So you want to stop relying on American Big Tech, but cannot decide which CAPTCHA provider to choose? I tried each major one in EU - it was interesting to compare them against Private Captcha.
What are we mostly looking for:
- based (as in “founded” and “operated”) in the EU
- privacy angle
- pricing
- ease of use / friction (integrations, portal)
Captcha.eu
The “master” of SEO (but not privacy - see the screenshot), Captcha.eu service from Austria (founded in 2023) is one of the first that pops up in search. During registration for getting a “magic” login link, they showed me a toast “You have received mail”, probably meaning that they sent me an email without errors. After registration you can create your own integrations.
Features
The dashboard of this service is among the least featured ones. However, when creating the captcha integration, you can insert custom CSS immediately, which I have not see pretty much anywhere else.
Even though I registered using a “Free trial” button, when I tried to create any single domain in their portal, I got an error that I exceeded amount of included domains (which is apparently less than 1):
Their dashboard (and, by extension, their service) has almost no features in terms of configuring any knobs for captcha settings.
Pricing
Their pricing has changed so many times that the next screenshot will probably not age very well. Yet, for point-in-time comparison with others in this list it can be quite useful.
So for 9€ / month you 1,000 captcha requests for 1 website only, but no support included. However, as they indicate, you can cancel any month (again, hard to find such generosity elsewhere on this list…). 100,000 requests will get you 180€ / month and up to 10 protected domains / websites included.
Integrations
Captcha EU does have some funky integrations, that not all other solutions have:
- Keycloak
Adobe CommerceMagento 2- NEOS
- Joomla
Verdict
Short verdict is - it’s hard to see how Captcha.eu survives if customers compare it with any other service in this list. To be honest, if not the new blogposts on their website, it would look mostly like an abandonware.
TrustCaptcha
TrustCaptcha
TrustComponent is a company from Germany (also founded in 2023) that offers a similar CAPTCHA service like Captcha.EU, but has more features. They do have a name confusion after migrating from Trust Captcha to Trust “Component” some time ago.
It’s a little funny how they use a non-interactive widget in the website hero (and the picture is in low resolution too), but the rest is pretty decent.
Features
After registration, I am obliged to subscribe to the service with a credit card or promise that I’m using it for non-commercial website only and up to 500 verifications/month (note the difference - other providers are billing for puzzle requests, while TrustComponent is billing for verifications - for now).
In dashboard they have quite extensive analytics of the captcha requests, similar to web analytics for a website. It is questionable why someone needs all of it, but if you need it - it’s there!
After creating the captcha integration (here called the “product”), you can also configure various security rules: duration of the token validity, verification period and captcha difficulty (called here “Captcha Security / Duration”). Down the page you can also configure geoblocking, IP Allow/Deny lists and “Proof of Work rules” based on: IP address, country, region, browser family, OS family, device class, language, time zone, and fingerprint.
Features are available on paid plans only, if you are using the free version, you can only add a domain “restriction”.
Pricing
Trust Captcha’s pricing starts with 8€ / month per 1,000 requests for a single website and if you need more than 150,000 requests per month, you need to call them. A lot of their features are available in lower tier plans too, but in limited capacity. For example, their “Advanced” plan allows you to “block by IP” starting with 100 IPs for 36€ / month. However, some useful features like Geoblocking are only available in 168€ / month plan.
Integrations
While TrustCaptcha has a solid set of integrations, they have guides for all major technological stacks on how to use those in their documentation. Integrations also include less popular options like TYPO3, JTL-Shop, CraftCMS.
They claim that they have a Webflow integration, but it does not work because it requires you to have your own server for verification. They even state in their own documentation that it’s useless on it’s own. So no luck for Webflow people and some karma damage for TrustCaptcha for the deception.
Verdict
TrustCaptcha offers a lot of functionality in a somewhat not-so-modern skin, but charges a lot for it.
CaptchaFox
CaptchaFox is also from Germany (from Munich - same as TrustCaptcha), also founded in 2023.
