# Anubis 164 Hacker News commenters recommended Anubis and 163 criticized it, November 2025 to November 2026. It was recommended in 12 of 13 months. **Verdict:** Open-source proof-of-work gate that sharply cuts AI scraper traffic on small sites without tracking visitors, but many see it as a temporary fix that frustrates slow devices. ## Why people recommend it - Drastically cuts bot traffic (7 comments): "Anubis cut the accesses on my little personal Forgejo instance with nothing particularly interesting on it from about 600K hits per day to about 1000." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46245524)) "As soon as Anubis became active in there, it decreased to about 11 requests after 24 hours, most just from curious humans." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565423)) "putting anubis in front of a website demonstrably reduces the amount of crawling and that is the entire goal" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591313)) - Makes mass crawling expensive (6 comments): "It works by running some sort of complex calculation in javascript, so it won't get rid of all bots, but it should slow them all down." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303514)) "The point of Anubis isn't to prevent bots from accessing a site, but rather to prevent dumb bots from accidentally DOSing a site." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49508185)) "The goal isn't to eliminate scrapers, its to prevent a distributed scraping network from requesting 10000 pages a second each" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591464)) - Private, open alternative to Cloudflare (4 comments): "it's actually cool and loved project here. It's an open-source Captcha that filters out bots, and it doesn't track you around the web" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49474912)) "Anubis is significantly better than Cloudfare from a ux perspective because it doesn't require interacting with the page." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591177)) "The proof-of-work approach is much better privacy-wise than what the usual CAPTCHA services are doing." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49477028)) - Barely disrupts real visitors (4 comments): "Anubis is significantly better than Cloudfare from a ux perspective because it doesn't require interacting with the page." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591177)) "Having to see half-a-second of the Anubis splashscreen occasionally is a small price to pay for keeping it alive." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45789595)) "Anubis’s silly, harmless images do a good job of driving away the traffic I don’t want on my personal site." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49055359)) ## What people warn about - Temporary fix scrapers can bypass (6 comments): "Anubis is offering a temporary reprieve, but after reading the recent kernel.org article it's increasingly clear that this is a temporary bandaid." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49717303)) "We're using Anubis where possible, but a lot of it is just whack-a-mole with residential proxies." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48910172)) "It doesn't detect "real browsers". It simply adds some friction and is niche enough that AI scrapers have not bothered to bypass it yet." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49212296)) - Very slow on low-end devices (4 comments): "The cost is nothing. The browser implementation is too slow, mobile devices are too slow, and hash algorithms with hardware acceleration are too fast." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49054847)) "it annoys regular visitors and prevents people on low-powered devices or with JavaScript disabled from reading the site at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233507)) "it makes visiting websites very difficult (often multiple minutes wait times) on old hardware and low-end smartphones" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49056718)) - Difficulty setting easily misconfigured (3 comments): "Anubis will sometimes sit and ask for ridiculous amounts of work, but at least it's never outright denied access." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49476317)) "The Anubis difficulty setting is (or was) so high that nobody could visit the site without leaving it open for minutes or hours." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47565948)) "The Anubis difficulty scale is unintuitive and the difference between a small delay and becoming unusable is easy to cross." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48873135)) - Requires JavaScript and cookies (3 comments): "I'm certainly am not going to whitelist those sites, nor am I going to enable cookies wholesale just to avoid solving challenges." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591484)) "If you change your IP address, it invalidates the cookie. If you don't change your IP address, you can be blocked by IP address." ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49591865)) "it annoys regular visitors and prevents people on low-powered devices or with JavaScript disabled from reading the site at all" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48233507)) ## Alternatives hackers recommend - [iocaine](https://hackerapproved.com/p/iocaine.md): 9 recommend - [Miasma](https://hackerapproved.com/p/miasma.md): 8 recommend - [Poison Fountain](https://hackerapproved.com/p/poison-fountain.md): 5 recommend ## Cite as Hacker Approved, "Anubis", https://hackerapproved.com/p/anubis/ (counts from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026).