Companies Using Friendly Captcha

Friendly Captcha's customer map matches its sales pitch. It sells privacy, made in Germany, and the buyers are German. A domain counts here when a page carries the widget's frc-captcha element or calls Friendly Captcha's API. I wanted to know the test holds, so we opened 15 random domains from the list: 14 had the widget, its script or a site key on the page, and 8 showed it on screen without a click. Our October 2026 crawl puts it on 4,741 domains, 10th of 38 in Bot Detection & CAPTCHA with 0.08%. (Our bot traffic statistics cover the wider CAPTCHA market.)

One platform, one key, 477 towns

The largest single block isn't a customer in the usual sense. 477 of the 4,741 domains are Italian municipal and public-body websites built on Municipium, whose footer reads "Powered by Municipium". All eight we opened, and the two that turned up in the random sample, carried the same site key inside the page-rating form, where the widget only appears at the second step. The towns didn't choose Friendly Captcha. Municipium chose it once, for all of them, so the charts on this page leave those sites out and work from the other 4,323 domains, 2,991 of them matched to a company. Other fleets are one customer each: 79 CDU branch sites, mostly on one key, Securitas's country sites, and 61 domains titled for the sugar brand Diamant Zucker.

Sales signal: treat Municipium as a single account. If you sell to Italian municipalities, the platform vendor is your partner or your competitor, not a list of 477 leads.

The monthly line

The monthly totals, town sites included, read 3,775 in June, 4,291 in July, 4,415 in August, 4,661 in September and 4,741 in October. I wouldn't call that growth. The domains we crawl change every month, with dead sites leaving and new ones arriving, and our detection of the widget has widened since June. The drops are easier to read. 533 domains dropped Friendly Captcha on at least one hostname since we started tracking it on 16 March 2026; 79 of them still run it on another hostname, which leaves 454 that dropped it everywhere.

"Two thirds of Friendly Captcha's matched companies are in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and they're older firms than reCAPTCHA's. That's a buyer who picked a CAPTCHA for privacy." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: outside Municipium this is a stable pool of 4,323 domains. Size a campaign on that, not on a growth story.

Who the customers are

43.63% of matched companies with a known size have 1 to 10 employees and 26.25% have 11 to 50, so 69.88% have 50 staff or fewer. Age is where the base stands out. Only 9.7% were founded in the 2020s and 13.93% before 1960; reCAPTCHA's profile reads 16.5% and 4.47%. The 178 companies with more than 1,000 staff often use it on a single property: AG2R La Mondiale on its client login, Leggett & Platt on a payments portal, Generali France on a home-insurance simulator, ResMed on its UK shop, Randstad Italy on a CV upload page. STILL, REMONDIS, PAUL and Lenzing run it on their main sites.

Sales signal: at a large account, look for the team that owns the one form-heavy property, in a European business that cares about privacy. That team made the choice.

A German product with a German map

Germany has 1,811 of the 2,991 matched companies, the United States 226, France 140, the Netherlands 111 and Austria 107. Germany, Austria and Switzerland together hold 66.03%. France is the strongest European market outside the German-speaking ones, with insurers and finance groups such as Covéa, AG2R La Mondiale, Generali France and Amundi among the named rows. Italy shows 51 companies once the town sites are out. Industries are spread thin: IT services lead at 6.75% and nothing reaches 7%.

Sales signal: for a privacy, consent or EU-hosting pitch, a Friendly Captcha domain is a qualified lead. The owner already picked a European, privacy-first product for its forms.

Where it meets reCAPTCHA

Our migration test found no switching flow big enough to publish. What we can count is overlap: 208 of the 4,323 domains run reCAPTCHA too, 47 run Cloudflare Turnstile and 21 hCaptcha. 26 domains dropped Friendly Captcha and kept hCaptcha, 24 of them in the last 30 days, which is too recent and too small to call a trend.

"208 sites run Friendly Captcha and reCAPTCHA side by side. For a privacy vendor, that's a site that has made half the switch." - Mehmet Suleyman, CEO & Co-founder at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales signal: the 208 shared domains are the obvious conversion target for Friendly Captcha's own team: they already run it, and they still run Google's CAPTCHA too.

The stack around it

WordPress runs on 38.77% of the 4,323 domains and TYPO3 on 15.66%. Contact Form 7 (15.2%) and Gravity Forms (5.37%) are the commonest form plugins beside it. Analytics leans private, with Matomo on 13.0% against 27.53% for Google Analytics; on DataDome's domains Google Analytics reaches 64.14%. Consent managers tell the same story: Usercentrics 12.26%, Borlabs Cookie 9.28%, CCM19 2.61%. The German hosts IONOS (5.85%) and ALL-INKL (2.82%) both show up.

Sales signal: a WordPress or TYPO3 agency in Germany will find its own clients in this list. Matomo and consent vendors can treat it as a shortlist of privacy-minded site owners.

What it costs

Friendly Captcha's pricing, checked 14 October 2026, starts at €9 a month for one domain and 1,000 requests, then €39 for five domains and €200 for 50, with a quoted Enterprise tier and a free plan for non-commercial, low-traffic sites. At those prices a small German firm can protect its forms for less than a lunch a month, which fits the 43.63% micro-company share.

Key takeaways

1. 4,741 domains, 10th of 38 in Bot Detection & CAPTCHA with 0.08%, including 477 Italian town sites on one Municipium key.
2. 66.03% of matched companies are in Germany, Austria or Switzerland.
3. An older base than reCAPTCHA's: 13.93% founded before 1960.
4. Overlap with reCAPTCHA (208 domains) is small, and there is no published switching flow.

Sales applications

Outreach template: "You chose a privacy-first CAPTCHA for your forms at [domain]. We help teams that care about that with [consent, hosting, analytics]. Worth a short call?" Write it in German for the DACH rows.

Targeting: on TechnologyChecker.io, filter Friendly Captcha users to Germany, Austria and Switzerland with 11 to 200 staff, and drop the Municipium town sites if you don't sell to public bodies.

Competitive angle: for a CAPTCHA vendor, the 208 domains that run Friendly Captcha and reCAPTCHA together already use a privacy-first CAPTCHA somewhere on the site. Pitch the forms that still use Google's.

The full list of Friendly Captcha domains, with company size, country and industry for the 2,991 we matched, is on TechnologyChecker.io, drawn from our crawl of 29.9M live business domains.