I don’t want to use reCAPTCHA, because it’s owned and operated by Google. Would’ve been great if we could use hCaptcha (already used by Cloudflare) with Netlify Forms. hCaptcha respects user’s privacy and the problems visitors solve are not for the benefit of a single company.
hey hexandcube,
can you tell us a little more about hCaptcha? what would it need in order to be added?
Hello,
I would love that Netlify supports hCaptcha too.
The implementation of hCaptcha (client side and server side) is mostly similar to reCaptcha.
See more details on this page: Switch from reCAPTCHA to hCaptcha | hCaptcha.
Hey there, @maustruy 
Thank you for taking the time to chime in and share that doc, and welcome to the Netlify Forums! We are always happy when folks take time to share requests and ideas with the team. 
In your own words, can you share a bit about why you are requesting this feature? Any additional context is helpful for us, as we will ultimately share this request with additional teams at Netlify.
Thank you!
I have never used hCaptcha so I can’t judge whether is better than reCAPTCHA or not. All I know is that reCAPTCHA was adding ~300kB oj JS and 11 requests on a page where I have a Netlify Form, so I decided to remove it. Now I only have a honey pot field.
Ref.
@jackdbd you can load reCaptcha (or hCaptcha) only when the visitor hits the form.
See this article for more details : Google Invisible reCaptcha – How To Boost Lighthouse Performance Score? - TehnoBlog.org
Note that in this case, you will have to use your own reCaptcha, like explained on this page : Spam filters | Netlify Docs
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Hi all
I too would love to see this supported with netlify. I think hCaptcha is a great alternative to google’s captcha. Google has a monopoly on the internet and does not respect people’s privacy. Google is ultimately an advertising company so will try to monetize any product in any way they can, with or without respect for the user.
For cloudflare:
- Google informed us that they were going to begin charging for reCAPTCHA
- In our case, that would have added millions of dollars in annual costs just to continue to use reCAPTCHA for our free users.
Something like this could also happen to netlify, so it is in your best interest to actually diversify the captchas you use. At least to give the user an option to choose between google and an alternative.
Also cloudflare had this issue in China:
- Google’s services are intermittently blocked in China. China alone accounts for 25 percent of all Internet users. Given that some subset of those could not access Cloudflare’s customers if they triggered a CAPTCHA was always concerning to us.
hCaptcha said this to Cloudflare:
- they don’t sell personal data; they collect only minimum necessary personal data, they are transparent in describing the info they collect and how they use and/or disclose it, and they agreed to only use such data to provide the hCaptcha service to Cloudflare;
All the cloudflare info is from here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/moving-from-recaptcha-to-hcaptcha/
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thank you, @soneji. Really appreciate the writeup. I have sent this over to the product team for them to evaluate; If I hear news, I will definitely post here to close the loop.
Just found a Doom Captcha if you want something completely different.
Because why not right!?
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I too would like to see hCaptcha added as an option for Netlify Forms. It sets no cookies, and is therefore GDPR-compliant out-of-the-box.
For my main personal site that I just moved to Netlify, I implemented some convoluted JS, that renders a reCAPTCHA on a form only after the user has agreed to cookies. This is the only thing on my site that sets any cookies. If I could instead use hCaptcha, then I wouldn’t need JS like that, and I wouldn’t need a cookie notice anywhere.
Hey there, @jaza 
Welcome to the Forums! We appreciate you taking the time to share this feedback with us. I have passed it along to our Product team.