Best Value Captcha in 2024
Prosopo Procaptcha is the best value CAPTCHA in 2024. It offers a frictionless free tier up to 100,000 assessments per month, which is more than Google reCAPTCHA's 10,000 assessments. Prosopo Procaptcha also offers custom challenge types, self-hosted options, and is open source, meaning that you can verify the security of the code yourself.