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hCaptcha VS AWS WAF

Compare hCaptcha VS AWS WAF and see what are their differences

ComplyCube
Verify your customers in under 15 seconds anywhere in the world with a cutting-edge SaaS & API platform for Identity Verification and AML/KYC compliance. featured
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hCaptcha logo hCaptcha

Do you use a captcha to keep out bots? hCaptcha is a drop-in replacement for reCAPTCHA that earns website owners money and helps companies get their data labeled.

AWS WAF logo AWS WAF

AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications from common web exploits.
  • hCaptcha Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-28
  • AWS WAF Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-04-02

hCaptcha features and specs

  • Privacy
    hCaptcha prioritizes user privacy and does not sell user data to third parties, unlike some other CAPTCHA services.
  • Security
    It offers strong bot detection capabilities, making it difficult for automated systems to bypass.
  • Monetization
    hCaptcha allows website owners to earn revenue by solving CAPTCHAs, since they contribute to datasets used for machine learning training.
  • Customization
    The platform provides various customization options so that website owners can tailor the CAPTCHA to their specific needs and branding.
  • Accessibility
    hCaptcha has features designed to be accessible to users with disabilities, including audio CAPTCHAs.

Possible disadvantages of hCaptcha

  • User Experience
    Some users find hCaptcha challenges to be more difficult and time-consuming than other CAPTCHA systems.
  • Integration
    While widely compatible, some developers may find the initial integration process to be more complex compared to other solutions.
  • False Positives
    There may be instances where legitimate users are incorrectly flagged as bots, leading to a frustrating user experience.
  • Learning Curve
    New users or administrators might face a bit of a learning curve when first deploying or managing hCaptcha.
  • Limited Analytics
    hCaptcha's analytics and reporting features may not be as comprehensive as those offered by some competitors.

AWS WAF features and specs

  • Scalability
    AWS WAF is designed to scale automatically with your application. It can handle high traffic loads without manual intervention, making it suitable for dynamic and unpredictable environments.
  • Ease of Integration
    AWS WAF easily integrates with other AWS services such as CloudFront, Application Load Balancer, and API Gateway, providing a seamless security solution within the AWS ecosystem.
  • Custom Rule Configuration
    Users can define custom rules and policies to suit specific security requirements. AWS WAF provides a flexible rule creation environment, enabling the creation of complex firewall rules.
  • Managed Rules
    AWS WAF offers a set of pre-configured managed rules that provide protection against common threats such as SQL injection and cross-site scripting, which saves time and effort for administrators.
  • Comprehensive Logging and Monitoring
    AWS WAF integrates with AWS CloudWatch and AWS Kinesis Firehose to provide detailed logging and monitoring capabilities. This helps in tracking, analyzing, and reacting to security events in real time.
  • Cost-Effectiveness
    AWS WAF operates on a pay-as-you-go pricing model, allowing businesses to scale costs with usage. This can be particularly cost-effective for smaller organizations or startups.

Possible disadvantages of AWS WAF

  • Complexity
    While AWS WAF offers powerful features, its setup and configuration can be complex, especially for users who are not familiar with AWS or web security concepts.
  • Initial Learning Curve
    New users may find it challenging to get up to speed with AWS WAF due to the need to understand AWS services and security rules syntax. This initial learning phase can be time-consuming.
  • Rule Processing Latency
    In some cases, the processing of complex rules can introduce latency in response times. This may impact the performance of high-speed applications that require minimal delay.
  • Service Dependency
    AWS WAF is deeply integrated within the AWS ecosystem. As a result, its effectiveness is dependent on the use of other AWS services, which may not be ideal for multi-cloud strategies.
  • Cost for Heavy Usage
    While the pay-as-you-go model can be cost-effective for small-scale operations, businesses with high traffic volumes might find the cumulative costs to be significant.
  • Limited Offline Capabilities
    AWS WAF is designed primarily for protecting online applications. Offline or on-premise applications require different solutions, and AWS WAF may not be well-suited in these scenarios.

