Which CAPTCHA fits you?
There is no single best CAPTCHA, only the right trade-off for your traffic. Start here, then read the matchup that applies to you.
You need GDPR-clean verification with no cookie banner and no visitor data leaving the EU.
captchaapi.eu
You want invisible, zero-friction checks on very high consumer / B2C traffic.
reCAPTCHA or hCaptcha
You want a free tier at very high volume and a US operator is acceptable.
Cloudflare Turnstile
You already run EU proof-of-work but want far more requests per euro.
captchaapi.eu
Head to head
Operator
Cookies on the widget
EU visitor-data transfer
Defence mechanism
Free tier
Where reCAPTCHA wins
Invisible ML scoring on huge consumer traffic: most visitors pass with no proof-of-work step at all.
Operator
Data processing
Cookies on the widget
EU visitor-data transfer
Defence mechanism
Where hCaptcha wins
A free tier up to 100,000 requests/mo and a mature ML model tuned on large-scale traffic.
Operator
Data processing
Data sent off-site
Cookies on the widget
Defence mechanism
Where Cloudflare Turnstile wins
Genuinely free up to about 1 million requests/mo, also cookie-free, and backed by Cloudflare's scale. If a US operator is acceptable, it is hard to beat on price.
EU-only data residency
Starter plan
Growth plan
Free tier
Cookies & defence
Where Friendly Captcha wins
A longer track record and an established German brand with enterprise SLAs.
The trade-off behind the rows
reCAPTCHA, hCaptcha and Turnstile lean on continuously trained risk-scoring against a global view of traffic. When a visitor looks normal they pass silently, with no challenge and no friction. On consumer-grade and high-volume e-commerce traffic that invisible pass is a real win, and it is hard to beat.
captchaapi.eu does not do that. The defence is deterministic proof-of-work: every request pays the same compute cost on the visitor's device, whether a model would have flagged them or not. The visitor sees a short computation instead of an invisible scoring pass. In return the cost properties stay predictable under coordinated, high-volume attacks (they do not depend on detection accuracy holding up), and the decision logic is auditable rather than opaque.
If you optimise for the lowest possible friction on consumer traffic and you are comfortable with off-EU risk scoring, the alternatives may genuinely fit better. If you optimise for GDPR cleanliness, explainability, or a defence whose cost you can reason about, that is the trade this product was built to make.
Competitor data last verified: 2026-06-04. Pricing and plan limits change — check each provider's own pricing page for current figures.
Sourced from each provider's own documentation: reCAPTCHA FAQ / pricing · hCaptcha privacy / pricing · Cloudflare Turnstile privacy / plans · Friendly Captcha plans / EU endpoint.
Where a provider's behaviour changes by plan tier, the comparison reflects the default configuration most integrations use. The CAPTCHA-data rows cover the verification path only; for billing-side data flows see the Sub-processors page.
Try the EU-clean option
Free tier, commercial use allowed, no card required. Drop the widget in and verify a form in minutes.