Alternative to Friendly Captcha

Private Captcha is an independent, user-friendly, GDPR-compliant security that doesn't get in the way of your users or your legal team.

A step forward

Why Private Captcha is better?

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 offers everything, that Friendly Captcha offers only in Enterprise and 'call-us' tiers, for everyone, at a fraction of a cost, and can be self-hosted on your premises."

Taras Kushnir
Founder
  • Same security. 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.
  • Stronger privacy. 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
    ? Available only with an account
    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.)
  • More affordable. 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.
  • Self-hosted. 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.

Compare pricing

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.

500 req / mo

Friendly Captcha: €9 / mo

Private Captcha: €1 / mo

5,000 req / mo

Friendly Captcha: €39 / mo

Private Captcha: €9 / mo

50,000 req / mo

Friendly Captcha: €200 / mo

Private Captcha: €49 / mo

500,000 req / mo

Friendly Captcha: Call us

Private Captcha: €499 / mo

Ready for a change?
Try it yourself.

Compare with Private Captcha

Friendly Captcha

  • Steep tiers
  • Enterprise tier only
  • Enterprise tier only
  • "Call-us" add-on
  • Enterprise tier only

Private Captcha

  • Affordable
  • Included
  • Included
  • Included
  • Included

Trusted by non-profit, governmental, and small to mid-size enterprises

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Private Captcha technology work?
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.
How does Private Captcha tell bots and users apart?
On scale, bots exhibit different usage patterns and fingerprints statistics than real users. Detection of those patterns is part of the Private Captcha solution.
How does Private Captcha comply with data protection regulations like GDPR?
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.
Can we use Private Captcha if our compliance requires strict EU-only data sovereignty?
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.
Does Private Captcha share your data?
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.
Do you offer a signed DPA?
Our DPA is part of our Terms and is binding upon acceptance of those terms - when you create your account you have to accept it. If you require a formally signed separate copy for your records, please contact support and we will provide you a digital version for your countersignature.
Do you keep or replicate data copies on non-EU servers?
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.
How does Private Captcha improve user experience upon Google reCAPTCHA?
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.
More questions

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