Instead of asking users to solve complex puzzles or track their behavior, Private Captcha solves an invisible cryptographic task in the background. The system automatically adjusts the task difficulty, ensuring smooth access for real users while making it too costly for bots to attempt. Cryptographic task provides equal security regardless of bot's intelligence level, making it effective even as AI technology improves. Which is hard to say about image/sound recognition tasks of other captchas.
Alternative to Altcha
Private Captcha is an independent, GDPR-compliant CAPTCHA made in EU that works without legal overhead and user friction
Time for a refresh
Private Captcha is different?
Private Captcha shares a few traits with Altcha: an independent European company, product source code available on GitHub (more on that later) and better UX than traditional "captcha hell" (in theory). However, some of these claims don't survive scrutity.
While Altcha claims to be self-hosted, you can not find the actual documentation for it, except of their proprietary closed-source Sentinel product, which costs €99-799/month. And when you actually get a trial of Sentinel, it's a security nightmare to deploy not only because of the ~500MB Javascript backend with outdated dependencies, but because of a huge stack of extra utilities, bundled together. Read more in the blog.
As for the UX part, Altcha is hands-down better than reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha, but it still feels a little bit 2000-sh. And bots have learned to see numbers behind the colorful lines long time ago.
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Frequently Asked Questions
On scale, bots exhibit different usage patterns and fingerprints statistics than real users. Detection of those patterns is part of the Private Captcha solution as we process a lot of request data on behalf of our clients.
Private Captcha does not use any client-side tracking technologies like cookies and does not retain Personally Identifiable Information (PII) on its backend systems. As part of service operation, user data is anonymized and aggregated, making it impossible to track to any individual user.
Private Captcha is powered by exclusively European suppliers. If you want to ensure that no data is transferred to other countries due to geographic routing, you can also use our EU-only API endpoints.
The data we collect belongs to you. We do not collect PII and aggregated data we do collect is not shared with any third-parties. Outside of the hosting companies that own servers on which data is stored, no other vendor can access it.
Short answer is no. Our non-EU servers are API servers only without any data persistance (any data copies are temporary in memory only). Any servers that store (and/or replicate) data on disk, are within the EU only.
The Private Captcha widget offers better accessibility for website visitors, regardless of their cognitive abilities. Also, it is a more lightweight (17 vs 220 kB) solution that does not require cookie banners and therefore reduces friction of using the website.