6 Frictionless Alternatives to CAPTCHA & reCAPTCHA

CAPTCHA was a good idea, but its time has passed. Created in the 1990s to stop spam, it relies on puzzles that were once easy for humans and hard for bots. But in the age of AI, the opposite is true: bots can now solve CAPTCHAs faster and more accurately than people can.

Most of us are probably familiar with one particular implementation of CAPTCHA: reCAPTCHA, which is owned by Google. Google’s reCAPTCHA has gone through several iterations, from presenting readers with words that helped digitize the archives of the New York Times (reCAPTCHA v1) to running invisibly in the background and giving each user a score (reCAPTCHA v3).

In this blog post, we will talk about the limitations of traditional CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHA, what modern CAPTCHA alternatives exist, and how you can prevent form spam without frustrating your users (yes, it’s entirely possible).

If you’re in a hurry, here are the top 6 reCAPTCHA alternatives for 2023:

1. Anti-spam honeypot
2. Bot protection software
3. Ant-spam plugin
4. WAF protection
5. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
6. Biometric security

Traditional CAPTCHAs Lack Accessibility

The most common CAPTCHAs are notoriously inaccessible—this has been a long-standing criticism. For one, they are significantly harder for non-English speakers, who typically don’t know the words “fire hydrant”. Even if they do, a fire hydrant in another country might look significantly different from a fire hydrant in the United States.

In addition, image CAPTCHAs are hard to solve for visually impaired users, audio CAPTCHAs tend to include very limited language options, and text CAPTCHAs are hard for dyslexic people.

Siloed CAPTCHAs Can Not Protect Against Advanced Bots

As Google keeps pushing out new iterations of reCAPTCHA, bots continue to beat the technology. We’ve come to a point where CAPTCHAs have become much harder for human, yet easier for bots.

Three researchers from the University of Columbia created a low-cost CAPTCHA attack that could automatically solve 70.78% of all presented reCAPTCHA challenges and 83.5% of all Facebook image CAPTCHAs. If three researchers can automate bots to pass CAPTCHAs, imagine what millions of hackers sharing tips with each other can do.

Hackers don’t even need to create bots that can beat CAPTCHAs. All they need is a bot that queries a CAPTCHA farm every time it encounters a CAPTCHA, using a simple API call. CAPTCHA farms can solve a CAPTCHA challenge in less than a minute for very little money. Simply put, yesterday’s CAPTCHAs and reCAPTCHAs are no longer a match for today’s bots.

Unfortunately, honeypots are pretty simple for bots to beat. While a honeypot might stop a few bots initially, hackers will quickly figure out what’s happening and circumvent the honeypot with a few lines of code. In addition, your real users with screen reader software or CSS disabled might be confused by a honeypot.

Pros:

• Invisible to most users.
• Can stop simple bots.

Cons:

• Doesn’t stop the most dangerous or persistent bots.
• Confusing for people with screen reader software.

2. Blocking Adaptive Bots With an Advanced Bot Protection Solution

The best alternative to a traditional, siloed CAPTCHA is an advanced bot protection solution that takes an invisible-first approach to verification. The vast majority of users are verified silently in the background based on behavioral and device signals.

Only when additional verification is required do users encounter a simple, frictionless interaction, ensuring security without compromising experience. The solution must operate and learn in real time at the edge, without frustrating your users or requiring any extra work from your team.

Pros of complete bot protection:

• Protects against the most advanced bots.
• Easy to integrate with your existing tech architecture.
• Requires minimal maintenance or upkeep.
• Respects global data privacy regulations.

Cons of complete bot protection:

• Doesn’t come free.

3. Blocking Spambots With an Anti-Spam Plugin

Your content management system (CMS) might have plugins that protect you against spam. The Akismet plugin for WordPress websites is a well-known example. It checks all comments and filters out those that look like spam. Unfortunately, this type of plugin only protects against spambots, not any of the other bots that can damage your platform.

The Akismet plugin is free for personal blogs but paid for commercial sites and blogs. The enterprise plan costs just over $500 a year, but it limits you to 60,000 API calls per month, which is not enough to stop the most dangerous bot attacks, which send millions of requests in a few days.

Pros:

• Easy to install and configure.
• Relatively affordable.

Cons:

• Limited number of API calls in most expensive plan.
• Only protects against a very simple and particular type of bot.

4. Blocking Basic Bots With a WAF

A Web Application Firewall (WAF) only protects against the most familiar security threats, such as cross-site scripting, SQL injections, and session hijacking. They are no longer adequate protection for today’s sophisticated bots.

Bots now mimic human behavior and can rotate between thousands of IPs, easily avoiding the IP-centric, static rules of a WAF.

Pros:

• Protects against some security threats.
• Familiar technology for security specialists.

Cons:

• Doesn’t protect against sophisticated bots.
• Relies too heavily on IP-centric, static rules.

5. Using Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)

Particularly if users can create accounts on your websites or apps, encouraging them to toggle MFA can serve as a great security measure. The trouble is, you cannot force your users to toggle MFA. They have to do it themselves.

This means that a large percentage of your user-base simply won’t use it. It’s too much friction. Additionally, while MFA can protect your users against credential stuffing attacks and account takeover, it does nothing to protect your platform or users against other types of attacks, such as web scraping or DDoS.

Pros:

• Among the better CAPTCHA “alternatives”.
• Easy to install and inexpensive.

Cons:

• Adds significant friction to your UX.
• Many of your users will not toggle it on.
• Only protects against very specific bot attacks.

6. Adding Biometric Security

Biometric security is a security layer that relies on biological measurements, such as facial recognition to unlock your iPhone, the fingerprint scan on your Surface laptop, and voice recognition to activate Alexa. Biometrics can serve as replacements for usernames and passwords, particularly powerful in combination with MFA.

But biometric security struggles with the same problem as MFA. You cannot enforce it. You can give users the option to enable fingerprint scanning to access your app, but you can’t force them to activate that option. Additionally, biometric security works best on smartphone apps but isn’t yet used as a common security layer for websites.

Pros:

• A powerful security option when combined with MFA.
• Hard to hack or circumvent.

Cons:

• Can’t be enforced.
• Not commonly used for websites.