Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

hCaptcha VS Smartproxy

Compare hCaptcha VS Smartproxy and see what are their differences

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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.

Smartproxy logo Smartproxy

Smartproxy is perhaps the most user-friendly way to access local data anywhere. It has global coverage with 195 locations, offers more than 55M residential proxies worldwide and a great deal of scraping solutions.
  • hCaptcha Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-28
  • Smartproxy Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-08-26

Smartproxy has been a promising proxy provider since its first days in 2018. They offer a wide selection of proxies (residential, shared and private datacenter proxies) and three full-stack scraping APIs with 100% success rates and a no-code scraper. It has an easy-to-use dashboard, public API, and flexible payment methods. Being awarded for its consumer-centric approach, Smartproxy continues to look for ways to make public data gathering as simple and accessible to everyone as possible.

The key things Smartproxy offers for you:

  • 55M+ high-quality residential IPs with an average speed of <0.5 sec.

  • Global coverage – target 195+ locations, including cities and 50 US states.

  • Pay As You Go option - $3.5 per 1GB.

  • 500K+ shared and dedicated datacenter IPs.

  • Unlimited connections and threads.

  • Full anonymity and security.

  • Smart Wallet for easy payment management.

  • Fantastic 24/7 support with 40s average response time.

  • User-friendly dashboard with a quick and easy proxy setup.

  • Detailed documentation and an informative blog.

  • A bunch of free tools with any plan subscription.

  • Free trial for all products..

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.

Smartproxy features and specs

  • Large Proxy Pool
    Smartproxy offers a vast pool of residential and data center proxies, which expands the choice and decreases the chance of IP bans.
  • User-friendly Dashboard
    The service provides an intuitive and easy-to-use dashboard, making it simple for users to manage their proxies and monitor usage.
  • High Anonymity
    Smartproxy ensures high levels of anonymity and privacy, useful for activities requiring discreetness like web scraping.
  • Global Coverage
    With proxies available in numerous locations worldwide, users can access geographically restricted content or conduct broad market research.
  • 24/7 Customer Support
    Their customer support is available around the clock, offering reliable and prompt assistance to users via live chat and email.
  • Flexible Pricing Plans
    Smartproxy provides a range of pricing plans catering to different needs and budgets, including pay-as-you-go options.

Possible disadvantages of Smartproxy

  • Higher Cost for Premium Plans
    While they do offer flexible pricing, the more advanced plans can be expensive, making them less accessible for smaller businesses or individual users.
  • Usage Limitations
    There are bandwidth limitations depending on the plan you choose, which can be restrictive for tasks requiring large data transfers.
  • Shared Proxies
    Some of the proxies are shared, which can potentially slow down connection speeds or lead to IP bans if other users abuse the service.
  • No Free Trials
    Smartproxy does not offer a free trial, which could deter potential customers who are unwilling to commit without trying the service first.
  • Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    Utilizing some of the more sophisticated functionalities might require a learning curve, especially for users not familiar with proxy services.

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 Smartproxy

Overall verdict

  • Smartproxy is generally well-regarded in the proxy service industry. It is recommended for those who need reliable and efficient proxy solutions with a balance of cost and performance. However, like any service, it’s important for users to assess their specific needs and test the platform to ensure it meets their requirements.

Why this product is good

  • Smartproxy is considered a good proxy service provider due to its extensive network of residential IP addresses, competitive pricing, and high success rates for web scraping and bypassing geo-restrictions. The service offers user-friendly management tools and responsive customer support, making it suitable for both beginners and advanced users. Additionally, Smartproxy places a strong emphasis on security and privacy, which are crucial factors for many users.

Recommended for

  • Web scraping professionals
  • SEO specialists
  • Businesses looking to bypass geo-restrictions
  • Users concerned with online privacy and security
  • Data miners needing reliable residential proxies

hCaptcha videos

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

Smartproxy videos

Residential rotating proxies. Why choose Smartproxy?

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Smartproxy review &amp; How to smartproxy
  • Review - Proxies for Scraping
  • Tutorial - How to Start Using Smartproxy
  • Review - Smartproxy Review 2023: Best Price To Value Proxies
  • Review - IPFighter| Review Smartproxy

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to hCaptcha and Smartproxy)
SPAM Protection
100 100%
0% 0
Proxy
0 0%
100% 100
Captcha
100 100%
0% 0
Residential Proxies
0 0%
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 Smartproxy

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...

