Cloudflare CAPTCHA, also known as Cloudflare Turnstile, is a relatively new CAPTCHA service on the market and hasn’t seen widespread adoption outside of existing Cloudflare customers. As Cloudflare’s smart CAPTCHA alternative, the Cloudflare CAPTCHA aims to eliminate the manual user tasks used by traditional CAPTCHAs.

The use of Cloudflare Turnstile comes with limitations in the areas of user lockouts, universal browser support, accessibility, and privacy compliance. For organizations that value these features without compromise, website operators need to consider other options that provide more complete functionality than Cloudflare Turnstile.

If you’re evaluating Cloudflare CAPTCHA alternatives or searching for a Cloudflare Turnstile alternative, this guide will help you explore the top options.

3 Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternatives

  • Friendly Captcha for invisible and universally deployable CAPTCHA challenges
  • reCAPTCHA for adaptive challenges and additional image-based tasks
  • hCaptcha for image recognition CAPTCHA challenges with a sense of humor
Personal data collection

Why Pick a Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternative?

Cloudflare offers a massive conglomerate of web security features for businesses looking for an all-in-one solution for their website. Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA service is a specific part of the whole package. While it’s a free service up to a point, it’s in Cloudflare’s interest to get you to use the full Cloudflare CDN feature suite. It is a common strategy by companies to make their customers dependent and effectively lock them into their feature suite with no easy way to switch to a different service. Turnstile allows you to run a challenge in a less intrusive way. To do this, Cloudflare Turnstile customizes the actual challenge result for each visitor or browser. By running a series of non-interactive JavaScript challenges, the CAPTCHA gathers more signals about the visitor or browser environment. Without presenting the user with a visual challenge, users are categorized as black or white, as humans or bots. Here are some of the key limitations:
  • Cloudflare CAPTCHA does not provide universal browser support. Cloudflare Turnstile does not support older devices, older versions of major browsers or operating systems for Android or iOS, alternative browser vendors, or Internet Explorer. In short, Cloudflare’s CAPTCHA will exclude real people who can’t afford or don’t want to use the latest devices.
  • A total user lockout is annoying and a barrier to CAPTCHA accessibility. Users who use accessibility tools are too often mistakenly identified as bots rather than humans when completing the checkbox challenge. This results in the user being totally blocked. There is no fallback solution for real users who are identified as bots. People with disabilities can apply for a pre-clearance token, which Cloudflare offers to its customers. However, this can also be an additional hurdle for legitimate users.
  • There is a lack of transparency regarding the privacy of personal data. Cloudflare Turnstile does not have a dedicated privacy policy or terms of service. When using the Cloudflare CAPTCHA, you must read and understand the terms and privacy policy for the entire Cloudflare suite of features. That privacy policy covers many topics, including a large amount of personal information collected, and never specifically mentions the use of the Cloudflare Turnstile CAPTCHA.
We have seen that it is necessary to look for better alternatives to Cloudflare Turnstile or Cloudflare CAPTCHA. We will now present 3 popular Cloudflare Turnstile alternatives.
Feature Cloudflare Turnstile Friendly Captcha reCAPTCHA hCaptcha

Bot protection
JavaScript-based browser challenges
Advanced proof-of-work cryptography
Behavioral analysis and image recognition tasks
Image-based recognition tasks

Privacy compliance
Limited transparency
Fully privacy-compliant; no HTTP cookies; no fingerprinting
Limited; uses cookies and collects user data
Limited; uses cookies

Accessibility
Limited accessibility, excluding real users from access
Full accessibility without black or white decisions
Limited accessibility
Limited accessibility

Best for
General-purpose
Privacy-focused, user-friendly applications
General-purpose; widely recognized
Casual, low-security scenarios

The Best Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternative for Invisible and Universally Deployable CAPTCHA Challenges: Friendly Captcha

Friendly Captcha Pros:

  • Friendly Captcha offers universal browser support and aims to support every browser and device released after Internet Explorer 11. This ensures that your website visitors don’t get locked out.
  • As a truly invisible CAPTCHA, Friendly Captcha is frictionless and never forces users to click checkboxes.
  • With Friendly Captcha, the background challenge is dynamically scaled so there are no user lockouts for real people.

