Spam protection, Honeypot, Anti-Spam by CleanTalk vs Contact Camo

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.

Contact Camo protects email addresses from scrapers and bots — now with a native Gutenberg block so you can build beautiful, protected contact experiences without touching a single line of code. What Is It? Contact Camo is a plugin for WordPress developed by Plan Left that effectively hides or obfuscates email addresses from scammers, web scrapers and internet bots to help minimize spam and other nefarious, automated actors. In addition to protecting email addresses, Contact Camo provides rich, visual control over how those protected email addresses are displayed and interacted with by your visitors — all from inside the WordPress block editor. Now with a Native Gutenberg Block! Contact Camo now feels right at home in the WordPress block editor. Drag it in, configure it visually, and see a live preview of exactly what your visitors will see — no shortcodes, no guesswork. Everything is point-and-click: 🎨 Pick an icon — Browse and search hundreds of WordPress icons right inside the sidebar. Choose your size from XS to XL, or dial in an exact pixel size. 🖌️ Choose a color — Set the text and icon color using your theme’s color palette or a custom color picker. It just works. 🔘 Link or button? — Toggle between a standard link and a styled button in one click. Your theme’s button styles apply automatically. 📋 Inline or popup form? — Show a sleek embedded contact form or a modal popup — your choice, configured visually. 📐 Control the layout — Adjust container padding and form width to fit perfectly within your design. 👁️ Show what you want — Display the icon and text together, icon only, or text only. You decide. ⚡ Live preview — Every change you make is reflected instantly in the editor canvas. What you see is what you get. All of the above is available through the shortcode too, for those who prefer it. Example Use Cases Educational Organization with large faculty directories Nonprofits who need to be accessible without displaying in-content email addresses Large Organizations who have departmental pages and points of contact but don’t want to maintain multiple contact forms Anyone who doesn’t want to expose email addresses to the scammers, scrapers and bots of the internet. Why Did You Make This Plugin? We work with many non-profits and educational organizations that need to list contact info in directories on their website. Due to the public visibility of these and their large user base, our clients’ web properties are under constant threat from spammers and bots. We wanted to ensure that their user directories were safe from these threats while still being functional to visitors. In other words, we needed to hide a bunch of email addresses from the outside world while still allowing the outside world to contact those users via their email address. When we got to developing this plugin, we knew we had to provide a solution that was as bulletproof as possible while allowing our clients and customers the most amount of control over things as practical. Ultimately, we needed to create a plugin that would: Optionally hide or obfuscate email addresses from scrapers and bots securely and confidently. For our use case, email addresses needed to be obfuscated in the source code, the DOM, and in HTTP requests. We took the email address out of the client-side equation completely by just tucking it safely away in the database in a lookup table instead of providing a workaround that simply disguises the email address. We essentially took the email address to a safe house and sent out its representative to interact with the outside world on its behalf. Nobody gets the email, not no way, not no how, see?!? Provide users with lots of control over the UX of protected email addresses, without the need for cumbersome configuration. The Gutenberg block handles all of that visually, and the shortcode is still there for power users. Be performant in capabilities, lightweight in footprint, and opinionated in scope. The client was very pleased with the end-result and so were we. So, we decided to offer it back to the community. Our development team reviewed and scrutinized the existing plugin, found areas for improvements and further customizations, and baked them right in for everyone to use. Who Is It For? Site administrators and content editors/moderators. Anyone with a WordPress site that would like the peace of mind of knowing that their users’ email addresses are safely hidden from spam bots and other unintended consumers with ill intent. Content creators that don’t want to worry about the complications and time expenditure of dealing with and managing their user base getting spammed from their platform. And especially when any of the above mentioned require some level of control over what’s displayed to their users, who may very well be their customers or clients or patients, etc… It’s for site builders that want protection AND customization without being overwhelmed. With the new Gutenberg block, that means literally anyone editing a page in WordPress — no code required. What Problems Does It Solve? Contact Camo hides or obfuscates email addresses in the source code AND the DOM. Not only this, it ensures the unobfuscated email address is never used in any page or ajax request from its originating context; all handling/processing is done server-side. Once obfuscated, the client-side never sees the original email address again (where obfuscated). The obfuscation (key) is a hash that is stored in a lookup table with the