Plugin: cleantalk-spam-protect (Used by 109,869 domains)

Top-rated anti-spam protection for WordPress. No CAPTCHA, no questions, no animal counting, no puzzles, no math and no spam bots. Universal AntiSpam plugin.

Anti-Spam features

1. Stops spam comments.
2. Stops spam registrations.
3. Stops spam contact emails.
4. Stops spam orders.
5. Stops spam bookings.
6. Stops spam subscriptions.
7. Stops spam surveys, polls.
8. Stops spam in widgets.
9. Stops spam in WooCommerce.
10. Real-time email validation. Is email real or Not.
11. Checks and removes the existing spam comments and spam users.
12. Compatible with mobile users and devices.
13. Compatible with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (EU).
14. Blocking disposable & temporary emails.
15. No Spam – No Google Penalties. Give your SEO boost.
16. Mobile friendly Anti Spam & FireWall.
17. Stops spam in Search Form.
18. Disable comments.
19. Spam FireWall: Anti-Flood.
20. Spam FireWall: Anti-Crawler.
21. Hide «Website» field for comments.
22. Block messages by languages, countries, networks and stop words.
23. Email Address Encoder – protection for email addresses published on your site.
24. No jQuery.

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

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.

CleanTalk – Cloud-Based Anti-Spam Service to Keep Your Site Bot-Free.
NewsWatch Review.

Compare reCAPTCHA & Akismet VS CleanTalk
https://www.saashub.com/compare-recaptcha-vs-cleantalk
https://www.saashub.com/compare-akismet-vs-cleantalk

I know you have heard of a number of anti-spam plugins. But you must know, the cloud-based ones are the best regarding detection rate. They compare all the content in forms with their own algorithm to find out the legibility.
www.techwibe.com

The key selling point of CleanTalk for me is not simply its effectiveness. It’s the fact that CleanTalk works in the background. It does not make users jump through hoops in order to submit a comment or complete a form.
www.kevinmuldoon.com

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 spam filter

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

Elementor Website Builder filter

Plugin extends spam protection for Elementor Website Builder. It filters spam submisssions and tested for contact form type.

Gravity forms spam filter

Plugin extends spam protection for Gravity forms. It filters spam submisssions for any type of forms.

Formidable Form Builder spam filter

Plugin extends spam protection for Formidable Form Builder. It filters spam submisssions for any type of forms – Contact Form, Survey & Quiz Forms.

Leaky Paywall subscription protection

Plugin protects Leaky Paywall plugin (by ZEEN01) against spam subscriptions. It can be used with any other third-party spam filters.

HubSpot protection for embedded forms

Plugin protects HubSpot embedded forms against any spam submissions. Guide to start using embedded forms https://knowledge.hubspot.com/forms/how-can-i-share-a-hubspot-form-if-im-using-an-external-site

Contact Form by WPForms spam filter

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.

WooCommerce spam filter

Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations and spam reviews for WooCommerce. The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1 and higher.

Spam filter for theme contact forms

The plugin blocks spam emails via any theme (built-in ones included) contact forms. The plugin filters spam emails silently (without any error notices on WordPress frontend) in AJAX forms as well.

bbPress spam filter

Spam protection for everything about bbPress: logins, registrations, forums, topics and replies.

Many other great contact, signups and all kind of forms that supported by CleanTalk

• AWeber form builder https://wordpress.org/plugins/aweber-web-form-widget/
• Contact form by BestWebSoft https://wordpress.org/plugins/contact-form-plugin/
• Contact Form Plugin by Fluent Forms Ninja forms https://fluentforms.com
• Forminator contact from https://wpmudev.com/project/forminator-pro/
• Ninja forms https://ninjaforms.com
• Newsletters – MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress (mc4wp.com), MailPoet – emails and newsletters in WordPress (https://www.mailpoet.com/)
• WS Form Lite https://wordpress.org/plugins/ws-form/
• WP User Frontend, UserPro.
• WordPress Landing Pages.

Protection for forms above works as built-in function of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk, without any additional actions from a user. Anywaym, if you have missed spam, try to activate a few options below. If nothing helps, ask for help at support forum https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/cleantalk-spam-protect/

• Any WordPress form (checkbox ‘Custom contact forms’).
• Any submission to the site (checkbox ‘Check all POST data’).

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.

How does CleanTalk improve SEO for your website?

CleanTalk works faster than most of the other anti-spam plugins. It is common knowledge that the faster your site loads, the better your customer experience is, the better your SEO will be, and the better your site will convert. Speed is becoming increasingly important in SEO, conversion and user experience. Today, site speed is one of the most important ranking factors on Google. A site that loads slowly will lose visitors and potential revenue.

Among anti-spam plugins CleanTalk is one of the fastest. Despite the large plugin functionality, the developers have optimized the performance of
the plugin so that AntiSpam by CleanTalk is faster than most analogs. This contributes to the cloud service architecture, as all calculations take place in the cloud, not on the server, the server receives the finished result for further action.

https://s.w.org/plugins/cleantalk-spam-protect/screenshot-5.png?r=1288723

Unlike stand-alone plugins (like Antispam Bee) Anti-Spam by CleanTalk uses less CPU that improves site response, visitors experience and SEO results.

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

How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA?

The most popular anti-spam method is CAPTCHA – the annoying picture with curved and sloping symbols, which are presented to the visitor to decipher and fill in. In is supposed that spam bots won’t discern these CAPTCHA, but a visitor will. CAPTCHA provokes great irritation, but if the visitor wants to comment, he has to fill in these symbols time after time, making mistakes and starting once again. 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

You do not have to work in IT to know what spam is. Besides piles of unwanted email, there are spam bots, or special software programs designed to act as human website visitors that post unwelcome messages over the Internet to advertise dubious services. More often than not spam messages do not even make sense. Similar to bacteria and virus mutations developing antibiotic resistance, spam bots are becoming more resilient in penetrating Internet firewalls and security layers.

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.

Latest and the most SPAM active IPs, Emails, Domains and ASN

• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• [email protected]
• 191.101.217.24
• 199.167.138.22
• 178.159.37.17
• 185.190.42.200
• 45.133.172.23

Effective date is July 13th, 2025. Real-time data is available at https://cleantalk.org/blacklists.

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 spambots.
• 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 spambots.

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.

Will the anti-spam plugin protect my theme?

Yes, it will. The Anti-spam by CleanTalk is compatible with any WordPress theme.

Should I use other anti-spam tools (Captcha, reCaptcha and etc.)?

CleanTalk stops up to 99.998% of spam bots, so you can disable other anti-spam plugins (especially CAPTCHA-type anti-spam plugins). In some cases several anti-spam plugins could conflict with each other.

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.