I’m using the CaptCha plugin. https://www.boriel.com/?page_id=17
I had one site that was getting a couple hundred spams/day. Got to the point where I could just sit and watch the spam pour in. No one has said anything about any trouble posting comments or that the captcha was too hard to read and it has cut my spam to only a couple per month but I might look into Akismet when I have more time.