Smartproxy Reviews

  1. Vladyslav
    · Backend Developer at KittenProperties ·
    Very good quality

    Residential proxy is quite good. High success rate with their proxies even though it is quite expensive

    🏁 Competitors: NetNut.io
    👎 Cons:    Expensive
  2. CPAScraping
    · Working at CPA Scraping ·
    My Review of Smartproxy Service

    Smartproxy, in my experience, is a solid choice for heavy-duty web scraping tasks. Been using it for bulk data mining. Their proxy pool's massive – good for avoiding blocks and captchas. Speed's decent, uptime mostly consistent. Setup? Straightforward. But yeah, pricing's a bit on the higher side, especially for large-scale operations. Overall, Smartproxy delivers, especially for those heavy scraping needs.

    👍 Pros:    Ip diversity|Quick data access|Minimal downtime|User-friendly interface:
    👎 Cons:    Pricey|Some geo-restrictions.|Ometimes slow response.

OxyProxy vs. Smartproxy: A Detailed Comparison
Set of Services Provided by Smartproxy Service TypeDescriptionResidential ProxiesOffers IP addresses from real residential connections, ideal for high anonymity and avoiding blocks.Data Center ProxiesProvides faster speeds, suitable for tasks requiring high-speed connections.Rotating ProxiesAutomatically rotates IP addresses, enhancing anonymity and reducing the risk of...
Source: oxyproxy.pro
Top 10 Alternatives to Bright Data (formerly Luminati Proxy Networks)
The proxy pool is one of the cleanest as it is regularly being updated. Currently, it has over 5 million residential IP addresses sourced from many locations. As stated earlier, Soax is affordable even though its pricing model is the same with both Smartproxy and Bright Data – bandwidth-based. Just like Smartproxy, all you need to use the Soax service is a minimum of $75.
17 BEST Residential Proxies to Buy in 2022 (Cheap & Premium)
Smartproxy offers both residential and datacenter proxies, but their residential ones have the best features. Unlike most other residential proxy providers, Smartproxy focuses solely on providing the best residential IPs to businesses.
Source: earthweb.com
10 Best Free Online Proxy Server List of 2022 [VERIFIED]
Smartproxy offers a residential proxy network with 40M+ IPs. It offers the solutions of data center proxies, search engine proxies, etc. Chrome proxy extension will help you with accessing the localized content. Proxy address generator provides the facility of exporting the proxy list for any software.
Best Data Scraping Tools
Smart proxy has about 10 million rotating residential proxies with location targeting and flexible pricing. There are rotating sessions, random IPs, geo-targeting, sticky sessions, and more. Smart proxy creates a room for unlimited connections and numerous threads which offer 99% SLA with low failure rates, functioning 24/7 with reliable support of 5 minute response time.

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Smartproxy should be more popular than hCaptcha. It has been mentiond 6 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

Smartproxy mentions (6)

  • Best Amazon Scraper APIs To Check Out in 2024
    Smarproxy is another proxy provider that offers a dedicated section for scraping e-commerce platforms including Amazon. Their Amazon API is known for its speed and quality and can be used just with a simple POST request. - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Basic Web Browser with Electron +APIS
    Smartproxy: Offers residential proxies with support for HTTP(S) and SOCKS5. It is known for its high success rate and 24/7 technical support. Smartproxy provides a balance between price and performance, making it accessible to less experienced users (Smartproxy). - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Cheap Residential Proxy: Affordable and Reliable Proxy Service for Anonymous Browsing
    For instance, imagine you are conducting market research and need to scrape data from various websites for analysis. By using a residential proxy service like anyip.io or Smart Proxy, you can ensure that your scraping activities are secure and undetectable while maintaining anonymity. Additionally, these services effortlessly handle throttling of threads and swiftly manage captchas. Source: over 1 year ago
  • Proxy for Instagram: What is It and How to Get It?
    Smartproxy Rotating residential IPs for multi-accounting. Large rotating residential proxy pool, 195+ countries, no subnets, an easy setup process. The IPs are from both desktop and mobile devices. Different tools for IG automation and affordable price plans ($75/5 GB ($15/GB). However the residential IPs are still P2P, so you have sticky sessions up to 30 min and then proxies rotate. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • Smartproxy Review
    Smartproxy is one of the latest rotating residential proxy services to hit the market. Smartproxy offers its users immense features and functionality at affordable rates. If you’re looking for a long-term proxy service to stick to, it’s worth looking at Smartproxy’s unique offerings. - Source: dev.to / almost 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

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

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

Bright Data - World's largest proxy service with a residential proxy network of 72M IPs worldwide and proxy management interface for zero coding.

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

Oxylabs - A web intelligence collection platform and premium proxy provider, enabling companies of all sizes to utilize the power of big data.

MTcaptcha - Enterprise Captcha solutions

NetNut.io - Residential proxy network with 52M+ IPs worldwide. SERP API, Website Unblocker, Professional Datasets.