Features
CaptchaFox has a clean dashboard that feels better than TrustCaptcha, for example. Also it is the only dashboard where you can customize captcha widget directly inside the portal. What was interesting inside the dashboard is that when attempting to contact support, you just get your email client opened - there’re no separate support system available.
Overall their dashboard feels slick, but just with barely any features at all. They have some “knobs” to toggle in terms of captcha difficulty, but they are hidden by “Contact sales” buttons.
Pricing
CaptchaFox pricing starts with 15€ / month for 10,000 requests, which is kind of cheaper than TrustCaptcha and Captcha.EU, but it includes two domains only and lots of restrictions (like no usage history). However, 100,000 requests costs only 80€ / month, unlike previous contenders.
What is less cool is that if you want to configure rules for captcha difficulty or SSO (Okta/Auth0), you need to “Contact Sales” and pricing of that is unknown.
Integrations
CaptchaFox’s list of integrations looks impressive until you notice about half of them has "Coming soon" label on them. Even though they have some kind of exotic integrations like ReachFive and CS-Cart, their servier-side list consists only of JavaScript, which is a bummer. For example, it’s kind of ironic that they have WordPress plugin, but no PHP server-side integration.
Verdict
I want to like them due to more affordable pricing and thought-through dashboard, but no server integrations and the “Call-us” add-ons for the only features are putting me off.
Friendly Captcha
Friendly Captcha, the last (but not the least) member of German Captcha mafia in this list, is one of the oldest (relatively speaking), founded in 2020. It was the company that popularized the proof-of-work captcha “movemenent”.
Features
Friendly Captcha is quite functional as it spent long time on the market, but the drawback of that is that, similar to many incumbents, most useful features are locked in higher paying tiers, making it mostly unusable if you’re not a larger enterprise. If you are, though, you may enjoy quite detailed analytics (albeit not as detailed as TrustCaptcha has), Audit Logs and IP allow/deny lists.
One feature that Friendly Captcha does not have is the custom rules, that few other solutions offer (for example, if you want to change difficulty in real time based on User-Agent or various HTTP Headers).
Having access to many features requires signing DPA for “v2 captcha” (which is doing a lot of client-side tracking/fingerprinting actually) and subscribing to “Advanced” or “Enterprise” tiers. Same if you want to have access to EU-only endpoints.
Pricing
Friendly Captcha is the most expensive on the list and the value received is questionable, given what other companies provide more features for less money. The largest bummer is unless you’re on €200 / month tier, you do not get dynamic difficulty scaling for proof-of-work CAPTCHA puzzles, rendering them practically useless overall.
Integrations
Frindly Captcha’s list of integrations a little bit similar to that of CaptchaFox: it’s quite impressive until you notice the "Coming soon" label everywhere. However, unlike CaptchaFox, most server-side stacks are covered and more than enough client-side integrations are available already today.
Private Captcha
The only non-German company in this list is Estonian 🇪🇪 Private Captcha, founded in 2025. Unlike all other products in the list, Private Captcha can also be installed on premises (self-hosted) and server part of Private Captcha is available on GitHub.
Features
Private Captcha’s dashboard is a bit more polished than others, but the main differentiator is the amount of features users on all plans will have: difficulty scaling, EU-only endpoints, platform API, usage statistics and many many others.
Example of a feature is the difficulty rules system that allows to change puzzle difficulty on the fly. Available as an add-on with clear pricing (or without, if you’re self-hosting).
Pricing
Private Captcha offers the most bang for the buck in this list: almost all features are available on all pricing plans and the tiering is only done based on requests count. Pricing starts at 1€ / month for 1,000 requests and 9€ / month for 10,000 requests. Click the link above for more info.
Integrations
Private Captcha offers a solid set of integrations covering most popular server-side and client-side technologies. It’s not as extensive as TrustCaptcha and Friendly Captcha (for example, there’re no “exotic” integrations like ReachFive or CS-Cart), but chances are you will be covered.
Verdict
I would like to suggest that in terms of value provided, Private Captcha is the clear winner here, but you can have a free trial and decide yourself!