reCaptcha hurts conversion rates, costing your business money
If you run an online business, where revenue is tied to users purchasing goods or signing up for your service, user experience is critical. A CAPTCHA can be the deciding factor between a person spending money or leaving your site. A Stanford University study puts the conversion rate reduction at up to 40% due to reCaptcha.
Paraxial.io has a similar goal to reCaptcha, stopping bots, but achieves it in a much different, and more effective way. Rather than requiring users perform frustrating tasks, Paraxial.io is installed in the backend of your Elixir/Phoenix application, automatically analyzing traffic, rejecting bots, and allowing real users to use your site without disruption.
reCaptcha is run by an ad-tech giant, profiting off your users
Google runs reCaptcha, using data and work from your users to benefit their business. For privacy conscious users, the presence of reCaptcha is a major point against their decision to use a website. The time they spend fumbling through blurry pictures is a waste, and does not actually improve the security of your website.
Google does not provide any support for Elixir
reCaptcha is an enterprise product that costs thousands of dollars per month in some cases, yet Google is notorious for their lack of customer support. If you need help ensuring reCaptcha is actually installed correctly, it's highly unlikely someone from Google who knows Elixir will talk to you. Paraxial.io was designed to be fully integrated with Elixir from day one, with detailed documentation and code examples. If you have a question, send an email to support@paraxial.io, and a real person will reply to you, someone who knows Elixir and genuinely cares about the security of your website.
reCaptcha is trivial to bypass
2captcha.com currently charges between $1 and $2.99 for 1000 reCaptcha v2 solves, and provides bypass API clients for PHP, Python, Java, and Go. Searching Github for "reCaptcha bypass" will turn up hundreds of repos showing different techniques that have been developed and published. The creators of malicious bots are familiar with reCaptcha, and know how to get around it.
Big Tech vs Independent Business
Paraxial.io is a fully bootstrapped business, we have not taken any venture capital funding, and make a product that serves the Elixir community. Google is a massive company with numerous privacy and security controversies, harvesting user data for targeted advertisements. By using Paraxial.io, you are supporting an independent business and a better internet.
Stay in control of your website data
With Paraxial.io, the Elixir agent is fully open source, meaning you can inspect the code and determine what data to send to the Paraxial.io backend. Even though our service is cloud hosted, you fully own your site's data.
- The data you upload for your site is not shared with advertising companies.
- Your data is not sent to any third parties.
- We do not sell or monetize the data you send us.
reCaptcha is a Google service, a company known for collecting as much data as possible and using it for advertising or other purposes.
Paraxial.io is easier and faster to install
If you want to get setup with reCaptcha in your Elixir/Phoenix application, there is no official documentation from Google on how to do it securely. Many sites where reCaptcha is installed are still vulnerable to bots, because the lack of good documentation from Google results in an insecure configuration.
With Paraxial.io, you have access to excellent code examples and documentation showing how to get setup in minutes. If you have a question, send an email to support@paraxial.io, and a real person will reply to you, someone who knows Elixir and genuinely cares about the security of your website.