Analysis of hCaptcha

Overall verdict

  • hCaptcha is a strong choice for websites looking to enhance security and user privacy. It balances usability with effectiveness, making it a reliable alternative to other popular CAPTCHA services. However, like any CAPTCHA, it may still pose accessibility challenges to some users, and implementation effectiveness can vary depending on user needs and website configurations.

Why this product is good

  • hCaptcha is considered a good option for several reasons. It focuses on privacy and security while providing protection against bots and fraudulent activity. Unlike some other CAPTCHA services, hCaptcha doesn’t track users across the web, making it favorable for privacy-conscious users. Additionally, hCaptcha often provides quicker load times and can be more user-friendly, depending on the implementation. It offers robust protection and flexibility for website owners, with the added advantage of allowing site owners to earn revenue when visitors solve CAPTCHAs, as businesses pay to train AI models using the data collected.

Recommended for

  • Websites prioritizing user privacy
  • Businesses wanting monetization opportunities
  • Developers seeking a GDPR and CCPA compliant solution
  • Webmasters looking for alternatives to Google's reCAPTCHA
  • Owners of sites facing high traffic from automated bots

Analysis of AWS WAF

Overall verdict

  • AWS WAF is generally regarded as a strong choice for users already within the AWS ecosystem due to its seamless integration, scalability, and comprehensive security features. It offers extensive functionality for protecting web applications against various online threats, with the flexibility to cater to both basic and advanced security requirements.

Why this product is good

  • AWS WAF (Web Application Firewall) is considered effective due to its ability to protect web applications from common web exploits that can affect application availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. It's highly customizable, allowing users to create security rules that suit their specific needs while leveraging AWS's global infrastructure for scalability and reliability. The integration with AWS services like CloudFront and Application Load Balancer further enhances its usability and efficiency in safeguarding web applications.

Recommended for

    AWS WAF is recommended for businesses and developers who host their applications on AWS and require a robust web application firewall. It is especially suitable for those needing a scalable solution that can be easily integrated with other AWS services. It caters well to users seeking customizability in their security setup and to those who want to protect their applications from a wide range of web threats and attacks.

hCaptcha videos

+ Add

How To Setup hCaptcha For WordPress 2020 - reCaptcha Alternative hCaptcha - reCaptcha Paid Service?

AWS WAF videos

+ Add

Protecting Your Web Application Using AWS Managed Rules for AWS WAF - AWS Online Tech Talks

More videos:

  • Review - Amazon AWS WAF (Web application Firewall ) Training
  • Review - AWS WAF REVIEW

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to hCaptcha and AWS WAF)

hCaptcha

AWS WAF

SPAM Protection
100 100%
SPAM Protection
0% 0
Web Application Security
0 0%
Web Application Security
100% 100
Captcha
100 100%
Captcha
0% 0
Security Monitoring
0 0%
Security Monitoring
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare hCaptcha and AWS WAF

hCaptcha Reviews

  1. Stan
    · Founder at SaaSHub ·
    It's super easy, straightforward and shouldn't take you more than 20-40 minutes to integrate

    To summarise the process of migrating from reCaptcha to hCaptha:

    1. 👌 It's super easy, straightforward and shouldn't take you more than 20-40 minutes
    2. 👁 You are feeding less data to Google
    3. 💸 You earn crypto/money (I have no idea what's the potential though)

    Here it is my original review

    🏁 Competitors: reCAPTCHA
    👍 Pros:    Easy integration|Privacy concisous|You earn money
Cloudflare replaced reCAPTCHA with hCaptcha. I followed their example. It took me 18 min.
Cloudflare announced yesterday that they are moving away from Google's reCAPTCHA in favour of hCaptcha. In my opinion, that is huge! Given the amount of traffic transiting through CloudFlare. That has cut some significant level of vision from Google's all-seeing and tracking eye. Moreover, they are giving a good example for others to follow.
Source: dev.to
Moving from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha
We evaluated a number of CAPTCHA vendors as well as building a system ourselves. In the end, hCaptcha emerged as the best alternative to reCAPTCHA. We liked a number of things about the hCaptcha solutions: 1) they don't sell personal data; they collect only minimum necessary personal data, they are transparent in describing the info they collect and how they use and/or...
Source: blog.cloudflare.com

