Cloudflare moves away from Google's reCaptcha

Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha

We recently migrated the CAPTCHA provider we use from Google's reCAPTCHA to a service provided by the independent hCaptcha. Since this change potentially impacts all Cloudflare customers, we wanted to walk through the rationale in more detail.

blog.cloudflare.com

I like this move. It's good to see the internet become a little less centralized. hCaptcha also has a pretty cool business model that leverages the Ethereum blockchain.

 

[Evan]

Interesting. Didn't hear about Google charging for reCaptcha. I imagine their model will be similar to their recent API changes (those who gets 100's of thousands of hits will need to pay, regular sites won't be affected).

Not familiar with hCaptcha, but I trust Cloudflare knows what they're doing.

 

[Adam]

I am surprised that Cloudflare have not rolled their own and offered it as a service. Seems to me like they would be well placed to do this but obviously not! They touch on the fact they considered building their own but did not elaborate.

That being said, I welcome this as a trusted recommendation for a long sought after reCaptcha alternative.

Thanks for sharing Nick! Appreciate it. 😃

 

[Gummibeer]

Somehow good move and I hope that a customer like cloudflare will enforce hCaptcha to improve the service.
Right now I can agree on most of the hCaptcha complaints.

• They always show the image captcha
• The images load super slow - definitely not a CF CDN response
• The questions are too complex to solve quickly
• Multistep image questions by default - what's wrong with them!?

Right now hCaptcha feels like what they describe themselves - a data labeling service for their paying customers.

The good thing I've took out of the blog post is privacy pass. Have to read more about it and if it makes sense to install it or even to implement it in my projects.