A Friendly Captcha alternative for €3 a month
Updated
Both stop bots on web forms. The differences are in what the visitor sees, what runs on your page, what the free plan includes, and where the data is stored.
Where Friendly Captcha is better
Friendly Captcha is a German company near Munich, founded in 2020. It adds risk signals to the proof of work, for example VPN and WebDriver detection. The Advanced plan has a 99.9% uptime guarantee. The company is ISO 27001 certified, and TÜV certified its widget for WCAG 2.2 AA. It has plugins for WordPress, Magento and more. If your buyer needs a vendor with an uptime guarantee and certificates, pick Friendly Captcha.
Where Bot403 is better
The idea is the same: the browser solves a proof of work, and the visitor clicks nothing. The price is different. Bot403 Starter costs €3 a month for 50,000 checks on 10 sites, VAT included. At Friendly Captcha, 1,000 requests a month cost €9 and 50,000 cost €200. The Bot403 free plan has 5,000 checks a month, and you can use it on a business site. The Friendly Captcha free plan is for non-commercial sites only.
Side by side
The facts come from the public pages of Friendly Captcha (https://friendlycaptcha.com/, https://friendlycaptcha.com/free-captcha/, https://friendlycaptcha.com/privacy/gdpr/, https://friendlycaptcha.com/accessibility/wcag/), checked on 2026-10-23. "Not stated" means the page does not say. If something changed, email me. Then I will correct it.
| Capability | Bot403 | Friendly Captcha |
|---|---|---|
| Method | proof of work | proof of work and risk signals |
| Free plan | 5,000 checks, 2 sites, no card, business sites too | non-commercial sites only, 1,000 requests, 1 domain |
| First paid plan | €3 a month for 50,000 on 10 sites, VAT included | Starter: €9 a month for 1,000 requests, 1 domain |
| 5,000 a month | free | Growth: €39 a month, 5 domains |
| 50,000 a month | €3 a month (Starter) | Advanced: €200 a month, 50 domains |
| VAT | included | not stated |
| Cookies | none | none |
| Uptime guarantee | none | 99.9% on Advanced |
| Data in the EU | always, server in Germany | with a dedicated EU endpoint |
| Accessibility | nothing to click or read | WCAG 2.2 AA, certified by TÜV |
Switch in 10 minutes
Remove the Friendly Captcha script and widget from the page. Add one script tag with your public key. On the server, replace the Friendly Captcha verify call with a POST to /api/v1/verify. The verify page has the request for Node.js, Bun, Deno, Hono, Next.js, Cloudflare Workers, PHP, Python, Go and Ruby. The form fields stay as they are.