Private Captcha is an independent, GDPR-compliant CAPTCHA made in EU that works without legal overhead and user friction
A step forward
Private Captcha is a more modern, more open and more affordable iteration of Friendly Captcha. Not only it offers the same benefits (and more), but it costs a fraction of the cost, is more private for the end users, and is designed for self-hosting from the ground up.
Private Captcha is also founded and hosted in the EU and offers the same privacy guarantees under GDPR as Friendly Captcha. However, our widget does not collect any end-user Personally Identifiable Information (PII), while Friendly Captcha DPA inside "Description of Transfer" section states that in widget v2 they can track what the end user can be doing (keystrokes, local fonts, local language, screen size, browser events etc.)
Private Captcha offers the same security of modern Proof-of-Work cryptographic challenges like Friendly Captcha for stopping the bots from spam and abuse. Private Captcha widget likewise reduces the user friction by moving the verification fully to the background, but looks more modern than Friendly Captcha.
Each Private Captcha tier offers everything that Friendly Captcha offers only in Enterprise or "call-us" tiers: automatic difficulty scaling, user/org management, EU-only datacenters, audit logs etc. Private Captcha pricing is much more flexible and does not force you into upgrading into x5 more expensive plan when you don't need to.
All Private Captcha source code is publicly available not only for everyone to inspect our privacy claims, but also to install on premises having the same features as SaaS version at privatecaptcha.com. To the contrary, Friendly Captcha is a black box and it’s unclear how they process the data.
Independent, privacy-first, self-hostable CAPTCHA service made in EU
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Below are sample tiers only. While Friendly Captcha has 3 tiers (and "call-us") only, Private Captcha offers 10 fine-grained tiers so everyone can find a suitable pricing.
Save money without compromising privacy and compliance
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Question zone
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.
On scale, bots exhibit different usage patterns and fingerprints statistics than real users. Detection of those patterns is part of the Private Captcha solution.
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.
Independent, privacy-first, user-friendly CAPTCHA service made in EU
