Joomla 5 has removed the Captcha plugins

One of the question that you may ask if you update your website to Joomla 5 is : where is the captcha plugin ?

Since years with Joomla 3 and joomla 4 you have used the Recaptcha or Invisible captcha solution from Google, and these plugins were integrated in the core of Joomla. These plugins were available by default in a new Joomla installation and you just needed to setup your keys in the captcha plugin from your Google account.

Since Joomla 5, the captcha plugins have been removed from the core of Joomla.

Why the plugins captcha have disappeared from Joomla 5 ?

The official information from the Joomla developer channel is

Remove outdated captcha from core.
This still will keep the invisible captcha for existing installations, and uninstall old recaptcha.

This means that

the Recaptcha is obsolete and shall not be used anymore
the invisilbe captcha can still be used

But the invisible captcha is no more part of the core in a new Joomla 5 installation ! So be aware that you won't find it in your website unless you still have it from a previous version (and may be not up to date).

Some people suspected that the emails from Google announcing a change in the pricing for the captcha solution would also have contributed to the decision to remove the captcha, but there is no official info on this. We shall also consider that this price change from Google only affects the enterprise plan, and not the small ones.

There are some discussion about the fact that the invisible captcha shall still be part of the Joomla 5 core, but at the time I write these lines, it is still no more in it. Hoping that this will change soon.

What's next ? How to add a captcha on a Joomla 5 website ?

There is no simple solution for now, but Joomla has some good developers in the community that have already some working solution. Here is a list (unordered list without affiliation) of the known solutions. These solution have been proposed by the community in a discussion on Facebook (thanks to all participants). Some as free and some are paid :