Friendly Captcha Alternative 2026: TrustCaptcha Compared

What is the best Friendly Captcha alternative?

For teams that need EU-only data processing on every plan and a bot score from €36 a month, TrustCaptcha is the best Friendly Captcha alternative. Both are cookie-free proof-of-work CAPTCHAs from Germany, and for non-commercial projects Friendly Captcha’s larger free plan is still the better start.

Because both are privacy-first European CAPTCHA options, the differences are easy to miss. They sit in four places: where your users’ data goes on each plan, how far the bot detection goes, what the widget looks like on your site, and what you pay for each level of protection. The table sums them up, and the sections below go through them one by one.

Friendly Captcha vs TrustCaptcha side by side

The one question that settles most comparisons early

Before getting into features, one structural question decides the matter for many European buyers: on which plan does EU-only data processing start?

Friendly Captcha routes verification traffic through a global endpoint by default. Its dedicated EU endpoint (processing in Germany) is documented as an Advanced plan feature, and the Advanced plan costs €200 per month.

TrustCaptcha processes all verification data on EU infrastructure on every plan, including the €8 per month Hobby plan. You do not have to switch anything on. It is the default.

For organizations where EU data residency is a hard requirement (public sector, healthcare, regulated finance, any team that gets audited), this question alone often ends the comparison. If your DPO has to sign off on data flows and you are not on a €200/month plan, TrustCaptcha is simpler to document.

If your Friendly Captcha plan already includes EU routing, or budget is not a constraint, read on.

How bot detection works, and what a score adds

Both products build on proof-of-work. A small cryptographic computation runs in the background in the visitor’s browser. The visitor solves no puzzle and does not have to click anything. When the computation finishes, a token goes to your server for validation, and both products tell you whether that token is valid: pass or fail.

TrustCaptcha also tells you how risky the request looks.

Every TrustCaptcha verification result includes a bot score, calculated by a separate analysis that checks static and dynamic signals: browser inconsistencies, signs of automation, device fingerprint anomalies and behavioral patterns. Your server receives the score, and you decide what to do with it.

In practice, this is where the two products part ways. With pass or fail, you can only let the request through or block it. With a score, you can respond in steps:

• Trusted score (e.g. 0 to 0.4): proceed normally
• Neutral score (e.g. 0.4 to 0.7): flag for review, require email confirmation, or add a second check
• Suspicious score (e.g. 0.7 to 1): block the request or route it to a manual queue

Steps help wherever a hard block would annoy real users but a plain pass would let doubtful traffic in. Contact form abuse, login rate limiting and checkout protection are typical cases, and proof-of-work alone cannot make that distinction.

Friendly Captcha’s Advanced plan includes risk intelligence features, at €200 per month. TrustCaptcha’s bot score is included from the Solo plan at €36 per month.

Access control: acting on risk without custom backend logic

A score is only useful if you can act on it, ideally without writing new backend code for every case.

From the Team plan, TrustCaptcha includes an access rule builder with several conditions per rule. You decide what happens based on IP address, country, language, time zone, browser, operating system or device type. Rules can use match-any, match-all or match-none logic, they can expire on a set date, and named rule sets can be applied to several sites from one dashboard.

Geoblocking is also available from the Team plan (€168/month). IP allowlists and blocklists come with the Solo plan (€36/month), with limits that grow with the plan. Bypass keys, from the Team plan, let test environments and CI pipelines skip verification without disabling the integration in production.

Friendly Captcha’s plans do not list IP lists, geoblocking or rules for which requests get through.

How the widget looks on your site

A CAPTCHA widget sits on your login page, your contact form and your checkout. A third-party widget that does not match your brand makes those pages look less finished.

On the Team plan and above, you can adjust every element of the TrustCaptcha widget to your design system: colors, border, corner radius and theme. Light and dark modes are included on every plan and can follow the visitor’s system setting. The widget ships with 37+ languages, and you can add any other, because every text in the widget can be changed or replaced. With the paid Captcha Branding add-on, the branding can be removed entirely, which matters to agencies and SaaS platforms that build verification into client products.

Friendly Captcha offers a light theme (default) and a dark theme, selected with a data attribute. Styling beyond that means writing and maintaining CSS yourself, using its skipStyleInjection option. That works, but it is developer work rather than a setting, and it needs attention whenever the widget is updated.

If the widget should look like part of your product, TrustCaptcha needs less upkeep.

Friendly Captcha pricing vs TrustCaptcha

Both vendors publish their prices. They are close at entry level and move apart on the larger plans.

At the growth level, TrustCaptcha’s Solo plan (€36/month) gives you 10,000 verifications for less than Friendly Captcha’s Growth plan (€39/month) charges for 5,000. Solo also includes the bot score, custom proof-of-work rules and IP allow and block lists, none of which Friendly Captcha’s Growth plan offers.

For non-commercial projects, Friendly Captcha has the clear advantage: its free plan covers 1,000 requests a month, twice TrustCaptcha’s 500. For open-source tools, community sites or student projects, Friendly Captcha is the better free starting point.

At the mid-market level, Friendly Captcha’s €200/month plan is where EU-only routing becomes available. TrustCaptcha’s Team plan costs €168/month and already includes EU hosting, geoblocking, 30-day audit logs and a 99.9% uptime SLA.

Integration: where each product plugs in

Both products follow the same pattern: a widget snippet in the frontend, a token verification call on the server and an update to your privacy notice. For most teams, moving from one to the other does not touch the architecture.

TrustCaptcha offers 55+ pre-built integrations, maintained by the TrustCaptcha team. They cover React, Vue, Angular, Svelte, Node.js, PHP, WordPress, TYPO3, Magento 2, Shopware 6, Keycloak, Webflow and more. On most mainstream platforms, you can install TrustCaptcha without writing your own integration.

Friendly Captcha also has a good set of integrations: official SDKs for the common frameworks, community libraries and thorough developer documentation, including migration guides from reCAPTCHA and hCaptcha.

Which product fits your situation

TrustCaptcha is usually the better fit when:

• You need a bot score to respond in steps rather than with a plain pass or fail

Friendly Captcha is worth choosing when:

• You need a non-commercial free plan with 1,000 monthly requests for an open-source or community project
• You want a broad set of integrations with established SDK libraries and migration guides
• Developers lead the evaluation and open-source tooling matters most to them
• Your procurement process asks for the highest WACA certification grade (WACA Gold)

Moving from Friendly Captcha to TrustCaptcha

Switching is mostly a configuration job. Both products follow the same general pattern.

1. List every protected flow. Find all pages, forms and API endpoints that run Friendly Captcha today. Note which endpoint your widgets use and which plan you are on.

2. Create a TrustCaptcha account and generate site keys. One key per domain. The free trial needs no credit card.

3. Replace the widget. Remove Friendly Captcha’s script and markup. Load the TrustCaptcha widget for your stack: the React component, the Vue plugin, the WordPress plugin, or whichever integration matches your platform.

4. Update server-side verification. Swap the verification endpoint URL, update the token field name and adjust the credential parameter. If you want to, read the bot score from the response and add logic that responds in steps.

5. Revise privacy documentation. Update your privacy notice to name TrustCaptcha. Since EU-only processing is the default, the description is short: all verification data is processed on EU infrastructure.

6. Test before deploying. Start with login and registration flows. Check completion rates, false positives and keyboard navigation before rolling out to the remaining forms.

Try TrustCaptcha for free

Try TrustCaptcha for free. No credit card required. EU hosting included from day one.