Friendly Captcha

<p>Friendly Captcha is a privacy-first anti-bot solution that protects WordPress website forms from spam and abuse.</p>
<p>Do you use a captcha like reCAPTCHA to keep out bots? Friendly Captcha is a powerful anti-spam service that blocks spam-bots without annoying captcha images and protects user privacy.</p>
<h3>How Friendly Captcha Works</h3>
<p>Friendly Captcha is a tool for preventing spam on your website. Other CAPTCHAs are a burden on your users, Friendly Captcha respects your users.</p>
<p>Friendly Captcha is a proof-of-work based anti-bot solution in which the user’s device does all the work. We generate a unique crypto puzzle for each visitor.</p>
<p>Solving it will usually take only a few seconds. As soon as the user starts filling the form it starts getting solved. By the time the user is ready to submit, the puzzle is probably already solved.</p>
<p>Friendly Captcha prevents spam and doesn’t punish real users in doing so.</p>
<h3>Privacy Notices</h3>
<h4>No personal information</h4>
<p>Our anti-bot service does not store personal data from your end users. See our Privacy Policy for End Users to learn more.</p>
<h4>No cookies</h4>
<p>Our end user solution does not use cookies. This protects your end users from being tracked and followed from site to site.</p>
<h4>No discrimination</h4>
<p>Normal CAPTCHA tasks are not easy for all humans. Our solution works without labeling tasks and is thus accessible to everyone.</p>
<h4>Decentralized data processing</h4>
<p>By default, requests are processed in the point-of-presence closest to where it is accessed by the end user. See our Privacy Policy for End Users to learn more.</p>
<p>Join thousands of organizations in switching to a privacy-first anti-bot solution.</p>
<h3>Forms and Plugins Supported</h3>
<ul>
<li>WordPress Login Form</li>
<li>WordPress Register Form</li>
<li>WordPress Reset Password Form</li>
<li>WordPress Comments</li>
<li>CoBlocks</li>
<li>Contact Form 7</li>
<li>Divi Contact Forms</li>
<li>Elementor Pro Forms</li>
<li>FluentForm</li>
<li>Gravity Forms</li>
<li>Ultimate Member Login Form</li>
<li>Ultimate Member Register Form</li>
<li>Ultimate Member Reset Password Form</li>
<li>WooCommerce Login Form</li>
<li>WooCommerce Register Form</li>
<li>WooCommerce Checkout Form</li>
<li>WooCommerce Lost Password Form</li>
<li>WPForms</li>
<li>Profile Builder Login Form</li>
<li>Profile Builder Register Form</li>
<li>Profile Builder Reset Password Form</li>
<li>Forminator</li>
<li>Formidable</li>
<li>Avada Form Builder</li>
</ul>
<p>If you see an integration that’s missing, please <a href="https://github.com/FriendlyCaptcha/friendly-captcha-wordpress" rel="nofollow ugc">open a pull request</a></p>
<p>However, you may wish to email the authors of plugins you’d like to support Friendly Captcha: it will usually take them only an hour or two to add native support if they choose to do so. This will simplify your use of Friendly Captcha, and is the best solution in the long run.</p>


Friendly Captcha for WordPress

On first sight this CAPTCHA solution is what many people are looking for: Easy to implement and fully GDPR-compliant.

With the "Personal" plan there is a free plan available however I got an email from the friendly captcha team to upgrade my account. The smallest pricing option is 9 € a month. Sorry guys... for providing a simple piece of software 1.080 € over 10 years is ridiculous and I am out.

Good but...

