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.

• $0 for up to 10,000 assessments per month
• $8 per month for up to 100K assessments
• $108 per month for up to 200K assessments
• $408 per month for up to 500K assessments
• $908 per month for up to 1M assessments

Prosopo Procaptcha cost

Prosopo Procaptcha is a GDPR-compliant CAPTCHA solution that offers advanced protection against bots, spam, and other forms of attack, such as:

• Scraping
• Denial of inventory
• Credential stuffing
• Account takeover
• Click through rate/ad fraud
• Ticket scalping
• Black friday automation (and more general sale automation)
• Phishing attacks
• Loyalty programme automation

Prosopo Procaptcha is better value than reCAPTCHA and avoids turning your website into a data collection tool for Google.

Procaptcha's default CAPTCHA is dynamic and frictionless - your users will not be required to complete an image CAPTCHA. Only bots that are flagged as suspicious will be required to complete an image CAPTCHA.

• $0 for dynamic, frictionless use up to 10,000 assessments per month
• $39 per month for up to 100K assessments
• $59 per month for up to 200K assessments
• $99 per month for up to 500K assessments
• $139 per month for up to 1M assessments
• Custom pricing for enterprises or users with over 1,000,000 assessments

hCaptcha cost

hCaptcha cites itself as a free alternative to Google reCAPTCHA but its not immediately clear that the free hCaptcha tier is image captcha only. As mentioned, the hCaptcha image captcha is often found to be very difficult to solve, which is a poor user experience.

• $0 for image captcha only. This is a poor user experience.
• $99 per month for 100K assessments 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. This is a poor user experience.
• No image / puzzle captcha, only frictionless mode based on browser signals.
• Easily by-passable forcing you to upgrade to their much more expensive Enterprise plan which is rumoured to be at least $2000 per month.

Comparison Table

We've broken our comparison down as follows:

Best Value Captcha in 2024

Prosopo Procaptcha is the best value CAPTCHA in 2024. It offers a frictionless free tier up to 10,000 assessments per month, which is equivalent to Google reCAPTCHA's 10,000 assessments. For larger volumes, Prosopo Procaptcha is considerably better value than Google reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, and Cloudflare Turnstile. 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.