Friendly Captcha
Invisible, privacy-first bot protection using proof-of-work instead of visual puzzles.
🔗 Visit Friendly Captcha
Description
Friendly Captcha protects a website's forms from bots and spam without making a real human click on traffic lights or type distorted letters — it runs a small computation in the background of the page (harder for a bot to fake cheaply, invisible to a person) and lets legitimate visitors through without any interaction at all.
Built by a German company to be GDPR-compliant by design, it collects zero personal data and holds ISO 27001 and PCI DSS certifications, with open-source SDKs for React, Vue, Angular and several backend languages. Pricing scales from a free tier for low-traffic/non-commercial sites up through Starter ($9/mo), Growth ($39/mo) and Advanced ($200/mo) tiers based on request volume and domain count, with custom Enterprise pricing above that.
💬 Our review
The short version: Friendly Captcha is a genuinely better user experience than Google's reCAPTCHA, and a real, GDPR-friendly alternative if privacy compliance is a business requirement, not just a preference.
reCAPTCHA is free and has near-universal name recognition, but it tracks users across sites for Google's own purposes and has a well-documented history of showing endless puzzle challenges to VPN or privacy-tool users — friction Friendly Captcha's invisible proof-of-work approach avoids entirely. hCaptcha sits in between, also privacy-focused but with its own tracking-for-payment model on the free tier. Friendly Captcha's honest tradeoff is price: $9-200+/month is real money for something reCAPTCHA gives away, so the calculus is straightforward — pay for it if GDPR compliance, user experience, or avoiding Google trackers matters to your business; stick with reCAPTCHA if budget is the only concern and you're not GDPR-constrained.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Free tier for low-traffic sites; paid plans $9-200+/month by volume
Pros
Invisible, no user friction
GDPR-compliant, zero data collection
ISO 27001 / PCI DSS certified
Open-source SDKs
Cons
Paid beyond limited free tier
Less brand recognition than reCAPTCHA
Cost scales with traffic