Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk vs Custom Contact Forms

Trusted by over 200,000 websites and rated among the top anti-spam solutions for WordPress in 2026. No CAPTCHAs, no puzzles, and no visitor friction — just automatic spam blocking for forms, comments, registrations, subscriptions, and fake orders. Powered by a global spam detection network that includes over 1,078,000 websites and helps stop spam before it reaches your website. Install it in less than 30 seconds and start protecting your site immediately. Superpowers Stops spam comments. Stops spam registrations and logins. Stops spam contact emails. Stops fake orders eCommerce sites and online stores. Antispam for bookings. Antispam subscriptions. Stops spam surveys, polls. Stops spam in WooCommerce. Antispam for Search Form. Real-time email validation. Check if an email is real or fake. Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users. Blocking disposable & temporary emails. Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words. Public reviews It’s more than just a tool to combat spam; it’s an integral component that enhances the overall quality and performance of your website. techbusinessnews.com.au Improve Your Security WordPress Spam Protection With CleanTalk Anti-Spam The Hacker News. Compare reCAPTCHA & Akismet VS CleanTalk CleanTalk vs Google reRECAPTCHA CleanTalk vs Akismet Free trial then $12 per year CleanTalk is an anti-spam plugin which works with the premium Cloud Anti-Spam service cleantalk.org. This plugin as a service https://developer.wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-org/detailed-plugin-guidelines/#6-software-as-a-service-is-permitted AntiSpam protection for comments Native spam protection for WordPress, JetPack comments and any other comment plugins. The plugin moves spam comments to SPAM folder or you can set the option to ban spam comments silently. You can also enable the option in the plugin settings to auto-delete comments from SPAM folder. Contact Form 7 Antispam Plugin extends spam protection for Contact Form 7 (CF7). It can be used with any other third-party spam filters. How to protect your Contact Form 7 using CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin Contact Form by WPForms Antispam Plugin extends Contact Form by WPForms to provide spam protection. It filters spam submissions for each type of forms – simple contact form, marketing form, request a quote and etc. Antispam for WooCommerce & fake orders filter Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations, spam reviews, and fake orders for WooCommerce (any eCommerce plugin as well). The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1+ and online stores. Many other great contact, signups and all kind of forms that supported by Anti-Spam plugin by CleanTalk Asgaros Forum Avada Forms AWeber form builder Awesome Support – WordPress HelpDesk & Support Plugin Back In Stock Notifier for WooCommerce | WooCommerce Waitlist Pro bbPress by John James Jacoby Brave Popup Builder – Popup, Optins, Lead Generation, Survey & Interactive Content Brevo – Email, SMS, Web Push, Chat, and more by Brevo Calculated Fields Form Chatway Live Chat – AI Chatbot, Customer Support, FAQ & Helpdesk Customer Service & Chat Buttons Contact Form Clean and Simple Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Advanced WP Contact Form Builder for WordPress Contact Form Plugin by Fluent Forms Ninja forms Contact Form by Supsystic Contact Form Email Constant Contact Forms Comments – wpDiscuz By AdvancedCoding Customer Reviews for WooCommerce Floating Chat Widget: Contact Chat Icons, Telegram Chat, Line Messenger, WeChat, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty Forminator Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder Easy Digital Downloads – eCommerce Payments and Subscriptions made easy eForm – WordPress Form Builder Elementor – Build, Design & Manage Forms From One Place Elfsight Blocks for Elementor — 80+ Widgets Events Manager – Calendar, Bookings, Tickets, and more! By Marcus (aka @msykes) Everest Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form, Quiz, Survey & Custom Form Builder with AI FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce Flamingo Fluentbooking.com Formidable Forms – WordPress Form Builder for Contact Forms, Calculators, Quizzes & More Form Maker by 10Web – Mobile-Friendly Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder GeoDirectory – WP Business Directory Plugin and Classified Listings Directory GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform gravityforms.com – Powerful data capture fueled by Gravity Forms Gwolle Guestbook Happyforms – Form Builder for WordPress: Drag & Drop Contact Forms, Surveys, Payments & Multipurpose Forms HivePress – Business Directory, Listings & Classified Ads Plugin HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat Hustle – Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Optins, Popups JetFormBuilder — Dynamic Blocks Form Builder Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth Jotform – Online Forms — Customizable Payment, Contact, Quiz, Survey Form Builder Kadence Blocks — Page Builder Toolkit for Gutenberg Editor Kali Forms (Free & Pro) — Contact Form & Drag-and-Drop Builder Klaviyo Kulahub Landing Page Builder – Coming Soon page, Maintenance Mode, Lead Page, WordPress Landing Pages Leaky Paywall LearnPress – WordPress LMS Plugin for Create and Sell Online Courses Lead Form Builder & Contact Form By ThemeHunk Login & Register Customizer – Popup | Slider | Inline | WooCommerce MailChimp Forms by MailMunch MailOptin – Popup, Optin Forms & Email Newsletters for Mailchimp, HubSpot, AWeber Etc. My Sticky Elements – All-in-one Sticky Floating Contact Form, Call, Click to Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs MetForm – Contact Form, Survey, Quiz, & Custom Form Builder for Elementor Newsletter – Send awesome emails from WordPress by Stefano Lissa Newsletters by Tribulant Software Newsletters – MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress NEX-Forms – Ultimate Forms Plugin for WordPress by Basix Nextend Social Login and Register by Nextendweb Ninja forms by Kevin Stover Piotnet by piotnet.com Product Enquiry for WooCommerce (Now with AI Assistant) By WisdmLabs Quform by quform.com QuickCal by quickcal.co RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms, User Registration, Payment, and User Login By Metagauss Simple Registration for WooCommerce By Astoundify Smart Forms – when you need more than just a contact form By EDGARROJAS Strong Testimonials By WP Chill SureForms – Drag & Drop Contact Form & Form Builder, Payment Form, Survey, Quiz & Calculator By Brainstorm Force User Registration & Membership – Free & Paid Memberships, Subscriptions, Content Restriction, User Profile, Custom User Registration & Login Builder By wpeverest Visual Form Builder By Matthew Muro WP Booking System – Booking Calendar By Roland Murg User Frontend: AI Powered Frontend Posting, User Directory, Profile, Membership & User Registration By weDevs WS Form LITE – Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder By Mark Westguard Wufoo Shortcode By wronganswersonly WP User Frontend, UserPro WordPress Landing Pages ZeroBounce Email Verification & Validation By zerobounce Zoho Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for Websites – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Order Forms & More By Zoho Forms Protection for the forms above works as a built-in feature of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk without requiring any additional actions from the user. Check existing comments for spam. Bulk spam comments removal. Spam comment Cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing comments to find and quickly delete spam comments at once. To use this function, go to WP Console -> Comments -> Find spam comments. Check existing users for spam. Bulk spam accounts removal. Spam users cleaner With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing accounts to find and quickly delete spam users at once. For use this function, go to WP Console -> Users -> Check for spam. Also, you can export a list of spam users to the CSV. Private black lists for anti-spam service Automatically block comments and registrations from your private black IP/email address list. Hide «Website» field for comments This option hides the «Website» field from standard WordPress comments forms. After that spammers won’t be able to send spam links using «Website» field in the bottom of the comments form. Low false/positive rate This plugin uses multiple anti-spam tests to filter spam bots having as low false/positive rate as possible. Spam FireWall Spam FireWall allows blocking the most active spam bots before they get access to your website. It prevents spam bots from loading website pages so your web server doesn’t have to perform all scripts on these pages. Also it prevents scanning of pages of the website by spam bots. Therefore Spam FireWall significantly reduces the load on your web server. Spam FireWall also makes CleanTalk the two-step protection from spam bots. Spam FireWall is the first step and it blocks the most active spam bots. CleanTalk Anti-Spam is the second step and checks all other requests on the website in the moment of submitting comments/registers etc. How does it work? The visitor enters to your web site. HTTP request data are being checked in the nearly 5.8 million of the identified spam bot IPs. If it is an active spam bot, the bot gets a blank page, if it is a visitor then he receives a normal page. This process is completely transparent for the visitors. All the CleanTalk Spam FireWall activity is being logged in the process of filtering. Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood & Anti-Crawler Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood and Anti-Crawler options are intended for blocking unwanted bots, content parsing, shop goods prices parsing or aggressive website scanning bots. Learn more https://cleantalk.org/help/anti-flood-and-anti-crawler By default, well-known good bots — including AI crawlers such as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), Google-Extended (Gemini), and Copilot — are allowed. You can choose which of these bots to block individually in your private lists. Blocking a bot will stop the corresponding AI service from accessing your content. How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA? CleanTalk Anti-Spam protects websites from spam bots without using traditional CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or other visitor challenges. Instead of showing CAPTCHA puzzles, the service uses behavioral analysis, invisible JavaScript tests, and a global spam database to detect spam automatically in the background. This CAPTCHA-free anti-spam protection works for contact forms, comments, registrations, and WooCommerce checkouts without creating friction for real visitors. By replacing CAPTCHA with automated spam detection, CleanTalk helps improve usability, accessibility, and conversion rates while still blocking spam effectively. Sometimes CAPTCHA reminds us of the doodles of a two year old child. For users with vision problems CAPTCHA is an insurmountable obstacle. Users hate captcha. Captcha for users means “hate”. Unreadable CAPTCHA stops about 80% of site visitors. After 2 failed attempts to decipher CAPTCHA 95% of visitors reject further attempts. At the sight of CAPTCHA and after input errors, many visitors leave the resource. Thus, CAPTCHA helps to protect the resource spam both from bots and visitors. CAPTCHA is not a panacea from spam. Doubts concerning the Need for CAPTCHA? “Ultimately, CAPTCHAs are useless for spam because they’re designed to tell you if someone is ‘human’ or not, but not whether something is spam or not.” Matt Mullenweg Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not. It is very important to be sure that the user used his real email address. Spambots very often use fake email addresses, i.e. which addresses do not exist. CleanTalk will check email addresses for existence in real time. Non-existing email addresses also entail several other problems for website owners. You can never contact them by email, the client will never receive any notifications from you (account activation letter, password recovery, email distribution, notifications, etc.), if you use email marketing for your clients, then a large number of nonexistent emails in the mailing list may result in your IP address being added to various blacklists of email servers. Improve your email list with email validation without fake emails. Blocking disposable & temporary emails Block fake and suspicious users with disposable & temporary emails to improve email delivery. So, it also prevents malicious activity, spam bots, and internet trolls. Stops Spam in Search Form Spam bots can use your search form to make a GET request with spam text. CleanTalk Anti-Spam has the option to protect your website search form from spam bots. Each time, the search generates a new page and if there are many requests, this can create additional load. So, under some conditions, spam searches can be indexed, which affects SEO, Anti-Spam protection for website search forms repels spam bots. If your search form gets data too often the CleanTalk Anti-Spam plugin will add a pause and increase it with each new attempt to send data. It saves your web server processor time. Spam protection allows you to not forbid indexation for the crawler bots if you really need it but simultaneously you will get protection from spam bots. You will always know what users were looking for on your site. Disable comments This option disables comments on your site. You can choose one or several options: Disable comments for posts Disable comments for pages Disable comments for media When using Disables comments, existing comments will not be deleted and will remain on the pages. Email, Phones Address Encoder CleanTalk Anti-Spam offers a feature called “Encode contact data” that is designed to encode all email addresses on the website pages. Encoding email, phontes addresses increases the level of protection of contact data from being abused, parsed, getting spammed and used in spam mailing lists by bots and online criminals. To reveal the encoded email address simply click on it and it will be decoded instantly. Honeypot field The option helps to block bots. The honeypot field option adds a hidden field to the form. When spambots come to a website form, they can fill out each input field. Enable this option to make the protection stronger on these forms. Learn more about supported forms here.