original email address. A few of the limitations we found in some existing (but great) plugins: email address only obfuscated in DOM, but not in source code email address only obfuscated in source code, but not in the DOM integrating with a 3rd-party service that scrapes entire pages and performs a search-and-replace of email addresses with obfuscated versions in the source code email address obfuscation using only html entities replacement few options for controlling output no contact form or fallback options no native block editor support How Does It Work? With the Gutenberg block (recommended): Search for “Contact Camo” in the block inserter, drop it onto your page, enter the email address you want to protect, and configure everything else from the visual sidebar. Done. You’ll see a live preview of the output right there in the editor. With the shortcode: Contact Camo provides a simple shortcode that can be placed anywhere shortcodes are supported. The shortcode’s default output is a clickable link with the obfuscated email address’s generated hash stored in a data attribute. On click, this hash is used to look up the email address and then open the browser’s configured email client with the “To” field pre-populated. The shortcode accepts parameters for overriding the default output — output a button instead of a link, add CSS classes, change the text output, choose an icon, set a color, and more. The shortcode also supports an embedded contact form or an optional modal popup contact form as an alternative to triggering the email client. What is Hide vs Obfuscate? For our plugin, we wanted to give site administrators the option to either completely hide the email address and never let any end content consumer see any piece of the email, or to hide the email until requested and reveal it in context after a specific action is taken. Hiding the email address: The site visitor will never see the email address, and instead only be presented a popup contact form that submits and mails through ajax. This option totally hides the email, and it will never be revealed unless the emailed recipient emails the form submitter back. Obfuscating the email address: The site visitor will not see the email address until the contact button (or link) is clicked. On click, the email address will be revealed and the visitor can copy or mail to that address. What Can I Do With It? We chose to err on the side of simplicity, balanced with enough options to be truly useful. The Gutenberg block makes all of these options accessible without writing a single line of code: Show a link or a button — your theme’s styles applied automatically Add an icon from a library of hundreds, with full size control Set a custom text and icon color using your theme palette or a custom picker Show only the icon, only the text, or both Display an inline contact form or a modal popup form Control padding, form width, and layout Add a custom CSS class or anchor ID for targeting with your own styles or JavaScript All of the above is also available via the shortcode for developers and power users. Basic Usage Block Editor: Search for “Contact Camo” in the block inserter (+), add it to your page, enter an email address in the sidebar, and you’re protected. Shortcode: [contactcamo email="[email protected]"] output: a basic anchor tag with default text [contactcamo email="[email protected]" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true] output: a clickable button with text that says “Contact Us” [contactcamo email="[email protected]" label="Contact Us" form=true button=true popup=true] output: a clickable button that, when clicked, pops up a modal contact form [contactcamo email="[email protected]" icon="email" display="both" iconsize="md"] output: a link with a mail icon and text [contactcamo email="[email protected]" id="one-contactcamo-to-rule-them-all" label="Fly, You Fools!" button=true class="btn btn-lg btn-lt-blue"] output: a large, styled clickable button with custom text Shortcode Parameters email required string the email address to be obfuscated label optional string default=”Email” the visible text on the link or button subject optional string pre-fills the email subject line icon optional string a Dashicon slug (e.g. email, phone, admin-users) to show alongside the label display optional string default=”both” controls what is shown: both (icon + text), icon (icon only), or text (text only) iconsize optional string default=”sm” icon size preset: xs (12px), sm (16px), md (20px), lg (28px), xl (36px), or custom iconsizepx optional integer default=20 custom icon size in pixels, used when iconsize=custom textcolor optional string a hex color value (e.g. #e63946) for the text and icon color form optional boolean default=false if true, show a contact form instead of opening an email client popup optional boolean default=false if true, show the contact form in a modal overlay when clicked formtitle optional string default=”Compose Email Message” the heading shown at the top of the popup form formwidth optional integer default=325 maximum width of the contact form in pixels; set to 0 for full width button optional boolean default=false if true, render a element instead of an tag containerpadding optional integer default=15 padding in pixels applied to the outer container class optional string CSS class(es) to add to the link or button element, space delimited id optional string HTML id attribute to add to the link or button element There is also an admin page for Contact Camo. From this page, you can configure where the contact form redirects after form submission.