Friendly Captcha Cons:

  • There is a free version available for small websites only.
Friendly Captcha is the best alternative to Cloudflare Turnstile for those focussing on universal browser support, accessibility and privacy. Friendly Captcha relies on a sophisticated proof-of-work-based algorithm to generate invisible, cryptographic puzzles. The user’s device solves the puzzles in the background to prove that it is not a malicious attacker, bot, or spambot. These cryptographic puzzles are used in combination with advanced risk signals and difficulty scaling to provide bot protection and spam protection for web interactions. Instead of visitors having to manually click a checkbox, Friendly Captcha works completely in the background and is truly invisible. There is no impact on the user experience, and human visitors should rarely have to wait more than a few seconds. Usually, the invisible CAPTCHA is solved before the visitor has even filled out the form. Since there is no human interaction with the CAPTCHA at all, Friendly Captcha is fully compliant with accessibility laws such as WCAG, ADA, AODA or EAA. What makes Friendly Captcha truly invisible? Go on reading about invisible CAPTCHA here. Try yourself and sign up for a free one-month trial.
Image-based CAPTCHAs provide a visual image recognition test to select or identify images that match a particular theme.

The Best Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternative for Adaptive Challenges and Additional Image-Based Tasks: Google reCAPTCHA

reCAPTCHA Pros:

  • Google reCAPTCHA offers basic bot protection with adaptive challenges or visual puzzles.
  • There is a free plan for Google customers with up to 10,000 assessments.
  • Based on the determined risk score, reCAPTCHA is partially invisible to ordinary users.

reCAPTCHA Cons:

  • Google reCAPTCHA collects and stores personal user information with cookies, leading to privacy compliance issues.
  • Prior user consent is required to use Google reCAPTCHA.
As an alternative to Cloudflare Turnstile, Google reCAPTCHA offers basic bot protection with image recognition tasks. Many people and businesses around the world trust the Google brand. Google services are ingrained in people’s minds. No wonder companies are still using reCAPTCHA bot protection despite better alternatives being available. With reCAPTCHA v2, so-called Invisible CAPTCHAs were introduced. Clicking the “I’m not a robot” checkbox or identifying traffic lights or busses on a grid of nine images is familiar for all of us. Additionally to the image-based challenge, information is collected and behavior analyzed to determine whether it’s contact form spam, web page spam, bot attacks or neither. reCAPTCHA v3 does not need user interaction in theory. reCAPTCHA v3 tracks the user’s behavior such as the time it takes to form submission. By outputting a risk score to the website owners, they have to decide wether to let the visitor submit, block him or do additional tests with image-based puzzles. All in all, Google reCAPTCHA is raising privacy concerns. Google reCAPTCHA v2 and Google reCAPTCHA v3 use cookies for storing personal user data which is critical to comply with international data protection laws such as GDPR or CCPA.

The Best Cloudflare Turnstile Alternative for Image Recognition CAPTCHA Challenges With a Sense of Humor: hCaptcha

hCaptcha Pros:

  • Free hCaptcha plan available for small site owners.
  • Presented with a sense of humor, there are funny image recognition tasks.
  • hCaptcha tries to collect as little data as possible for its services in order to partially meet strict privacy requirements.

hCaptcha Cons:

  • Using cookies for the CAPTCHA solution makes prior user consent mandatory.
  • Accessibility issues exclude visually impaired persons.
hCaptcha from Intuition Machines is a possible alternative to Cloudflare Turnstile, if you enjoy fun image recognition tasks like clicking on images of smiling dogs. hCaptcha mainly uses image labeling tasks to try to distinguish between human users and computers. These tasks require the user to select photos that match a given description. Most Internet users will have probably been asked to select traffic lights, pedestrian crosswalks, or laughing dogs from a set of pictures or photos. For hCaptcha Enterprise customers, they offer a passive mode which aims to be an invisible version. “The passive CAPTCHA” aims to challenge a lower number of legitimate users by presenting a visual CAPTCHA test. The passive difficulty in combination with the hCaptcha “no checkbox” configuration comes at the price of security compared to their traditional image recognition challenges. While hCaptcha strives to be a privacy preserving alternative, it still requires cookies to work. Without prior user consent, these cookies are considered critical according to privacy laws, such as GDPR and CCPA.
User-friendly captcha

Which Cloudflare CAPTCHA Alternatives Are Best?

