hCaptcha
Shares rank 3 of 6 captcha services by recommenders
People recommend it for reliably blocking bots and form spam. The most common caveat is that its challenges are hard to solve and inaccessible to users with disabilities.
People recommend it for reliably blocking bots and form spam. The most common caveat is that its challenges are hard to solve and inaccessible to users with disabilities.
16 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 6
- criticize it
- 10
- approval share
- 38%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: not recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: not recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: recommended
- August 2026: recommended
- September 2026: not recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 6 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 0.6 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, not met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Reliable bot and spam blocking
“hCaptcha might have a better blocking rate at the moment, but it's also $0.99/1K evals”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Creepy Crawlies” “adding hCaptcha is pretty reliable in getting rid of them”
Comment from 13 Apr 2026 in “Ask HN: What's your experience with PoW captchas against form spam?”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Inaccessible to users with disabilities
“HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “Google Broke reCAPTCHA for De-Googled Android Users” “it's also $0.99/1K evals, and that "animated challenge" will be impossible to solve for visually-impaired users”
Comment from 31 Aug 2026 in “Creepy Crawlies” “straight-up requires you to have an "accessibility cookie", which requires verifying your email address”
Comment from 8 May 2026 in “Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged” - Comment from 13 Jul 2026 in “Stop Using reCAPTCHA – It's Not a Real Captcha”
Challenges are hard and tiring
“I remember running into a hCaptcha task that asked me to distinguish between circuit boards and top-down cityscapes”
Comment from 6 Oct 2026 on Hacker News “keeps getting extremely difficult or brain-draining hCaptchas thrown at me with no real solutions”
Comment from 30 Oct 2026 in “Breaking the open web won't stop the bad bots” “they are about the most difficult to solve captchas I've ever done”
Comment from 9 Jul 2026 in “Stop Using reCAPTCHA – It's Not a Real Captcha” - Comment from 2 Oct 2026 in “Meta's Muse is fantastic for web scraping”
- Comment from 29 May 2026 in “CAPTCHAs can still detect AI agents”
Other captcha services people recommend
The four most recommended other captcha services, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cloudflare Turnstile | 33 | 86 | 28% | 10 | — | — |
| Google reCAPTCHA | 15 | 158 | 9% | 7 | — | — |
| hCaptchaThis page | 6 | 10 | 38% | 4 | — | — |
| Cloudflare CAPTCHA | 6 | 22 | 21% | 4 | — | — |
| Google Cloud fraud defense | 6 | 54 | 10% | 1 | — | — |
What people said
16 of the 19 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“keeps getting extremely difficult or brain-draining hCaptchas thrown at me with no real solutions”
“I remember running into a hCaptcha task that asked me to distinguish between circuit boards and top-down cityscapes”
“overly complex hCaptchas these days I keep getting forced upon me”
“It goes in an infinite loop, despite solving correctly all challenges.”
“it's also $0.99/1K evals, and that "animated challenge" will be impossible to solve for visually-impaired users”
“hCaptcha might have a better blocking rate at the moment, but it's also $0.99/1K evals”
“it's probably the best you can do”
“probably the most inaccessible of them all once you are not part of the low friction flow”
“I don't know about hCaptcha”
“they are about the most difficult to solve captchas I've ever done”
“I've failed various hCaptcha challenges.”
“It uses a very wide variety of traditional visual puzzles.”
“HCaptcha is inaccessible and actively discriminatory against individuals with disabilities and refuses to change”
“straight-up requires you to have an "accessibility cookie", which requires verifying your email address”
“hcaptcha solving is also really cheap nowadays”
“adding hCaptcha is pretty reliable in getting rid of them”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.