CAPTCHAs are tests meant to tell humans and bots apart. While they help prevent spam and attacks, CAPTCHAs can also block bots needed for tasks like web scraping.
Thankfully, CAPTCHA solvers were created to help with this issue and use sophisticated techniques, often involving optical character recognition (OCR) to bypass CAPTCHA. In this article, you’ll learn about the best CAPTCHA solvers for web scraping, evaluating them based on speed, accuracy, cost, types of CAPTCHAs they solve, and API integration.
Let’s jump right in.
1. Bright Data’s Web Unlocker
The Bright Data Web Unlocker comes with several features, including a CAPTCHA Solver, which automatically detects the rules for websites and solves them by emulating human behavior and managing fingerprints.
The CAPTCHA Solver has a success rate of 99 percent, is blazingly fast, and can easily be integrated into your code through its API. In addition, it can bypass a long list of different CAPTCHA types, including reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, Click CAPTCHA, FunCaptcha, Cloudflare Turnstile, KeyCAPTCHA, Capy Puzzle CAPTCHA, and Geetest CAPTCHA.
When using the CAPTCHA Solver, you pay only for successful requests. Moreover, you can use it with Bright Data CAPTCHA proxies, which can help to avoid all CAPTCHAs so you never get blocked.
The CAPTCHA Solver is only one of Web Unlocker’s many features. It also offers IP rotation, extremely high uptime and success rate, JavaScript rendering, automatic request retries, anti-bot bypass, and automated user-agent rotation.
The Web Unlocker is a sophisticated software that uses state-of-the-art technology to bypass any website blocking technique, making it possible to unblock and scrape virtually any website, even those with the most advanced blocking methods. In addition, Bright Data offers the largest pool of residential proxies, including over 72 million IPs from virtually any country in the world. You can use this proxy network together with Web Unlocker as it has a very high success rate and a response time of less than a second.
The Bright Data Web Unlocker has extensive documentation and 24/7 support, along with flexible pricing plans to fit your needs. For low-volume CAPTCHA solving, the Pay-as-you-go plan is a cost-effective option at $3 USD per 1,000 API calls. If your needs are larger, you can choose between the Growth plan ($500 USD a month or $2.30 USD per 1,000 API calls), the Business plan ($999 USD a month or $2.03 USD per 1,000 API calls), or the Premium plan ($1,999 USD a month or $1.89 USD per 1,000 API calls). A free trial is also available if you want to test it out first.
2Captcha
Unlike The Bright Data Web Unlocker, which has numerous features, most of the other CAPTCHA solvers on this list solve only CAPTCHAs. One such service is 2Captcha, which is one of the more popular solutions:
2Captcha employs humans who manually solve CAPTCHAs. The speed of the process largely depends on the type of CAPTCHA and the free capacity at the given moment, and it can usually range between three and fifteen seconds; though for certain CAPTCHAs, it can take up to ninety seconds.
Compared to other CAPTCHA solvers, 2Captcha is significantly slower because humans are the ones doing the work. For that same reason, 2Captcha is more accurate than many of the other alternatives.
2Captcha can solve more than thirty different CAPTCHAs, including reCAPTCHA v2, hCaptcha, and Amazon Web Services Web Application Firewall (AWS WAF) Captcha. 2Captcha also offers a range of APIs and provides code examples for bypassing CAPTCHAs in many programming languages as well as 24/7 tech support. The price starts at $1 USD per 1,000 CAPTCHAs; however, the majority of CAPTCHAs cost closer to $3 USD per 1,000 CAPTCHAs.
AZcaptcha
AZcaptcha uses OCR instead of humans to solve CAPTCHAs. This approach is much faster and cheaper than 2Captchas, but it can also be less accurate.
Based on its performance on the most commonly used CAPTCHAs, AZcaptcha is one of the fastest resolvers, resolving CAPTCHAs in about 0.2 to 0.3 seconds. This makes AZcaptcha a very attractive option if speed is the most important factor to you.
Because it uses OCR, AZcaptcha is relatively cheap. For example, the price per 1,000 solved reCAPTCHA v2 is $1 USD. You can also opt for one of their unlimited monthly plans, which range from $25 USD to $300 USD a month. There’s also a limited free plan.
AZcaptcha works for a wide range of CAPTCHAs, including the popular reCAPTCHA v2, reCAPTCHA v3, and hCaptcha. The API is easy to integrate into your scripts, and there are also browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, as well as 24/7 customer support.
Buster
Buster is a Google Chrome browser extension that uses speech recognition to solve reCAPTCHA audio challenges.
Given that it’s an extension, it’s pretty easy to install and use, and it’s affordable and fast enough. However, Buster does come with many limitations.
While its success rate with reCAPTCHAs is okay, Buster fails to solve most CAPTCHAs. In fact, it solves only reCAPTCHAs, and it sometimes takes a few tries to do so. Additionally, if you use it to solve multiple CAPTCHAs in one day, you may get temporarily blocked. This makes it practically unusable for those who want to solve CAPTCHAs in bulk or who want to solve any type of CAPTCHA aside from reCAPTCHA.
