CleanTalk Anti-Spam – Complete Spam Protection

The Anti-Spam plugin is trusted by over 200,000 websites and powered by a global spam detection network. CleanTalk “eats” spam before it reaches your website. By using cloud-based, API-driven analysis and shared spam intelligence, it provides more advanced protection than local, standalone plugins that don’t use a cloud API — helping catch spam they may miss.

🛡️ Anti-Spam Protection for your entire WordPress site

• Contact forms — block spam submitted through Contact Form 7, WPForms, Elementor Forms, Gravity Forms, Fluent Forms, Formidable Forms, and many others.
• WordPress comments — automatically detect and block spam comments.
• WooCommerce — stop fake orders, spam registrations, and spam reviews.
• User registrations — prevent spam accounts and automated registrations.
• Subscriptions and bookings — filter unwanted and automated submissions.

✨ More Than Just Anti-Spam

• ✉️ Real-Time Email validation — detects fake, disposable, and suspicious email addresses.
• 👤 Real Person Badge! — identifies and highlights real people in WordPress comments and can automatically approve legitimate, non-spam comments.
• 🔒 Contact Data Protection — protects published email addresses and phone numbers from being harvested by bots.
• 📋 Anti-Spam Log — shows every checked request, so you can see what was accepted or blocked and review possible false positives.
• 🛡️ Spam FireWall — block known spam bots before they reach your forms.

🧩 No CAPTCHA. No Puzzles. Less Friction.

CleanTalk analyzes submissions automatically in the background. Visitors don’t need to solve CAPTCHA challenges, select images, or complete additional verification steps.

⚡Quick Setup

Install the plugin, connect it to the CleanTalk Anti-Spam service, and your WordPress site is protected.

⭐ Public reviews

Anti-Spam, and the Catch

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.

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

🗂️ Managing Multiple Websites?

CleanTalk also works well for agencies, developers, and website managers. Protect and manage multiple client websites from one CleanTalk account with unlimited checks for spam.

💬 AntiSpam protection and moderation 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.

CleanTalk can also automatically approve legitimate, non-spam comments, helping you spend less time moderating your blog.

📩 Contact Form 7 Antispam

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

Contact Form by WPForms Antispam

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.

Antispam for WooCommerce & fake orders filter

Anti-spam by CleanTalk filters spam registrations, spam reviews, and fake orders for WooCommerce (any eCommerce plugin as well). The plugin is fully compatible with WooCommerce 2.1+ and online stores.

Many other great contact, signups and all kind of forms that supported by Anti-Spam plugin by CleanTalk

