Comment spam filtering and broader spam protection
Comments are the category’s largest related area, but Spam listings also cover broader protection labels.
The comments tag overlaps with 283 plugins. Among the leading listings, Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection and Anti-Spam, Spam FireWall by CleanTalk have broad spam-protection wording in their names, while the category also includes plugins associated with comments. These labels point to different areas of focus without making every listing comment-specific.
CAPTCHA and form-specific protection
CAPTCHA is a substantial part of the category, with plugins whose names indicate particular approaches and form contexts.
- 84 plugins overlap with the CAPTCHA tag, including listings for Cloudflare Turnstile, reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha, and image CAPTCHA.
- Contact Form 7 appears in related tags and plugin names: ReCaptcha v2 for Contact Form 7 and Image CAPTCHA for Contact Form 7 and WPForms by Ho.
- WooCommerce is represented by reCAPTCHA for WooCommerce, a form-specific association reflected in its name.
Related security and email tools
The category reaches beyond direct spam-filtering labels into adjacent security and email concerns.
- Security: 78 plugins overlap with this tag; Sucuri Security is among the leading listings.
- Email: 41 plugins overlap, including WP Mail Logging and Email Address Encoder among the leading listings.
- Spam terminology: 75 plugins overlap with anti-spam and 72 with antispam.
- Honeypot: 27 plugins share this tag, another adjacent area represented in the category.
How concentrated and actively maintained the spam category is
Adoption is concentrated in a small set of listings, and recent updates are not universal across the category.
Of 576 plugins, only 8 have at least 100,000 installs and 19 have at least 10,000; 36% were updated in the last year. Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection leads with 5 million installs, an excellent rating with many reviews, and an update two months ago. Sucuri Security has 600,000 installs, a good rating with a moderate number of reviews, and was updated this month. WP Mail Logging has 300,000 installs, an excellent rating with a moderate number of reviews, and was also updated this month.
Other established listings include Simple CAPTCHA with Cloudflare Turnstile and ReCaptcha v2 for Contact Form 7, each with 200,000 installs and excellent ratings; the former was updated this month and the latter four months ago. The contrast between these listings and the much larger number of lower-install plugins shows a clear long tail.