Cloudflare recently announced a transition in their services
reCAPTCHA vs hCAPTCHA – What Cloudflare Says
In a recent blog post, Cloudflare announced to dump Google’s reCAPTCHA service for an independent venture hCAPTCHA. The service publicly announced this change since they believe that it would directly affect their users too.
Briefly, Cloudflare has shared several reasons that triggered this decision.
The first of these revolves around Google’s and Cloudflare’s conflicting policies regarding data collection. While Google’s prime aim remains advertising, Cloudflare focuses more on user privacy.
Likewise, another concern was regarding Google’s plans for charging fees for reCAPTCHAs.
Google informed us that they were going to begin charging for reCAPTCHA. That is entirely within their right…
In our case, that would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue to use reCAPTCHA for our free users.
For these two reasons, Cloudflare had to abandon the use of reCAPTCHA and look for alternative services such as hCAPTCHA. It is an independent service powered by Intuition Machines Inc., a technology company based in California.
Why Cloudflare Preferred hCAPTCHA
Cloudflare deems hCAPTCHA as a better Captcha due to numerous reasons. According to Cloudflare,
- hCAPTCHA only collects minimal data with transparency and without intending to sell personal data.
- They exhibited better performance during A/B testing
- They offer better solutions for users with accessibility challenges
- hCAPTCHA works in areas where Google is blocked
- It supports Privacy Pass
And, they have a responsive team.
To make things work, Cloudflare has decided to pay hCAPTCHA for better services.
We proposed that rather than them paying us we pay them. This ensured they had the resources to scale their service to meet our needs.
They consider it affordable than paying to Google for reCAPTCHA.
While that has imposed some additional costs, those costs were a fraction of what reCAPTCHA would have. And, in exchange, we have a much more flexible CAPTCHA platform and a much more responsive team.
Let us know your thoughts in the comments.