Locking out real users due to the use of older devices, accessibility hurdles and privacy issues on top of that – there are multiple factors for choosing Cloudflare Turnstile alternatives, such as universal browser support, accessibility, and privacy. Each CAPTCHA provider solves this problem in a different way:
  • Friendly Captcha stands out for its focus on privacy, accessibility, and universal browser support, making it a strong choice for organizations prioritizing compliance and usability.
  • Google reCAPTCHA is a widely recognized option with image-based challenges and adaptive security features but raises privacy concerns due to extensive data collection.
  • hCaptcha offers fun and engaging image recognition tasks, though it has limitations in accessibility and privacy compliance due to cookie usage.
The Cloudflare Turnstile alternatives address user experience and privacy compliance differently, with Friendly Captcha excelling in security, accessibility and privacy. Looking for the most user-friendly and modern Cloudflare CAPTCHA alternative? Try Friendly Captcha today with a free one-month trial.

FAQ

Cloudflare CAPTCHA alternatives are solutions that protect websites from bots and spam while addressing the limitations of Cloudflare Turnstile, such as privacy compliance, accessibility, and browser support. Popular options include Friendly Captcha for truly invisible, privacy-first challenges, Google reCAPTCHA for traditional image-based tasks, and hCaptcha for visual puzzles. These alternatives provide diverse features to meet varying security and usability needs.

To clarify whether Friendly Captcha is better than Cloudflare CAPTCHA, we need to look at privacy compliance, usability and accessibility. From a privacy perspective, Cloudflare is not transparent about what data it collects for the CAPTCHA and what it uses it for. There is no dedicated privacy policy for Turnstile. Also, its CAPTCHA challenges aren’t entirely invisible. In some cases, the end user has to perform manual tasks, which causes problems for people with disabilities.

Friendly Captcha, on the other hand, works without HTTP cookies and is transparent about all the data it requires. Friendly Captcha tests the device in the background, making it a truly invisible CAPTCHA. It is WCAG compliant and excels in CAPTCHA accessibility. Friendly Captcha is the better alternative to Cloudflare CAPTCHA.

While Cloudflare CAPTCHA claims GDPR compliance, it raises concerns due to a lack of specific privacy policies. Specifically, Cloudflare does not provide a dedicated privacy policy or data processing agreement for its CAPTCHA service Turnstile, leaving uncertainty about what data is collected and how it is used.

For websites targeting EU users, the fact that Cloudflare is a US-based company with multiple data centers outside the EU complicates GDPR compliance. Cloudflare CAPTCHA’s reliance on external scripts loaded from Cloudflare’s servers introduces risks related to data transfers to non-EU countries and potential security vulnerabilities. Similar issues have led to significant fines for companies using comparable services to Cloudflare CAPTCHA, such as Google reCAPTCHA, that involve data transfers to the US without adequate transparency and user consent. In summary, the lack of specific privacy disclosures for Cloudflare CAPTCHA and the global distribution of Cloudflare’s servers pose GDPR compliance risks.

Cloudflare CAPTCHA is promoted as a free CAPTCHA replacement tool with “Turnstile Free”. This plan is only available for up to 10 widgets and in managed mode. Companies with more requests will need to upgrade to a paid Enterprise plan. In this way, Cloudflare is trying to get Cloudflare Turnstile customers to upgrade from its free CAPTCHA service to its extensive and expensive full-featured suite. An alternative to Cloudflare CAPTCHA is Friendly Captcha, which specializes in providing privacy and human-friendly CAPTCHAs that run completely in the background.

Cloudflare, Google and Friendly Captcha promote non-intrusive browser challenges to check web visitors. One big difference is privacy and GDPR compliance. Cloudflare Turnstile does not have a dedicated privacy policy for its service. There is a lack of transparency about what data is collected and for what purpose.

The same goes for Google reCAPTCHA. When it comes to protecting personal information, reCAPTCHA is viewed critically by European data protection authorities. Therefore, both Cloudflare CAPTCHA and Google reCAPTCHA are not a solution for EU sites and sites with EU customers. With Friendly Captcha, user data never leaves the EU. As a modern CAPTCHA provider, Friendly Captcha has a clear focus on privacy and continuous improvement of the service. It’s the best Cloudflare CAPTCHA alternative.
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