AWS WAF Reviews

We have no reviews of AWS WAF yet.
Be the first one to post

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, AWS WAF should be more popular than hCaptcha. It has been mentiond 36 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

hCaptcha mentions (4)

  • Figured out how to make HCaptcha work -- Instructions Inside.
    That's it, and HCaptcha will start working. I would imagine it's a better idea to add a specific site exception for hcaptcha.com, and I'm sure I will later, but just really didn't have the patience to do it via screen reader right now. Source: over 2 years ago
  • Discovering OpenZeppelin Defender features with an NFT Game
    Finally, we build a front end with a captcha feature with NextJS and hCaptcha. - Source: dev.to / about 3 years ago
  • I can't log into Bitwarden.....
    I have Ublock and UMatrix running. Had to whitelist hcaptcha.com and bitwarden.com to get the challenge to pop up. Source: about 3 years ago
  • New Bungie store password reset broken :(
    First of all, you can stop trolling. It's not about the actual technology, as it may be hcaptcha.com for change or any others like that. It's about not relying on badly aged technology which is only creating problems for users, not for the bots, as this level of noise and numbers/letters is no longer an issue even for javascript-based AI. Source: almost 4 years ago

AWS WAF mentions (36)

  • Understanding AWS Regions and Availability Zones: A Guide for Beginners
    AWS CloudFront is the star of the show here. It caches static content (like media, scripts, and images) to ensure fast, reliable delivery. Other AWS services that run at the edge include Route 53 for DNS routing, Shield and WAF for security, and even Lambda via Lambda@Edge — giving you the ability to run serverless logic closer to the user. - Source: dev.to / about 1 month ago
  • 🚀🚀Setting Up AWS Firewall Manager Used For Auditing Security Groups in AWS Organization accounts.
    AWS Firewall Manager is a security management service that makes it easier to centrally configure and manage firewall rules across your accounts and applications in AWS Organizations. You can use Firewall Manager to manage AWS WAF, AWS Shield Advanced, VPC, security groups, AWS Network Firewall, and more. - Source: dev.to / 2 months ago
  • 12 Practices and Tools to Ensure API Security
    Like Adam said - WAF is Cloudflare's bread-and-butter product offering, but Amazon also offers AWS WAF in case you want to stick to a single-cloud solution. - Source: dev.to / 3 months ago
  • Block direct access to CloudFront origins with custom headers and AWS WAF
    Amazon Web Application Firewall AWS WAF is a web application firewall that lets you monitor the HTTP(S) requests that are forwarded to your protected web application resources. AWS WAF lets you control access to your content. Based on criteria that you specify, such as the IP addresses that requests originate from or the values of query strings, the service associated with your protected resource responds to... - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
  • AWS Serverless Security: Preventing HTTP Flood DDoS Attack
    AWS WAF is a web application firewall that helps protect your web applications / APIs against common web exploits and bots. Attacks may affect availability, compromise security, or consume excessive resources. AWS WAF gives you control over how traffic reaches your applications by enabling you to create security rules that control bot traffic and block common attack patterns. - Source: dev.to / 6 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing hCaptcha and AWS WAF, you can also consider the following products

reCAPTCHA - reCAPTCHA is a free security service that protects your websites from spam and abuse.

OpenSSL - OpenSSL is a free and open source software cryptography library that implements both the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and the Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, which are primarily used to provide secure communications between web browsers and …

GeeTest CAPTCHA - GeeTest protects your websites, mobile Apps and APIs from bot threats.

Sqreen - Sqreen is a web application security monitoring and protection solution helping companies protect their apps and users from attacks. Get started in minutes.

AuthKong - A reliable captcha service, offers advanced security to protect websites from spam and abuse while ensuring a user-friendly experience for legitimate visitors.

Let's Encrypt - Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG).

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