Nothing else comes close

Akismet just works. You may never hear from it. You also won’t get any spam.

Akismet has been around a long time and is one of the earliest examples of Machine Learning (ML) put to use on a massive sale through Automattic’s unmatched infrastructure for WordPress. It’s a distributed cloud solution that doesn’t require your WordPress installation or your web host to front the resources necessary to stop spammers. If a spammer visits your site and the Akismet network has seen them and their type of spam before, their comment or form submission will never reach your WordPress site.

The only other effective and efficient plugin-based methods of spam *prevention* use honeypots and integrate with fail2ban, which isn’t the easiest thing to set up. Akismet just works — for comments and contact forms, custom forms built with Jetpack, and it can be easily extended for use with other well-documented form solutions, like Gravity Forms.

Nothing else is as simple end effective as Akismet.