CleanTalk Review – The Best Paid Cloud Anti-Spam/Security Plugins for WordPress (Akismet Alternative)

I have been using the Akismet plugin for quite sometime. And a couple of days ago, I received emails from Akismet:

You’re currently using Akismet for free, but the free plan is only allowed on non-commercial sites.

You are displaying ads on your site, so it does not qualify as non-commercial.

To continue using Akismet, please upgrade to the $5/month Plus plan.

akismet-upgrade-email You’re currently using Akismet for free, but the free plan is only allowed on non-commercial sites.
You are displaying ads on your site, so it does not qualify as non-commercial.

I don’t have a problem with paying for the subscription but I don’t like the reason – that displaying ads means commercial? this doesn’t make sense to me. Therefore, I deleted the Akismet plugin and look for the alternative.

Review of CleanTalk Plugin

CleanTalk Subscription Fee

Luckily I found CleanTalk. It is a lot cheaper, with 1 website, it costs only $8 a year (less than a dollar per month) – which is affordable for most bloggers.

1 website – $8/year
3 websites – $16/year
5 websites – $24/year
.. and so on.

I paid for 10 websites, which is $46/year. If you pay 2 years in advance, you get 10% discounts, and if you pay 3 years, that is 19% discounts, also, you will get additional 3 months free.

Mobile Dashboard

CleanTalk allows you to login to dashboard to see the antispam statistics on your smart devices/phones. For example, the iOS CleanTalk you can review the spam comments.

review-spam-comments on iphone

WordPress Dashboard Statistics by CleanTalk

After installation, you’ll also notice a graph that shows statistics on your wordpress home dashboard.

cleantalk-anti-spam-statistics

CleanTalk WordPress Plugin Configuration.

cleantalk-wordpress-setting

CleanTalk Dashboard

At CleanTalk dashboard, you can monitor your sites and see the statistics easily. You control what to do when a spam comment is found. You can also view the log and help identify the spam.

cleantalk-dashboard

CleanTalk Services

At your wordpress, when a spam comment is posted, the request is sent to CleanTalk cloud servers for identification. I am sure CleanTalk uses Machine Learning given Big Data of previous experiences of labeling comments spam or not. The spam comments or legimate comments are logged. I have used CleanTalk for 7 days trial and it seems showing very good results – CleanTalk manages to capture nearly all spam comments and I am able to spend more time on something else.

Apart from anti-spam wordpress plugin, CleanTalk also provides anti-spam plugins for other platforms such as PHPBB – a PHP forum. Also, CleanTalk has security plugin for wordpress that protects your wordpress blog by malicious attacks e.g. bruteforce attacks and more.

CleanTalk, is definitely a wordpress No 1 anti-spam/security plugin you should have!

–EOF (The Ultimate Computing & Technology Blog) —