Choosing the right CAPTCHA solution for your website is crucial, especially as bots and spam continue to evolve.
Google reCAPTCHA and Cloudflare Turnstile are two of the most popular options, but which one makes more sense as we head into 2025?
Here’s a breakdown of their strengths and weaknesses to help you decide.
1. How Well Do They Stop Spam?
- Google reCAPTCHA:
Google’s reCAPTCHA has been around for years and is a well proven tool for securing forms and blocking comment spam. The newer version (v3) works in the background, analyzing how users interact with sites on the internet to determine if they’re human, which means no annoying checkboxes or puzzles. While not perfect, its still very good.
- Cloudflare Turnstile:
Cloudflare Turnstile takes a different approach. It uses signals from the browser and device to verify users without making them interact with anything. It’s just as effective as reCAPTCHA in most cases and has the added bonus of being completely frictionless for visitors not requiring them to solve any puzzles.
2. Costs to Consider
- Google reCAPTCHA:
While reCAPTCHA is still free for most sites under its free tier of 1 million requests a month, however it’s no longer completely free for larger-scale use. Websites which receive high traffic or make heavy use of captcha may find themselves needing to pay for enterprise-level services where prices quickly ramp up , which could be a dealbreaker for some. - Cloudflare Turnstile:
Turnstile, on the other hand, is entirely free for an unlimited volume with few restrictions. Cloudflare does offer an enterprise version of the tool which offers additional functionality such as the ability to remove their logo and flexibility deploying it on a large number of different domains.
3. How Easy Are They to Implement?
Both reCaptcha and Turnstile are relatively simple to implement and from a programming perspective very similar in how they work. Most major plugins such as Contact Form 7 support both all leading Captcha providers making it a drop in solution.
While you need a Cloudflare account to use Turnstile, you do not need to have the Name Servers or domain with Cloudflare.
If you are just wanting to increase the security of your WordPress installation, FREE plugins for Cloudflare Turnstile have been developed such as Simple Cloudflare Turnstile too add Captcha to the WordPress login screen, registration and comment sections.
4. Other Things to Think About
- User Experience:
Turnstile’s no-interaction model is ideal for improving user experience in most cases as it avoids unnecessarily disrupting the user if it has high confidence it’s a real user very similar to reCAPTCHA v3. Both platforms have a decent web dashboard that gives you an overview of it’s performance.
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- Privacy Concerns:
Google reCAPTCHA collects a lot of data about users often without their knowledge, which might not sit well with privacy-focused audiences and IS NOT GDPR Compliant out of the box. Cloudflare Turnstile on the hand is designed with less invasive data collection in mind, and is designed to be privacy centric, complying with GDPR. - Better Performance
While not the largest consideration for many sites, Turnstile requires ~200kb of resources to be downloaded, Google reCaptcha requires closer to ~500kb. Another factor to consider is that reCaptcha is recommended to be run on all pages, while Turnstile is required on pages it is required. If performance is critical, Cloudflares offering certainly is a more attractive choice.
Which Should You Pick?
If you’re looking for a new reCaptcha Solution that meets modern requirement’s, Cloudflare Turnstile is a strong contender on several fronts, especially since you never need to worry about a huge bill. However, if you already have a site using Google reCaptcha and if GDPR compliance is not yet required it is still a valid solution not worth changing.
What are your thoughts? Let us Know in the comments below