Akismet is an anti-spam protection solution for WordPress and WooCommerce. It checks comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam to prevent the publishing of malicious content.

What features does Akismet have?

Some major features of Akismet include: automatically checking all comments and filtering out spam, providing a status history for each comment, revealing hidden or misleading links in comment bodies, showing the number of approved comments for each user, and a discard feature that blocks the worst spam.

How does Akismet work?

Akismet checks comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam. It filters out comments that look like spam and provides a status history for each comment. Moderators can also mark comments as spam or unspam.

Do I need to pay for Akismet?

Akismet offers free API keys for personal blogs. Paid subscriptions are available for businesses and commercial sites.

How can I activate Akismet?

Once you activate Akismet, you will be prompted to get an Akismet.com API key. This key is required to use Akismet.

Akismet Anti-Spam: Best WordPress Plugin for Spam Protection

Powerful Anti-Spam Protection

Block spam comments and forms

Description: Akismet is the best anti-spam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce websites. It protects your site by checking comments and contact form submissions against a global database of spam. With Akismet, you can prevent malicious content from being published on your site.

Automatic Spam Filtering

Save time and effort

Author’s Site

5.4

Release Date – 7 May 2025

The stats pages now use the user’s locale instead of the site’s locale if they’re different.
Adds a ‘Compatible plugins’ section that will show installed and active plugins that are compatible with Akismet.
Akismet now requires PHP version 7.2 or above.

5.3.7

Release Date – 14 February 2025

Simplify the logic used during a comment-check request to compare comments.

5.3.6

Release Date – 4 February 2025

Improve the utility of submit-spam and submit-ham requests.
Modernize styles for the Akismet classic widget.

5.3.5

Release Date – 18 November 2024

Address compatibility issues with < PHP 7.3 in v5.3.4 release.

5.3.4

Release Date – 18 November 2024

Improve activation notice on Comments for users who haven’t set up their API key yet.
Improve notice about commercial site status.

5.3.3

Release Date – 10 July 2024

Make setup step clearer for new users.
Remove the stats section from the configuration page if the site has been revoked from the key.
Skip the Akismet comment check when the comment matches something in the disallowed list.
Prompt users on legacy plans to contact Akismet support for upgrades.

5.3.2

Release Date – 21 March 2024

Improve the empty state shown to new users when no spam has been caught yet.
Update the message shown to users without a current subscription.
Add foundations for future webhook support.

5.3.1

Release Date – 17 January 2024

Make the plugin more resilient when asset files are missing (as seen in WordPress Playground).
Add a link to the ‘Account overview’ page on akismet.com.
Fix a minor error that occurs when another plugin removes all comment actions from the dashboard.
Add the akismet_request_args filter to allow request args in Akismet API requests to be filtered.
Fix a bug that causes some contact forms to include unnecessary data in the comment_content parameter.

5.3

Release Date – 14 September 2023

Improve display of user notices.
Add stylesheets for RTL languages.
Remove initial disabled state from ‘Save changes’ button.
Improve accessibility of API key entry form.
Add new filter hooks for Fluent Forms.
Fix issue with PHP 8.1 compatibility.

5.2

Release Date – 21 June 2023

Visual refresh of Akismet stats.
Improve PHP 8.1 compatibility.
Improve appearance of plugin to match updated stats.
Change minimum supported PHP version to 5.6 to match WordPress.
Drop IE11 support and update minimum WordPress version to 5.8 (where IE11 support was removed from WP Core).

5.1

Release Date – 20 March 2023

Removed unnecessary limit notices from admin page.
Improved spam detection by including post taxonomies in the comment-check call.
Removed API keys from stats iframes to avoid possible inadvertent exposure.

5.0.2

Release Date – 1 December 2022

Improved compatibility with themes that hide or show UI elements based on mouse movements.
Increased security of API keys by sending them in request bodies instead of subdomains.

5.0.1

Release Date – 28 September 2022

Added an empty state for the Statistics section on the admin page.
Fixed a bug that broke some admin page links when Jetpack plugins are active.
Marked some event listeners as passive to improve performance in newer browsers.
Disabled interaction observation on forms that post to other domains.

5.0

Release Date – 26 July 2022

Added a new feature to catch spammers by observing how they interact with the page.

For older changelog entries, please see the additional changelog.txt file delivered with the plugin.

Subscription Service

By jimsteinsharpe on June 13, 2025

Quick Response, 24/7, Very happy with service support

Good spam prevention and good support

By Denhomer on June 11, 2025

filters almost all spam on my site and support was quick to respond when asking questions.

Top-notch plugin

By daumantukas on June 2, 2025

It has a lot of free capabilities and on top of that it supports non profit organisations, this plugin deserves more attention than it currently has. Communication with the support is easy, polite and fast, I didn't need to wait days or even hours. Usage of the plugin is quite straightforward, this plugin has rich documentation, so it took minutes to set it up. Best of the best, thank you!

Ditched after years

By IainPurdie on May 31, 2025

I started using Wordpress Forms on my site and found that Akismet automatically (and forcibly) is used on these if installed. You cannot disable this connection. After a month I realised that it had gathered dozens of form responses as spam, and not a single one was a true positive. The most it lets me do is mark them as "not spam".

I now have these many messages stuck in Wordpress with no simple way to get them to where they should have gone (ie our mailbox). That's dozens of customer emails I didn't see. That's money lost. If any spam does get sent from a Form then our own email servers will handle it. I don't need Akismet sat in the middle stealing all the messages.

As with so much Jetpack stuff over the last year or so, the more they've started to charge for things, the worse the products have become. I've uninstalled it and will find something else that I can actually trust and which is functional (or at least includes an option to exclude it from certain areas of WordPress).

Excellent in support

By Mahdi Zolfaghari (mahdizk) on May 17, 2025

Fast Response and Nice Guarantee with 24/7 Support.

Garbage, misses hundreds of spam emails

By Circuit Basics (smithy468) on May 15, 2025

This plugin has turned to trash like most other Automattic plugins. It used to work fine until a few months ago when it started missing tons of spam comments. Now the plugin misses about 100 spam comments per week. I have to constantly log in, add the spam URLs to the disallow box in the discussion settings, then delete the comments. It takes forever now.

Here's a suggestion - when a user marks a comment as spam, please automatically add the IP address and email to a disallow list. This would save us time having to enter disallow keywords for every single comment spam that Akismet has missed.

Simply Works Well

By bobbyblaze on May 3, 2025

Software that simply works.

Good Service for Non-Profit

By Cee (Chengfucius) on April 18, 2025

They were very quick in making sure one of my clients' website is registered as non-profit. Super responsive.

Does what it promises

By vlih on April 9, 2025

I don't know how she does it, but it works really well.

Good Customer Support

By Jake Stoddard (jhstoddard) on April 2, 2025

Customer service was friendly and understanding.

More Reviews

Void Contact Form 7 Widget For Elementor Page Builder

This WordPress Plugin Adds Contact Form 7 widget element to Elementor page builder for easy drag & drop the created contact forms with CF7 (contac …

Try Demo More Details

WordPress Captcha Plugin by Captcha Bank

Captcha Bank is a anti-spam captcha plugin for WordPress forms that adds secure image captcha or math captcha to prevent spam.

Try Demo More Details

Disable Comments

Disable Comments – easy tool to disable comments for your blog posts, and pages. Admin can disable comments in just a few clicks.

Try Demo More Details

Akismet Anti-Spam: Spam Protection