New: build a form by describing it. Tell Custom Contact Forms what you need — “a booking form for a dog grooming appointment with the owner’s details and their preferred date” — and it builds it, fields, labels and all, ready to edit. It uses the AI provider already connected to your site under Settings > Connectors, so there is no API key to enter here and nothing is sent anywhere else. Requires WordPress 7.0 or later; the option stays hidden otherwise. Custom Contact Forms lets you build forms and manage submissions entirely within WordPress. The drag-and-drop builder lives inside the media manager — no separate admin pages, no learning a new interface. Live previews update as you build, and forms can be inserted via Gutenberg block, shortcode, widget, or PHP function. Start from a prebuilt template — contact, quote request, newsletter, event registration, or feedback — and have a working form in seconds. Or build your own from scratch with text, email, phone, address, dropdowns, checkboxes, file uploads, and more. Style it with included form themes and per-field width controls, or add your own custom CSS. Powering thousands of active websites, with over 1.3 million all-time downloads. Originally created by Taylor Lovett, Custom Contact Forms is now actively maintained by Dmitry Alexander — rebuilt for modern WordPress with a hardened, PHP 8+ codebase, a refreshed builder, and new features added regularly. What You Can Build Contact forms, quote requests, support forms, event registrations, newsletter signups Text, paragraph, email (with optional confirmation), name, phone, website, address (US + international), date/time, dropdowns, checkboxes, radio buttons, file uploads, hidden fields, and HTML blocks Conditional fields and sections — show/hide fields based on other field values Multiple email notifications per form — customize recipients, subject, from name, reply-to, and body with field mapping Post creation on submission — map form fields to post fields, meta, and taxonomies Recent Updates Build a form with AI — describe what you need in plain language and get a working form. Uses your site’s own AI connection, so nothing extra to sign up for Switching from another form plugin? — Import your existing Contact Form 7 and WPForms forms in one step under Forms → Import. Your original forms are only read, never changed Submissions dashboard widget — Totals and a per-form breakdown for the last 7 days, 30 days, or all time, right on your WordPress dashboard Modernized builder — Yes/No options are now clean toggle switches, and fields display as cards in the builder canvas Friendly submission columns — The submissions table now shows real field labels instead of internal slugs Redesigned templates screen — Each form template now has its own custom icon, under Forms → Templates Developer hooks for add-ons — Filter submission responses, field rendering, and notification timing WordPress 7.0 ready — Tested up to the latest WordPress Powerful Features, Included Free Drag-and-drop form builder with live preview in the media manager Prebuilt form templates for the most common form types Gutenberg block, shortcode, widget, and PHP template support Multiple form themes plus per-field width controls and custom CSS AJAX form submission — no page reloads Import your forms from Contact Form 7 and WPForms — fields, labels, required flags, placeholders, and choices, with a report of anything that needs your attention Export submissions to CSV, and import submissions from CSV with automatic column mapping Import and export forms via WordPress XML Cloudflare Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, and simple captcha options Built-in spam protection — honeypot, time-based trap, IP rate limiting, disposable email blocking, keyword blacklist Email diagnostics — send test emails and view delivery failure logs Restrict forms to logged-in users, or pause forms with a custom message Customizable completion text or redirect URL Conditional asset loading — only load scripts where forms appear Extensible with hooks, filters, and custom field types Quick Start Go to Forms → Templates and pick a starting template — or go to Forms → Forms and Submissions to start from scratch Drag fields from the sidebar into the form area, and click a field to edit its label, width, and options Save the form Insert it with the Gutenberg block (search “CCF” in the block inserter) or the [ccf_form id="X"] shortcode Customize More with Pro Custom Contact Forms Pro turns the builder you already know into forms that sell, book, and sign — no e-commerce stack required. Stripe payments on the form — cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay, and Link, with a live “Pay $25.00” button and server-verified totals PayPal payments — pay in place without leaving your form, with the same server-verified totals Product & pricing fields — fixed price, multiple options, or customer-chooses-amount, with quantities, images, and enforced minimums Coupons & live totals — percentage or fixed discounts, order total updates as visitors choose Digital signature field — draw with mouse, finger, or stylus; saved as an image with every submission Consent / terms field — scrollable terms with versioned agreement records, snapshotted permanently PDF receipts — attached to notification emails for paid orders, plus one-click PDF download of any submission Multi-step forms — page breaks, progress bar, per-step validation Conditional logic — show or hide any field based on answers, priced fields included Survey & star rating fields — Likert grids and quick ratings Address autocomplete — visitors pick their address as they type and the street, city, state and ZIP fill themselves in (uses your own Google API key) SMS confirmations — text customers the moment they book or pay, through your own Twilio account 13 ready-made templates — donations, orders, registrations, waivers, agreements, and more No added transaction fees — you pay only Stripe’s or PayPal’s standard processing fees Learn more about Custom Contact Forms Pro External Services This plugin optionally connects to the following third-party services for spam protection. These services are only used when the site administrator explicitly enables and configures them. Google reCAPTCHA When enabled in the form builder, this plugin loads the Google reCAPTCHA widget on form pages and sends form submission verification requests to Google’s servers. The user’s reCAPTCHA response token is sent to Google for validation. No personal data is sent by the plugin itself — Google may collect usage data through their widget script. Service provider: Google LLC Terms of Service Privacy Policy Cloudflare Turnstile When enabled in Forms → Settings → Cloudflare Turnstile, this plugin loads the Cloudflare Turnstile widget script on form pages and sends form submission verification requests to Cloudflare’s servers. The user’s Turnstile response token and the visitor’s IP address are sent to Cloudflare for validation. Service provider: Cloudflare, Inc. Terms of Service Privacy Policy