Friendly Captcha Review (2026): German, Invisible, from €9 a Month

What is Friendly Captcha?

Who is behind Friendly Captcha

Friendly Captcha is a bot-protection service from Friendly Captcha GmbH, registered in Wörthsee near Munich, Germany (Munich register HRB 260542). The company was founded in 2020 by Benedict Padberg and Guido Zuidhof after, in their words, experiencing the limits of traditional CAPTCHAs. Padberg is the managing director. Friendly Captcha describes itself as “Made in Europe” with a distributed team; its investors are not named on its site.

Instead of asking people to click traffic lights, Friendly Captcha gives every visitor’s device a unique cryptographic puzzle that is solved in the background while they fill in the form. A risk score, built from signals such as IP reputation, anonymisation detection and browser identification, sets how hard that puzzle is: normal visitors get easy work, suspicious traffic gets harder work. Friendly Captcha names the European Union, Porsche, SAP, IONOS, Birkenstock and the Red Cross among its customers and says it verifies 2.6 billion web interactions a year.

Where Friendly Captcha hosts your data

Friendly Captcha’s API runs on Hetzner servers in Germany (AS24940); its website is hosted by Combell in Belgium. On the Advanced and Enterprise plans you can use a dedicated EU endpoint (eu.frcapi.com), hosted in Germany, which Friendly Captcha describes as a guarantee that visitor IP addresses never leave the EU. The standard global endpoint is “served from all over the world”, so a visitor may be served from outside the EU depending on where they are. Enterprise customers can also run a self-hosted endpoint.

Checked 25 Oct 2026. Hosting can change – report a change.

Friendly Captcha pricing

All plans are priced per month, and every paid plan has a 30-day free trial. The pricing section does not say whether VAT is included and shows no yearly discount.

• Free – for non-commercial websites with low traffic: 1 domain, up to 1,000 requests a month.
• Starter – €9 a month: 1 domain, up to 1,000 requests.
• Growth – €39 a month: up to 5 domains, 5,000 requests and usage statistics.
• Advanced – €200 a month: up to 50 domains, 50,000 requests, real-time risk intelligence data, dedicated data centres (e.g. EU only), a 99.9% uptime guarantee and online support.
• Enterprise – custom price: unlimited domains and requests, SSO, audit logs and a self-hosted endpoint option.

Compared with reCAPTCHA, which is free up to 10,000 assessments a month per organisation, Friendly Captcha is expensive at volume: 10,000 requests a month already need the Advanced plan.

Privacy, accessibility and integration

Friendly Captcha says it sets no HTTP cookies and stores no personal data from visitors; data that could identify someone, such as the IP address, is anonymised by one-way hashing. It claims GDPR and CCPA compliance, ISO 27001 and WCAG 2.2 AA. Because there are no image or audio puzzles, it avoids the barriers the W3C describes for blind and deaf-blind users; the W3C notes that proof of work poses no direct accessibility problems but can be slower on older hardware.

For developers, the move from reCAPTCHA is well documented. Friendly Captcha offers a reCAPTCHA-compatible script, so you mostly replace Google’s script and change the g-recaptcha class to frc-captcha, then switch the server-side check. The widget SDK is open source under the MPL-2.0 licence. The official WordPress plugin (10,000+ active installations) supports Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Elementor Pro Forms, WPForms, WooCommerce, Divi, Fluent Forms, Formidable and more.

What users say about Friendly Captcha

I could not find a Trustpilot profile for Friendly Captcha. On G2 it has 4.8/5, but from only 3 reviews (checked 25 October 2026). Its WordPress plugin has 3.9/5 from 18 ratings on WordPress.org. There are too few public reviews to draw firm conclusions, so the customer list – the EU, SAP, Porsche – is the stronger signal.

Pros and cons

Verdict on Friendly Captcha

Verdict: Friendly Captcha is the most mature European CAPTCHA: German, invisible, cookie-free and easy to swap in for reCAPTCHA. The catch is price at volume – if you need many thousands of checks a month or EU-only hosting, you are on the €200 Advanced plan, and cheaper German options exist. Best for: businesses that want the closest European replacement for reCAPTCHA with minimal code changes. Not for: high-traffic sites on a small budget.

Friendly Captcha is ranked #1 in Best European alternatives to reCAPTCHA and in Best European CAPTCHA services.

Similar European CAPTCHA services

Friendly Captcha: FAQ