5 Best WordPress Plugins to Stop Comment Spam in 2026
How do you stop comment spam on WordPress? Spam bots never sleep. Over the years QuickOnlineTips has received more than 3 million spam comments, and without good filters the real comments get buried. Akismet alone is not always enough on busy blogs, and the GASP plugin we once recommended is no longer maintained. Here are the best WordPress plugins to stop comment spam in 2026, and how to combine them.
Quick answer: The best plugins to stop comment spam are Akismet (cloud spam filter by Automattic), Antispam Bee (free and privacy-friendly), WP Armour (invisible honeypot), Simple CAPTCHA with Cloudflare Turnstile (free, cookie-less CAPTCHA) and CleanTalk (paid cloud service). Use one filter plus one bot blocker, not five plugins at once.
Table of Contents
Best WordPress plugins to stop comment spam
1. Akismet
Akismet checks every comment against a huge cloud database of spam and catches most of it automatically. It is free for personal blogs and paid for commercial sites. By default it can silently delete the worst spam, which you can change in settings.
2. Antispam Bee
Antispam Bee is free, needs no account and does not send personal data to outside servers, making it popular with sites that care about GDPR. It uses honeypots, local spam databases and country or language filters. Over 700,000 sites use it.
3. WP Armour – Honeypot Anti Spam
WP Armour adds an invisible honeypot field that bots fill in but humans never see, so spam is blocked before it is saved. No CAPTCHA, no annoyance for readers.
4. Simple CAPTCHA with Cloudflare Turnstile
Simple CAPTCHA with Cloudflare Turnstile adds Cloudflare’s free, privacy-preserving Turnstile check to comments, login and registration forms. Most visitors never have to solve a puzzle. It also protects forms from Contact Form 7, WPForms and WooCommerce.
5. Anti-Spam by CleanTalk
CleanTalk is a cloud anti-spam service that blocks spam comments, registrations and form submissions without CAPTCHA. It costs about $12 a year per site after a free trial.
Best combination
- Small blog: Antispam Bee or Akismet.
- Busy blog: Akismet plus WP Armour or Turnstile.
- Sites with many forms: CleanTalk or Turnstile to cover comments, login and contact forms.
Built-in WordPress settings that cut spam
Go to Settings > Discussion and:
- Close comments on articles older than 60 or 90 days.
- Hold comments with two or more links for moderation.
- Require the comment author to have a previously approved comment.
- Add common spam words to the “Disallowed Comment Keys” list.
You can also ban spammer IP addresses, remove the URL field from comments so there is less reason to spam you, and learn to moderate WordPress comments quickly.
FAQ
Is Akismet free?
Free for personal, non-commercial blogs. Business sites need a paid plan.
Do CAPTCHAs hurt real comments?
Hard puzzles do. Invisible honeypots and Cloudflare Turnstile block bots without bothering most humans.
Why do spammers target my blog?
To get links. Nofollow comment links and a hidden URL field reduce the incentive.
How much spam does your blog get? Share your favourite plugin in the comments.
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It’s Really Amazing Post, Thank you so much sir
Thanks for this article, I was little bit confused which one to take for my blog. But You give me four best options. Among them i like to take SI CAPTCHA. It was very helpful and problem solving post for me.
@ James, Definitely after some time scaning and deleting spam comment will be harder.
I like akismet for preventing spam comment. And SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam is my of my favorite. Thanks for the info!
I think akismet plugin is the best plugin to stop spam comments
Spamming is increasing day by day. thank you for sharing such a great article. This WordPress plugins helps the many of the bloggers to avoid the spam.
Great information and thank you for sharing the plugin details. I am also using these plugins to stop spam comment. Its very helpful and nice.
According to me, Plugins are not a best option to deleting spam comments. Just login to your admin panel and read all the comments and delete it manually. I am always using this technique to removing spam comments!!
Can you please say me how to stop scam in comments in php and mysql, Its Urgent i want to introduce in one of my project.
the best way to stop comment spam is to just read the comments and delete those which are bad. I realize after a while this gets hard
askimet is so costly now. are there any free and best used comments manage plugins for wordpress which are having good rating?if so pls let us know ..thank you for the plugin details which you have given here…tnx again ! – rohit
Hi… Nice information about Stopping spam comment but is there any plugin to Do not copy content. if yes can you suggest name please.
I use thise plugins I ts verry nice and usefull
For Comment spam Askimet has always worked for me and for contact form spam I have found Contact Form 7 Honeypot plugin to be very effective.
I use askimet for stop the spam and it work,but i wanna try other plugin