• Asgaros Forum
• Avada Forms
• AWeber form builder
• Awesome Support – WordPress HelpDesk & Support Plugin
• Back In Stock Notifier for WooCommerce | WooCommerce Waitlist Pro
• bbPress by John James Jacoby
• Brave Popup Builder – Popup, Optins, Lead Generation, Survey & Interactive Content
• Brevo – Email, SMS, Web Push, Chat, and more by Brevo
• Calculated Fields Form
• Chatway Live Chat – AI Chatbot, Customer Support, FAQ & Helpdesk Customer Service & Chat Buttons
• Contact Form Clean and Simple
• Contact Form by BestWebSoft – Advanced WP Contact Form Builder for WordPress
• Contact Form Plugin by Fluent Forms Ninja forms
• Contact Form by Supsystic
• Contact Form Email
• Constant Contact Forms
• Comments – wpDiscuz By AdvancedCoding
• Customer Reviews for WooCommerce
• Floating Chat Widget: Contact Chat Icons, Telegram Chat, Line Messenger, WeChat, Email, SMS, Call Button – Chaty
• Forminator Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form & Custom Form Builder
• Easy Digital Downloads – eCommerce Payments and Subscriptions made easy
• eForm – WordPress Form Builder
• Elementor – Build, Design & Manage Forms From One Place
• Elfsight Blocks for Elementor — 80+ Widgets
• Events Manager – Calendar, Bookings, Tickets, and more! By Marcus (aka @msykes)
• Everest Forms – Contact Form, Payment Form, Quiz, Survey & Custom Form Builder with AI
• FiboSearch – Ajax Search for WooCommerce
• Flamingo
• Fluentbooking.com
• Formidable Forms – WordPress Form Builder for Contact Forms, Calculators, Quizzes & More
• Form Maker by 10Web – Mobile-Friendly Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder
• GeoDirectory – WP Business Directory Plugin and Classified Listings Directory
• GiveWP – Donation Plugin and Fundraising Platform
• gravityforms.com – Powerful data capture fueled by Gravity Forms
• Gwolle Guestbook
• Happyforms – Form Builder for WordPress: Drag & Drop Contact Forms, Surveys, Payments & Multipurpose Forms
• HivePress – Business Directory, Listings & Classified Ads Plugin
• HubSpot All-In-One Marketing – Forms, Popups, Live Chat
• Hustle – Email Marketing, Lead Generation, Optins, Popups
• JetFormBuilder — Dynamic Blocks Form Builder
• Jetpack – WP Security, Backup, Speed, & Growth
• Jotform – Online Forms — Customizable Payment, Contact, Quiz, Survey Form Builder
• Kadence Blocks — Page Builder Toolkit for Gutenberg Editor
• Kali Forms (Free & Pro) — Contact Form & Drag-and-Drop Builder
• Klaviyo
• Kulahub
• Landing Page Builder – Coming Soon page, Maintenance Mode, Lead Page, WordPress Landing Pages
• Leaky Paywall
• LearnPress – WordPress LMS Plugin for Create and Sell Online Courses
• Lead Form Builder & Contact Form By ThemeHunk
• Login & Register Customizer – Popup | Slider | Inline | WooCommerce
• MailChimp Forms by MailMunch
• MailOptin – Popup, Optin Forms & Email Newsletters for Mailchimp, HubSpot, AWeber Etc.
• My Sticky Elements – All-in-one Sticky Floating Contact Form, Call, Click to Chat, and 50+ Social Icon Tabs
• MetForm – Contact Form, Survey, Quiz, & Custom Form Builder for Elementor
• Newsletter – Send awesome emails from WordPress by Stefano Lissa
• Newsletters by Tribulant Software
• Newsletters – MC4WP: Mailchimp for WordPress
• NEX-Forms – Ultimate Forms Plugin for WordPress by Basix
• Nextend Social Login and Register by Nextendweb
• Ninja forms by Kevin Stover
• Piotnet by piotnet.com
• Product Enquiry for WooCommerce (Now with AI Assistant) By WisdmLabs
• Quform by quform.com
• QuickCal by quickcal.co
• RegistrationMagic – Custom Registration Forms, User Registration, Payment, and User Login By Metagauss
• Simple Registration for WooCommerce By Astoundify
• Smart Forms – when you need more than just a contact form By EDGARROJAS
• Strong Testimonials By WP Chill
• SureForms – Drag & Drop Contact Form & Form Builder, Payment Form, Survey, Quiz & Calculator By Brainstorm Force
• User Registration & Membership – Free & Paid Memberships, Subscriptions, Content Restriction, User Profile, Custom User Registration & Login Builder By wpeverest
• Visual Form Builder By Matthew Muro
• WP Booking System – Booking Calendar By Roland Murg
• User Frontend: AI Powered Frontend Posting, User Directory, Profile, Membership & User Registration By weDevs
• WS Form LITE – Drag & Drop Contact Form Builder By Mark Westguard
• Wufoo Shortcode By wronganswersonly
• WP User Frontend, UserPro
• WordPress Landing Pages
• ZeroBounce Email Verification & Validation By zerobounce
• Zoho Forms – Drag & Drop Form Builder for Websites – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Order Forms & More By Zoho Forms

Protection for the forms above works as a built-in feature of Anti-Spam by CleanTalk without requiring any additional actions from the user.

Check existing users and comments for spam. Bulk spam comments removal. Spam comment Cleaner

With the help of anti-spam by CleanTalk you can inspect through existing users, comments to find and quickly delete spam at once. To use this function, go to WP Console -> Comments -> Find spam comments/users.

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.

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

By default, well-known good bots — including AI crawlers such as GPTBot (ChatGPT), ClaudeBot (Claude), Google-Extended (Gemini), and Copilot — are allowed. You can choose which of these bots to block individually in your private lists. Blocking a bot will stop the corresponding AI service from accessing your content.

How to protect sites from spam bots without CAPTCHA?

CleanTalk Anti-Spam protects websites from spam bots without using traditional CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, or other visitor challenges. Instead of showing CAPTCHA puzzles, the service uses behavioral analysis, invisible JavaScript tests, and a global spam database to detect spam automatically in the background. This CAPTCHA-free anti-spam protection works for contact forms, comments, registrations, and WooCommerce checkouts without creating friction for real visitors. By replacing CAPTCHA with automated spam detection, CleanTalk helps improve usability, accessibility, and conversion rates while still blocking spam effectively.

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

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.

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.

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,

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.

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.

Installation instructions

1. Download, install and activate ‘Anti-spam by CleanTalk’.

2. Get Access key https://cleantalk.org/register

3. Enter Access key in the settings: WordPress console -> Settings -> Antispam by CleanTalk

4. Do dummy spam comment (registration or contact message) with email stop_email@example.com. You should see notice: Forbidden. Sender blacklisted.

5. Done! The plugin is ready to use.

Video guide – Anti-Spam Plugin Installation in WordPress

Important! To test spam protection you must post a dummy submissions as website visitor (use must logged out from WordPress console), because the plugin doesn’t filter submissions from WordPress administrators.

How can setup plugin in WPMU version?

In WordPress multisite version you can switch the plugin to use Global Access key. In this way the plugin doesn’t show any options to enter Access key in plugin settings and doesn’t show Trial banner in WordPress backend. To setup global CleanTalk access key for all websites in WPMS, define constant in your wp-config.php file before defining database constants:

define('CLEANTALK_ACCESS_KEY', 'place your key here');

Make it before you activated the plugin. If the plugin already activated, deactivate it and add the code and active it again.
Now, all subsites will have this access key.