Friendly Captcha is a privacy-first anti-bot solution that protects WordPress website forms from spam and abuse.

captchaapi

<p>Protects WooCommerce (login, registration, lost password, checkout), Contact Form 7, WPForms, Fluent Forms, Formidable Forms, Forminator, Gravity Forms and Elementor Forms – cookieless, EU-hosted, no cookie banner required.</p>
<p>A privacy-first alternative to reCAPTCHA: captchaapi.eu stops form spam without making your visitors click traffic lights. A free tier with commercial use allowed gets you started. The work happens in the background: the visitor’s browser solves a small proof-of-work puzzle while they fill in the form, and a token rides along with the submission. There is nothing to solve and nothing to see.</p>
<p>When a form is submitted, your server confirms that token with captchaapi.eu over a single request, secured by your secret key. It is the same model every hosted CAPTCHA uses, and it keeps the secret on your server, never in the browser.</p>
<h4>Privacy by design</h4>
<ul>
<li>No cookies, and nothing to add to a cookie banner.</li>
<li>No tracking and no visitor profile. The IP address is used only for rate limiting and abuse detection, then dropped; it is never written to a database.</li>
<li>Hosted only in the EU, in Nuremberg, Germany. No data leaves the EU.</li>
<li>No images and no puzzles to solve. The check runs in the background, so it works the same for every visitor, including people who find image challenges difficult or browse with a screen reader.</li>
<li>A free tier, with commercial use allowed.</li>
</ul>
<h4>Forms and plugins it protects</h4>
<p>WordPress core:</p>
<ul>
<li>Login (wp-login.php)</li>
<li>Registration</li>
<li>Lost password</li>
<li>Comments</li>
</ul>
<p>WooCommerce:</p>
<ul>
<li>Login</li>
<li>Registration</li>
<li>Lost password</li>
<li>Checkout</li>
</ul>
<p>Form plugins:</p>
<ul>
<li>Contact Form 7</li>
<li>WPForms</li>
<li>Fluent Forms</li>
<li>Formidable Forms</li>
<li>Forminator</li>
<li>Gravity Forms</li>
<li>Elementor Forms</li>
</ul>
<p>Each form can be turned on or off from the settings screen. The WooCommerce and form-plugin options appear only when that plugin is active.</p>
<h4>How it works</h4>
<ol>
<li>The widget loads on the pages with a protected form and solves a proof-of-work puzzle in a Web Worker.</li>
<li>On submit, it attaches the resulting token to the form.</li>
<li>The plugin confirms the token with captchaapi.eu using your secret key and rejects the submission if the service does not accept it.</li>
</ol>
<p>Each token verifies exactly once – the service enforces single use – so the plugin keeps no local replay table and nothing to clean up on a schedule.</p>
<h4>You need an account</h4>
<p>This plugin connects to the captchaapi.eu service. Create a project at https://captchaapi.eu to get a site key and a secret key. A free tier is available.</p>
<h3>External services</h3>
<p>This plugin connects to captchaapi.eu, a third-party CAPTCHA service, to protect your forms from spam. It is required for the plugin to function.</p>
<p>On any public page that contains a protected form, the plugin loads the service’s widget script (captcha.js) from your configured captchaapi.eu endpoint. The visitor’s browser then communicates with the captchaapi.eu API to perform a proof-of-work challenge and obtain a token that is attached to the form on submit. This happens for every visitor who loads a protected form.</p>
<p>To issue and validate a token the service receives your public site key, the proof-of-work result, and – as with any HTTP request – the visitor’s IP address. The IP address is used for rate limiting and abuse/bot detection (including a coarse, IP-derived country) and is processed transiently: a hashed form and aggregate counters are held briefly in a cache. No raw IP address and no per-visitor record are written to a database. The service sets no cookies. Data is processed on servers in the EU (Nuremberg, Germany).</p>
<p>When a protected form is submitted, your server sends the token to the captchaapi.eu /verify endpoint, authenticated with your secret key, and trusts the service’s accept-or-reject answer. The secret key stays on your server and is never sent to the browser.</p>
<ul>
<li>Service provider: captchaapi.eu</li>
<li>Terms of Service: https://captchaapi.eu/legal/terms</li>
<li>Privacy Policy: https://captchaapi.eu/legal/privacy</li>
</ul>


GDPR Cookieless CAPTCHA for WooCommerce & Forms – captchaapi.eu

Cookieless, EU-hosted reCAPTCHA alternative for WooCommerce, WPForms, Fluent Forms & CF7. GDPR-clean, no cookie banner.

Friendly Captcha for WordPress vs GDPR Cookieless CAPTCHA for WooCommerce & Forms – captchaapi.eu