What is hCaptcha?

hCaptcha is a free privacy-focused tool that is a popular alternative to Google's reCAPTCHA in protecting sites from spammers and spambots. Its program is designed to distinguish human users from spam via a challenge-response test.

Subscribe on YouTube

Set up hCaptcha

1. Go to the hCaptcha website and click Sign Up in the top menu.
   

   

2. On the Pricing page, click Get Started under Basic (Free).
   

   

3. hCaptcha offers a free 14-day trial of hCaptcha Pro. Click Continue. No payment is required. Your account switches to the free plan after 14 days unless you keep Pro.
   

   

4. Sign up with your Google, GitHub, or Microsoft account. Or enter your email address and country, then click Create Account.
   

   

5. When you sign up, hCaptcha opens the Onboarding page with your first site key already created. Your first site is ready, so you can skip to step 7. You create your secret key in step 8.
   

   

6. To add another site key, or if you already have an hCaptcha account, go to Sites and click Add Site.
   

   

   Enter a Name to identify the site. Choose the other settings you need, such as hCaptcha Behavior. Then click Save.
   

   

7. To copy your site key, go to Sites and click your site. A new account's first site has no name, so its row shows "--" above the key. Scroll down to the Sitekey section and click the copy icon next to the key.
   

   

8. To get your secret key, click your account picture in the top menu. Then click Settings.
   

   

   On the Secrets tab, under Account-level Secret, click Generate New Secret.
   

   

   In the confirmation window, click Generate. A new secret replaces any secret you already have.
   

   

   Click Copy Secret and save the secret somewhere safe. hCaptcha shows it only once.
   

   

9. Go back to your site and go to Formidable → Global Settings → Captcha/Spam. Under Select captcha type, click hCaptcha. Then, in the hCaptcha settings section, paste your keys into the Site key and Secret key boxes.
   

   

   Changing the captcha type replaces it in every form that uses a captcha. The hCaptcha settings section stays open until both keys are saved. After that, click hCaptcha settings to view or change your keys.
10. Click Update to save your changes.
11. Go to Formidable → Forms and open each form you want to protect in the form builder. Click Captcha on the Add Fields tab. With hCaptcha selected in Global Settings, the new Captcha field shows the hCaptcha box.
    

    

    If you are building a multi-paged form, insert the Captcha field on the last page.
12. Click Update to save the form. On a new form, this button is Save.

How to disable hCaptcha

If your form includes a Captcha field and you want to disable hCaptcha, delete the Captcha field from the form builder page. You can also visit the Formidable → Global Settings → Captcha/Spam page and remove the hCaptcha keys.

Troubleshooting

The CAPTCHA on this form is not set up correctly. Please contact the site administrator.

This message means hCaptcha reported a problem with your hCaptcha settings rather than with the visitor's answer. For example, the secret key is missing or invalid, the site key is invalid, or the site key and secret key don't belong together.

Reenter your site key and secret key. Both keys must come from your hCaptcha account.

If CAPTCHA errors is set to Save as a spam entry, the visitor doesn't see this message. Instead, the submission is saved to the Spam tab of the form's entries, with the CAPTCHA error details.