In a nutshell, Buster may be a good option if you want to quickly set it up and use it sparingly, but if you want to scale solving CAPTCHAs or solve various types of CAPTCHAs, Buster is probably not the tool for you.
EndCaptcha
EndCaptcha is a CAPTCHA solver that stands out because of its service level agreement, where it guarantees a CAPTCHA solving time of seven seconds. The agreement also comes with outage insurance that provides compensation if the service is out, as well as slowness insurance that provides compensation in case it takes too long to resolve a CAPTCHA. However, the insurance is included only in their more expensive packages.
The pricing for EndCaptcha starts at $12 USD, which allows for 3,000 CAPTCHA credits. The largest plan costs $479 USD for 100,000 CAPTCHA credits. Although EndCaptcha’s accuracy and success rate are satisfactory, the price per CAPTCHA resolved is on the higher end compared to the other solvers in this roundup.
EndCaptcha offers an API, so it’s easy to integrate. You can also use a third-party API, but the solving times are slower. The official EndCaptcha API supports a few different CAPTCHA types, such as reCAPTCHA v2, reCAPTCHA v3, hCAPTCHA, FunCaptcha, and text CAPTCHAs. If you need help, EndCaptcha has a support team and live chat support, though it works only six hours a day during workdays.
Bypass Captcha
Bypass Captcha is another tool that relies on humans, rather than OCR, to solve CAPTCHAs. Because of this, their accuracy is high, but the speed is relatively low, with a response time of around ten seconds. Because humans solve the CAPTCHAs, Bypass Captcha tends to be expensive, with the lowest plan—offering 2,000 credits—costing $14 USD. Even with the larger plans, their cost per CAPTCHA remains among the highest of all the options in this article.
Bypass Captcha is easy to integrate with your software through their API, available in languages such as Python, PHP, Ruby, Java, and Perl. It also supports all the common CAPTCHAs, including reCAPTCHA v2 and reCAPTCHA v3.
Bypass Captcha is one of the longest-running and most stable CAPTCHA solvers as it’s been in this business for over fifteen years with only a few interruptions to the system.
DeathByCaptcha
DeathByCaptcha is a CAPTCHA solver that utilizes both humans and OCR. This allows it to get the best of both worlds: a solid accuracy supported by a team of humans as well as lower prices compared to the CAPTCHA solvers that utilize humans only. The price depends on the type of CAPTCHA you want to solve but, in general, ranges between $1 USD and $4 USD per 1,000 CAPTCHAs.
The range of CAPTCHAs supported is wide and encompasses around twenty different types, including the usual reCAPTCHA v2 and v3, hCAPTCHA, but also many less common types, such as Capy Puzzle CAPTCHA, MTCaptcha, and KeyCAPTCHA. DeathByCaptcha also provides live customer support, though it’s available for only a few hours during workdays. As with most of the other solvers in this roundup, DeathByCaptcha also provides APIs, which you can use in Python, PHP, and C#, to automate the CAPTCHA solving.
SolveCaptcha
SolveCaptcha is another human-based CAPTCHA solver and can work with most types of CAPTCHAs.
While it’s slower than other solutions, it is fairly accurate. SolveCaptcha provides an API, so integrating it into your software is easy. The API supports most of the popular programming languages, such as Python, Java, C#, C++, and PHP. While the pricing varies between different CAPTCHA types, in general, SolveCaptcha is fairly priced considering it’s human-based. Normal Captcha and Text Captcha cost at most $1 USD per 1,000 CAPTCHA solves, while reCaptcha v2 and FunCaptcha cost $3 USD per 1,000 CAPTCHA solves.
TrueCaptcha
TrueCaptcha is a relatively quick CAPTCHA solver, with solutions in under five seconds. It’s also pretty cheap, with a price of $0.33 USD for 1,000 CAPTCHA solves as it uses OCR to solve CAPTCHAs. You can also request a custom solution and get a custom price. However, TrueCaptcha is extremely limited when it comes to the types of CAPTCHAs it can solve as it works only for normal (aka image) CAPTCHAs. Given this, it’s hardly useful for anyone looking to solve other CAPTCHA types.
You can use TrueCaptcha with one of its browser extensions as they have them for Google Chrome and Firefox. Using these extensions is extremely straightforward; all you need to do is right-click the CAPTCHA and click Solve captcha. For those who want to solve normal (image) CAPTCHAs, TrueCaptcha provides an API as well, which is easy to use with a programming language such as Python, JavaScript, or C#.
Conclusion
In this article, you looked at nine different CAPTCHA solvers on the market, reviewing them based on their speed, accuracy, price, types of CAPTCHAs they solve, and API integration.
Of the options discussed, the Bright Data Web Unlocker stands out with its high success rate, speed, and ability to solve different types of CAPTCHAs. Web Unlocker also comes with many other features, such as IP rotation and proxy integration, JavaScript rendering, and automatic request retries, all of which can help you in your quest to overcome CAPTCHAs.
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