Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection vs WPForms – AI Form Builder for WordPress – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Survey Form, Quiz & More (2026): PluginCheck
Quick Verdict
Pick Akismet if your only concern is blocking spam on comments and existing forms without touching your form setup. Pick WPForms if you need to actually build contact, payment, or survey forms on your site, with spam filtering available as a bonus feature.
These two plugins serve very different primary purposes, but site owners often consider them together when building out a new WordPress site. Akismet focuses entirely on filtering spam out of comments, registrations, and form submissions, while WPForms is a full drag-and-drop form builder for contact, payment, survey, and quiz forms. The choice usually comes down to whether you need spam defence, a form builder, or both (in which case they pair well together).
Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection
The best anti-spam protection to block spam comments and spam in a contact form. The most trusted antispam solution for WordPress and WooCommerce.
- Active installs 5M+
- Rating 4.7/5 (1,186)
- Last updated Aug 18, 2026
- Support resolved 100%
- Tested to WP 7.1
- Requires PHP 7.2
WPForms – AI Form Builder for WordPress – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Survey Form, Quiz & More
The best WordPress contact form plugin. Drag & Drop form builder to create beautiful contact forms, payment forms, & other custom forms.
- Active installs 5M+
- Rating 4.8/5 (14,375)
- Last updated Sep 17, 2026
- Support resolved 91%
- Tested to WP 7.1.1
- Requires PHP 7.2
Where Akismet Anti-spam: Spam Protection Wins
Higher support resolution rate
Akismet resolves 100% of support tickets compared to WPForms' 90.9%, suggesting fewer users need follow-up help or that issues are closed more reliably.
Purpose-built spam engine
With 5 million installs and a single focus on spam, Akismet is a specialist tool refined over many years, whereas WPForms treats spam filtering as one feature among many.
Where WPForms – AI Form Builder for WordPress – Contact Forms, Payment Forms, Survey Form, Quiz & More Wins
Higher quality score
WPForms scores 98.04/100 versus Akismet's 91.6/100, reflecting stronger overall performance across PluginCheck's combined metrics.
More user ratings
WPForms has 14,375 ratings scoring 96/100, compared to Akismet's 1,186 ratings at 94/100, giving a broader and slightly higher satisfaction signal.
Stronger support track record at scale
WPForms scores 91/15 on the weighted support metric versus Akismet's 50/15, indicating more responsive and well-documented help despite a slightly lower resolution rate.
Score-by-Score Comparison
Both plugins tie at the maximum 100/30 popularity score, each with 5 million active installs, making reach a non-issue in this comparison.
Both score 100/25 on maintenance, with WPForms last updated 2026-09-17 and Akismet on 2026-08-18, so neither shows any sign of neglect.
WPForms edges ahead with 96/15 versus Akismet's 94/15, backed by a far larger rating base of 14,375 reviews compared to 1,186.
Akismet wins on resolution rate at 100% versus 90.9%, but WPForms scores higher on the weighted support metric at 91/15 versus 50/15 thanks to volume and response depth.
Both score the maximum 100/15 on compatibility, so there is no difference in how broadly each plugin works across WordPress environments.
The Bottom Line
If you are choosing strictly between these two, WPForms is the stronger pick: it has a higher quality score (98.04 vs 91.6), more than ten times the number of user ratings, and a much better weighted support score. However, the two plugins are not really direct competitors. For most sites, the best move is to install Akismet for spam protection and add WPForms when you need a form builder, since they solve complementary problems rather than the same one.